I met a traveler from a distant place
who spoke of ruins buried not in sand
but in a mountain of refuse,
where glass and steel jutted like bones
from the carcass of a city.

There, among the wreckage of progress,
a fractured head lay,
its gaze hollow, its mouth locked in a grin
both triumphant and cruel.
A hand, severed, still reached upward,
grasping for something unseen.

On a shattered pedestal nearby,
words etched deep into tarnished metal:
“Behold my greatness, all who pass by,
and bow before what I have wrought.”

Around it, silence.
The monuments of men—crushed plastic,
twisted wires, broken screens—
formed its audience, indifferent and eternal.

The traveler paused,
surveying the heap that swallowed the horizon.
“All that they built,
all that they fought to preserve,
is here, decaying in the shadow
of their ambition.”

And so the mountain grew,
layer upon layer of forgotten dreams,
while the wind carried whispers of kings
whose names no one spoke.