The whisper, the sordid whisper is what
Swishes the gowns
Turns the head of your followers.

How can you live in a palace? How can you
Stand it, those columns around you
So crooked from so many angles?
They drive the floorboards mad.
I, too, have difficulties
Staying perpendicular.
One cannot stand as straight as those columns.

How is it that they hear you? Yell, feel
The echo taunt back,
Long for a reply—such
Vast rooms they are.
Never before has the marble
Seemed so cold.
For the first time, it
Got you while you were alone.

How can we breathe
In this palace?
The doors bar us from the air
The visitors suck it away.

Nothing has changed.
We are still
But statues.