This was inspired by dents on the pillars
Outside the porch before it began to rain
And their smoothness and dips and mountainous valleys
And inevitable destinations and their journeys
And feeling the rain before it fell, without touch,
And today will never be another tomorrow
And fleeting, transitory roughness.
This was inspired by dents on the pillars
As the foundation sank into shifting earth,
And its progressing non-smoothness
Laced cracks through the dents,
And I rumple my fingers into each notch
And feeling without touch, too,
And I remember slipping on an unsecured brick
And slamming my head against the pillar
And roughness and pain and inevitable destinations
Like hospital beds for the busted heads
And hallways for the churning stomachs.
The dents are molding from the rain
And yellowing with the oil from my fingertips
And I haven’t moved my hand in five years,
And the valleys are so deep now that I see flames dancing in the depths
But is the world so complex as that
Or is it simply same outcomes and same purposes
In an infinite score of time passing
And seven billion dents across an ornate pillar
That stands with so much pride
But feels hollow to me, is hollow.
I wish to feel each indentation
When feeling without touch won’t suffice,
But I haven’t moved my hand in 500 years
And this poem is about dents,
But it was only inspired by the honesty of them
Because it’s really about roughness and valleys
And oily finger swirls and inevitability and unsecured sameness
And the pillars keep sinking into themselves
And the dents are folding into the cracks
And I can no longer touch them with feeling.
There are smudges on your cheeks from my finger touches
And dents on your heartbeat from trying to keep mine in time to yours
And mountains in your mind that I fell for in the first place
And everything is transitory
And this poem is about the days you sought the pillars in my skull
And the night they began to sink into themselves
So that neither of us can reach them now.
There are dents on the pillars,
And it has begun to rain,
And you’ve curled miles into the folds of transitory time-passing
As if we were inspired by the dents, too.