At the top floor of the skyscraper that touches the sun
A man sits with his bourbon in hand, looking out over his creation:
The world in which people shine like glass

Something in that dark yellow of the bourbon reminds the man
Of that time he saw the world’s last tree
Twenty year before it fell.

It was when he was still young and naïve,
His visions of eternal life and glass people,
Still on the brink.

Some instinctual twitch in the back of his brain,
Passed down from the apes, guided him to climb it
But the first branches were too high
And so he cried,
Like a child who cries after stubbing his toe.

It’s while he’s still thinking
Of that first and only time
Seeing a tree beyond a screen
That the man takes his final sip of bourbon,
Though the glass is still half-full.

With the first gunshot in two thousand years,
The bourbon drops to the floor and
Shatters