Memories of Versailles

the pools of versailles they built the fountains to impress a god who turned out to be a short man in heels with debt up to his powdered wig. I stood there in July with the rest of the herd, eight euros for a warm beer by the canal, watching water shoot up out of stone that took forty years and a thousand broken backs to carve. the tour guide keeps saying magnificent. sure. magnificent the way a heavy tab is magnificent when somebody else's grandkids pick it up. the stones don't care. they've been rained on for three hundred years and they'll be rained on for three hundred more, long after your phone dies and the gift shop closes. and the hall of mirrors, christ. you shuffle through with two hundred strangers sweating in their vacation clothes, and every mirror shows you the same thing: a room built to hold everything holding nothing. that's the trick nobody tells you. the mirrors were the whole point. you come to see the palace and the palace shows you yourself, tired, ordinary, mortal, standing in the middle of the most expensive empty room ever made. the king looked in these same mirrors. he saw a god. the glass knew better. the glass always knows better. so drink the warm beer. look in the mirror. let the emptiness look back. it's the only honest thing in the whole damn place, and it doesn't charge admission.