Moon at Half Past Noon

The city sleeps, a circuit-board of light,
a trillion silent transactions in the dark.
He stands against the glass, a man envied,
his kingdom built on this, the seventy-sixth floor.
The only sound, the server’s hum, the score.

His gaze descends through his own famished frame,
past diamond towers, to a vibrant stain—
the favela, a scar that throbs with sound,
where generator-groans and beating drums
bleed from a thousand shacks to open air.
They are dancing there, he thinks. 
Their only care is dawn.

Then, it surfaces—not as a thought,
but as the sharp smell of rust and dust:
his father’s hands, busy with a bent can,
a length of wire, a piece of string.
Fingers, stained with ground-in grime,
taught his how to twist and tie it all
into a thing that rolled—a clattering truck
with bottle-cap wheels. A creation from nothing,
more real than any toy he’d later buy.
A worth scraped from the world’s discard,
and therefore, priceless.

And what he misses is not want, but sharing,
the sharp, sweet taste of one shared orange, passed
from hand to hand. He misses the clean heft
of a full water-jug, the simple, solid craft
of fixing what was broken. Purpose, plain and true.
His satisfaction now? A column cleared,
a threat dissolved. The transient, quiet thrill
of a game won, the dam that holds the sea at bay.

The morning’s worries form a patient line:
The board at ten—the buyback’s fragile scheme
must hold, must show a surgeon’s clean result.
The new mayor, waiting, must be made to see
how new taxes drown the golden goose.
His smile, rehearsed, is ready in its place.

Below, the crystal’s washed and put away.
The staff is gone. His children, fully grown,
are lifted by the tides of trust he built,
their lives now separate, a different shore.
He is the architect of all this quiet.

His palm meets cool glass. Through the sterile pane,
he feels the distant, sub-sonic beat,
the bassline of a world that does not need
his name, his gold, his calculated grace.
It has a rhythm he can never own,
a bond he was both smart and damned to break.

Tomorrow, he will fight for decimal points,
will charm and will persuade. But in this quiet,
the weight is not the world, but the hollow core—
the question of what’s left when numbers cease,
and all that drums within his silent skull
is music from that scar, a debt too deep for reason’s lease.