1
The city wakes up sideways.
It stretches in blocks and cylinders,
yawning in magenta,
rubbing its eyes with yellow thumbs.
Somewhere, a straight line was planned,
but it overslept
and a curve took its place,
wearing bright lipstick and bad intentions.

They will tell you this is architecture.
They will be wrong.
This is choreography fossilized in chalk,
a freeze-frame of movement
that forgot how to stop.

2
First rule of tonight:
this is a picture, not a pigture.
No snouts in sight,
no curly-tailed inspectors of reality.
The absence oinks silently,
but we ignore it, politely.
Here, the only animals permitted
are rectangles on stilts
and circles pretending to be moons
on coffee breaks.

If pigs existed in this frame,
they’d wear hard hats
and argue with the cranes
about union rules for flying over skylines.
Instead, we get cylinders,
tall and thoughtful,
like introverted smokestacks
at a color-therapy retreat.

3
A yellow tower clears its throat.
“I used to be concrete,” it says,
“serious, grey, full of right angles
and employment statistics.
Then somebody dropped a rainbow
in the mixer
and now look at me—
I glow like a highlighter
that fell in love with dusk.”

Next to it,
a turquoise column leans forward
as if listening to gossip.
It knows things:
which balconies dream of escape,
which windows secretly audition
to become mirrors,
which street corners rehearse
for revolutions that may never be staged.

4
The curve in the foreground,
half river, half question mark,
is not water.
It is a slip of time
spilled from a broken schedule.
Purple on one side, cyan on the other,
it flows between the buildings
like a rumor of softness
in a district zoned for hardness.

People do not walk here;
they are implied,
small circles of green and blue
hovering near an invisible railing.
They have traded bodies for viewpoints,
voices for gradients.
Each sphere is a conversation
rolled up and stored
for some future seminar on “Urban Emotions.”

5
If you listen closely,
you can hear the city tuning itself.
Pink facades tighten their strings,
green clouds cough into handkerchiefs of haze,
orange blocks test their microphones
with long, flat vowels.
The entire skyline is a reluctant orchestra,
warming up for an anthem
no one ordered
and everyone will remember.

Behind it all,
the sky glows in indecision:
a wash of lemon and mint
that can’t decide
whether to be morning or leftovers of sunset.
Light shrugs and spills everywhere.
Shadows take the night off.

6
A brutalist planner once stood here
with a ruler and a headache,
muttering about function,
about efficiency,
about honest materials.
The city listened with half an ear
and then misheard on purpose.
“Ah,” it said, “you want
efficient disobedience,
functional confusion,
honest chaos.”
So it kept the columns
but painted them like carnival rides,
kept the mass
but sliced it into ribbons,
kept the grid
but bent it into a grin.

The result is this:
a district designed
by a committee of crayons
and unresolved childhood dreams.

7
Dada arrives wearing a fluorescent safety vest.
It inspects the load-bearing nonsense,
the beams of color that support nothing
but their own enthusiasm.
It checks the angles of absurdity,
the compliance of expectations,
the fire exits for logic.

Then Dada stamps a seal on the whole scene:
APPROVED FOR USE IN UNREALITY.
Underneath, in smaller letters:
NO PIGS NECESSARY.
OPTIONAL HUMANS.
MANDATORY QUESTIONS.

8
At street level,
a magenta wall offers a door
that is both open and closed,
depending on how much history
you brought with you.
Step through,
and you find yourself inside
the echo of an escalator,
always moving,
never arriving.

On the right,
blue stacked rectangles whisper:
“We used to be warehouses of boredom,
storage for repetitive days.
Now we hoard astonishment instead.
Every floor contains another
‘Wait, what?’”

On the left,
a golden block remembers
being a parking garage
for abandoned intentions.
It has since retired,
content to simply glow
and confuse passing theories.

9
The city has no center,
only a gradient of attention.
Where your gaze falls
becomes downtown for a moment.
Skyscrapers rearrange themselves
to impress your pupils.
The soft green mist in the distance
poses as nature,
but everyone knows
it’s just a sentimental pixel fog,
installed by a council of nostalgic engineers
who once saw a tree in a book.

10
A child, elsewhere,
tries to draw this city
from memory.
They begin with straight lines,
but their wrist rebels,
adopting the dialect of curves.
The crayons do not stay in their lanes;
they overrun borders,
make treaties with other colors,
commit minor revolutions
on the paper’s surface.

Later, an adult will look at the drawing
and say it’s unrealistic.
The city, hearing this critique
through some distant,
shared neuron of pigment,
laughs so hard
its columns wobble by a millimeter.
Realism, after all,
is just another zoning law.

11
As the day (or was it night?)
slides across this polychrome relief,
the brutal in brutalism
softens around the edges.
What was once a sermon
in concrete and authority
becomes a joke told by geometry,
deadpan and generous.

Nothing collapses.
Nothing quite holds still.
The buildings inhale color,
exhale possibility.
And in the silent space
between those two movements,
where a pigture might have squealed
and a human might have sighed,
the city simply is—

a bright, blocky maybe
stacked on top of another maybe,
reaching upward
through the greenish mist
toward a sky
that refuses to choose
between yes and no.