Lyrical Power Ballads: Installement the Second

Here's a poem I've been tinkering with for the past several months.

Thoughts on the Mpls housing projects

From the window of the law school library
—the way the early morning light plays off the golden leaves of a sycamore,
gradually lights across a green slope, manicured and trimmed,
while pines throw their shadows down the grass—

out of obscurity
the towers rise, seemingly ex nihilo,
materializing in the shadows as the morning breaks on them,
valleys of concrete crags, the everlasting hills of the metropolis.
Sheathed in mismatched panels of unwanted cast-aside colors,
the towers hang in picturesque, pathetic majesty.

What Dickensian scenes will play out in dismal rooms today?

O, the nobility of the poor!
Apotheosized like inhuman Olympians,
cold alabaster, eyes plucked out,
their lifeless, stony heroism
incapable of sin, of sorrow, incapable of joy—

To us, devotees, their poverty becomes a quaint fable
that ends with a contented quietist moral,
an old lie.

This is too extravagant to be maintained.

I await feedback.