after The Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder

they told you

you looked godly on this side of heaven

told us what the kinsmen looked like

as they spilled like stairwells from the open maw

of your man-made mansion of tongues

you could’ve done it. consecrated your

aspirational claim to divinity in a traitorous dialect

made deities of us all, crawling and universal and

high-drunk on enough potential to make us good

you tried.

and failed, so they say, the twin flame

to every man who reaches for rapture

and falls just short of starlight

and what they never say is that

God bore you hungry

served you ambition as medicine,

the genesis of your second-hand sin

and called you scapegoat.

spoon-fed you the backstabbing

scaffolding to your own betrayal

and called you son.

your only suicide was in swallowing it all,

how you sucked on your pipe dream to make it last

and it still devoured you whole