The universe doesn’t care about a tower— old Flatiron—sinking in a wilderness of sand that grips you like a boa. (An hour was all it took for men to make this mess.) Balancing on the knife edge of a dune, we find ourselves transfixed by an edifice that lists like a riddled barque. Late afternoon sun warms your limestone skin. We reminisce, peering into your rooms, each one depicting a chapter from the days of civilization, reflections from your windowpanes inflicting both grief and rapture. You, the incarnation of all three-sided structures, have been waiting for a little flock of pilgrims. Cool and calm as cumuli—though dunes keep strangulating your skeleton—you’re thrilled that we have come. The grotesques lining your upper floors make faces while we glare back at them with uglier mugs, then scramble down a drift as it erases all traces of your base. (The cosmos shrugs.) The cherubs on the roof, no longer smiling, panic and leap into the blowing heaps, drowning in them as they keep on piling and piling up in a gale that never sleeps. Winds whipping your weathered pillars, keen like sirens. The sand assaults your broad hypotenuse, our coats, our hats, our eyes. The bleak environs go postal—like a thousand fiends turned loose. The leafy trees of Madison Square Park, cafés and plays and jazz, the brownstone where Ted Roosevelt was born—now all are dark beneath this desert. Crumbled. Beyond repair. And, as the universe is torn asunder and, as our dreams of triangles are through and, as your monumental head goes under, we hear you cry out: “Twenty-three skiddoo!”