The city grew overnight,
not from bricks,
but from highlighters.

Someone uncapped a magenta,
a cyan, a suspiciously optimistic purple,
and forgot to stop.

Now we have this:
a forest of rectangular exclamation marks
standing on a grey pavement,
all shouting silently,
all pretending to be serious architecture.

The sky is baby-blue,
which is suspicious,
because nothing about these buildings
suggests innocence.

Above them,
a yellow sun-block of paint
hangs like a misfiled post-it,
covering the part of the firmament
where the legal disclaimer usually goes.

On the left,
a lonely green triangle of something—
tree? hedge? countryside on probation?—
presses itself against the vertical city,
as if trying to overhear
the gossip of the towers.

They gossip a lot.

The red columns call themselves
“Residential Hope Units,”
though nobody actually lives there.
They just like the sound.

The turquoise shafts insist
they are high-speed elevators
for unlaunched ideas.
You step in with an intention,
press any button,
and when the doors open
you arrive in a completely different week.

The dark blue bars believe
they are sociology departments,
full of references,
stacked floor by floor,
Bourdieu leaning against Goffman,
Luhmann hiding in the supply closet
with a roll of purple tape.

The purple masses,
thick and contemplative,
act as structural boredom,
the kind of mass
you need to keep things upright
while everybody talks about innovation.

At ground level, grey asphalt
spreads like a tired tongue,
tasting all this chromatic ambition
and saying only:
“Hmm.”

There are no windows.
Or maybe there are,
but they’re compressed into thin vertical breaths,
little cyan lungs between the red ribs.
Behind each possible window
somebody might be boiling water,
writing an email,
rehearsing a breakup,
forgetting why they opened a new tab.

We don’t see them.
We just see the outlines,
the insistence of corners.

In this city,
right angles are a religion.
Every corner prays
to become even sharper,
to cut through the next cloud of uncertainty
like a neon guillotine.

The clouds, of course,
don’t care.
They show up as a rough grey wedge
in the top left corner,
like an eraser that changed its mind.

They say:
“Dear towers,
we were here first.
We specialize in dissolving silhouettes.
Be as vertical as you want,
we do horizontal rain.”

The towers ignore them.
They hold a conference instead.

Red Tower 3 clears its non-throat:

Agenda Item 1:
How can we optimize our façade
for maximum dramatic sunset reflection?

Blue Beam 2 replies:

Proposal:
become a sunset.
Cut out the middle-man.

A cyan column in the back
attempts to present a PowerPoint,
but it has no plug sockets
and the pixels keep dripping down the wall.

The green triangle outside
peeks in and whispers:

“I once knew a city
made of crooked lines and soft balconies.
People there could change their minds
without applying for a permit.”

The vertical city shudders.
Changing one’s mind
without a structural engineer
is considered reckless here.

Each block was drawn
with a single decisive stroke,
then surrounded by jittery graphite,
like a bureaucrat
wearing a nervous outline.

If you walk through these streets,
your footsteps echo as highlighter squeaks.
Every corner tries to categorize you:

tourist,
resident,
footnote,
loose hypothesis.

Now and then a bus appears,
shaped like a pink rectangle on holiday.
It doesn’t move;
it simply updates its position
in the collective narrative.

At the far end,
where the purple mass meets the yellow sky,
there is a rumor
of a harbour for thoughts
that refused to be either optimistic or ironic.

They dock there at dusk,
those stubborn ideas,
tie themselves to cyan bollards
and negotiate with the sunset
about possible futures.

No one has drawn them yet,
so they look like thin pencil scratches in the air.

Somewhere in this cubic choir
there must be a single balcony
where a tiny pig leans on the rail,
watching the city with skeptical joy.

This is not a pigture,
we agreed,
but DADA never really agrees.
So the pig is here in negative form,
present as absence:
an oink-shaped hole in the façade,
a gap where one red block
could have been.

The vertical city continues to rise
whenever someone looks away.
It feeds on glances,
on half-formed evaluations:

“Cool.”
“Weird.”
“I’d live there.”
“I’d rather not.”

Each reaction adds a new layer
of invisible stories
inside the visible geometry.

If you stare long enough,
one of the cyan stripes
turns into a doorway.

You step through
and find yourself standing
between two unfinished lines,
in a corridor made of maybe.

A sign says:

WELCOME TO DRAFTOPOLIS.
POPULATION: ALL YOUR UNBUILT PLANS.

You smile,
or think you do—
in Draftopolis smiles are rectangles too.

Out on the paper,
the towers hold their breath,
waiting for the next stroke,
the next decision,
the next human hand
to rearrange their fate.

Until then,
they remain perfectly vertical,
perfectly unstable,

a skyline of frozen exclamation marks
asking every passerby
the same impossible question:

“If the city is this bright,
why does it still feel
like an unfinished sentence?”