The world spins so much more quickly here.
They say the city never sleeps,
With its rushing trains and zooming cars and blaring sirens
At every hour of the day and night--
--what a way to recall the hunter-gatherer night guards,
In a place so stridently and desperately artificial,
In a night rent by the brash light and sound
That displaces and drowns out those who once called us prey.
The earth of my childhood turned gently,
A single distant highway its only motion,
The only sign anything at all ever happened.
But this place spins wildly and unceasingly,
An impossibly dense planet of life orbiting close, so perilously close,
To the bright, hot star of civilization
That so often burns its children to ash.
Perpetual motion is impossible, of course,
But amidst its constant thrum of wheels upon wheels upon wheels,
This frenzied dynamo of humanity
Hasn't seemed to notice.