Discrepant Awareness Alex Fleck

This latest poem came about after I took a look at an image of Brueghel’s The Tower of Babel. Only after I wrote the rough outline did it occur to me that I was ripping off the concept from W.H. Auden’s “Musee Des Beaux Arts”. He’s one of my favourites, so let’s chalk it up to influence rather than plagiarism…
In any case, I hope you enjoy Brueghel’s Babel!

…like Brueghel’s Babel.
A twisting,
squatting, mammoth building,
stumbling through the sky.
A testament
to and of the little men
looking on their mastery
between their ships and sea
and city on the land.
Meant to be solidity
abstracted from the earth,
but lost in endless fractal elements.
Towers up
And up until…