Oh these Secret Architectures
We learn early:
hands itch not only to build
but to strike
a taste for vengeance,
a natural pleasure in demolition,
as if walls themselves lie.
We read manuals promising happiness
in twenty-four hours,
how to make populations wise, rich, obedient even faithful,
pamphlets smelling of fresh ink
and old fraud.
We teach rhythms of blows,
how rhetoric lifts a fist.
Politics writes us letters in blood and mud.
Intrigue whispers quietly,
peasants bend beneath brands and sickles,
their socialism ferocious,
as animal as hunger.
Then the coup
history snaps shut like a trap.
Emperors rise from the wreckage,
citizens hope crushed into grit
that grinds the teeth.
“We are depoliticized,” they say,
knowing isn't half the battle, when
it is half a lie.
Every serious matter
seizes us again
assassins’ bombs, borders tightening,
mourning draped over kings,
presidential abductions,
Curiosity is our vice,
passion is our relapse.
Creditors knock on doors like clocks.
Rooms change,
addresses shed their skins.
Bodies hurt;
minds blister,
fingers reach for the sun.
Love stays because it is necessary,
a wound that does not close with time
and therefore lives,
it becomes more than a scar
but part of who we are.
Yet we keep writing
reviews, translations, our deepest thoughts,
with pens run low
dark mirrors held up to life
and poems, always poems,
as if survival requires cadence.
While we refuse the consolations of Nature.
Marble gods do not rise at our bedsides,
vegetables and chicken soup do not save our souls.
We blindly trust instead the city,
that amazing engine of lamentations and
streets where grief learns to walk upright with its crooked spine,
where crowds become metaphors
and metaphors breathe.
Then i suppose Imagination,
most scientific of faculties,
discerns correspondences everywhere:
between gaslight and despair,
between cement bridges and iron ribs,
between eternity
and bodies crossing like stone squares at dusk.
We arrange poems like buildings,
twilights paired, parallel
symmetries argued over with printers,
commas weighed,
italics insisted upon,
Indentations
Even punctuation carries ethics.
Every page has a spine,
lines inherently inconsistent yet discerning.
Oh these Critics deny the language itself,
but they trust shifting memory
that stubborn archive
to make room for flowers of every kind
grown from evil soils.
Trials sharpen us.
Beauty, we must insist,
owes nothing to sermons.
Censorship applied provokes abundance.
Anger quickens hands.
Cities keep changing,
and we all change with them
old men multiply,
old women gleam,
old stories can live forever,
swans lose themselves among scaffolds,
exile makes itself visible,
leaving footprints in dust shoes.
Constraint teaches force:
the tighter the form,
the brighter the burst.
Death marches behind them all,
camp follower of mankind,
counting steps, counting days
always counting.
They dream of frontispieces,
Oh those illustrations placed on stained pages,
allegories guarding thresholds,
images before words
as if each book needs a face
to stare back at its readers.
Through it all,
an architecture of disgust
secret architectures that hold:
cities inside books,
books inside souls,
regularity wrestling excess,
harmony bruised but standing
proof that from ruin and distain
we can still design
places where beauty survives.
Jan 11
Jan 11, 2026 at 8:01 PM UTC
Oh these Secret Architectures
We learn early:
hands itch not only to build
but to strike
a taste for vengeance,
a natural pleasure in demolition,
as if walls themselves lie.
We read manuals promising happiness
in twenty-four hours,
how to make populations wise, rich, obedient even faithful,
pamphlets smelling of fresh ink
and old fraud.
We teach rhythms of blows,
how rhetoric lifts a fist.
Politics writes us letters in blood and mud.
Intrigue whispers quietly,
peasants bend beneath brands and sickles,
their socialism ferocious,
as animal as hunger.
Then the coup
history snaps shut like a trap.
Emperors rise from the wreckage,
citizens hope crushed into grit
that grinds the teeth.
“We are depoliticized,” they say,
knowing isn't half the battle, when
it is half a lie.
Every serious matter
seizes us again
assassins’ bombs, borders tightening,
mourning draped over kings,
presidential abductions,
Curiosity is our vice,
passion is our relapse.
Creditors knock on doors like clocks.
Rooms change,
addresses shed their skins.
Bodies hurt;
minds blister,
fingers reach for the sun.
Love stays because it is necessary,
a wound that does not close with time
and therefore lives,
it becomes more than a scar
but part of who we are.
Yet we keep writing
reviews, translations, our deepest thoughts,
with pens run low
dark mirrors held up to life
and poems, always poems,
as if survival requires cadence.
While we refuse the consolations of Nature.
Marble gods do not rise at our bedsides,
vegetables and chicken soup do not save our souls.
We blindly trust instead the city,
that amazing engine of lamentations and
streets where grief learns to walk upright with its crooked spine,
where crowds become metaphors
and metaphors breathe.
Then i suppose Imagination,
most scientific of faculties,
discerns correspondences everywhere:
between gaslight and despair,
between cement bridges and iron ribs,
between eternity
and bodies crossing like stone squares at dusk.
We arrange poems like buildings,
twilights paired, parallel
symmetries argued over with printers,
commas weighed,
italics insisted upon,
Indentations
Even punctuation carries ethics.
Every page has a spine,
lines inherently inconsistent yet discerning.
Oh these Critics deny the language itself,
but they trust shifting memory
that stubborn archive
to make room for flowers of every kind
grown from evil soils.
Trials sharpen us.
Beauty, we must insist,
owes nothing to sermons.
Censorship applied provokes abundance.
Anger quickens hands.
Cities keep changing,
and we all change with them
old men multiply,
old women gleam,
old stories can live forever,
swans lose themselves among scaffolds,
exile makes itself visible,
leaving footprints in dust shoes.
Constraint teaches force:
the tighter the form,
the brighter the burst.
Death marches behind them all,
camp follower of mankind,
counting steps, counting days
always counting.
They dream of frontispieces,
Oh those illustrations placed on stained pages,
allegories guarding thresholds,
images before words
as if each book needs a face
to stare back at its readers.
Through it all,
an architecture of disgust
secret architectures that hold:
cities inside books,
books inside souls,
regularity wrestling excess,
harmony bruised but standing
proof that from ruin and distain
we can still design
places where beauty survives.
12 January 2026
The Architecture of Disgust
Malcolm Gladwin
