Listen to poem:
Demolition by Soft Touches
Written: July 23, 2026 for a contest sponsored by Edward Ibeh
Quote: "There are gentle touches that remind the soul how fragile it has always been." By Poet
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Tremulous dawn drips through the lattice,
a lapidary light that swathes the room
in citrine silence—
yet even here, amid sedate scriptorium calm,
the walls start their quiet sunder.
Not the wanton wrecking-ball,
not the truculent ordinance of overt ruin—
but the sapient, serendipitous wooing
that treads orchid-light across an inviolate floor.
A patina of gentling,
a furtive augury that the impregnable
is never as adamantine as it claims.
A beam buckles—
and something in me buckles with it.
The katabatic abyss widens
in the marble edifice
and in the psyche,
a shared gossamer grid spreading
through plaster and pulse alike.
The collapse is circumspect,
a mellifluous malignancy of tenderness
that pinions both edifice and toughness
with the same tremulous touch.
Even the sacrosanct rafters
—Tuscan arches, hortensia frescoes,
ochre patina of archaic iron tether—
start to sway,
and my thoughts sway with them,
their once-ruby-lotus resolve
now cerulean edge cleaved,
squelched by soft insistence.
A whimper in the joists
echoes a whimper in the chest.
A sedate sashay of dust;
mirrors the silken saunter of doubt.
The synergy is unmistakable:
each gentle stroke against the wall
evinces a stroke against the mind,
each frolicking fissure in the façade
summons a fissure in the heart.
Demolition by soft touches—
the lucid quietus,
the quiet debacle,
the wanton velleity of tenderness
that dismantles the impregnable
brick by breath,
beam by sigh,
until the whole edifice
—outer and inner—
sneaks inward as an ouroboros
consuming its serene façade
and the psyche that believed
it was inviolate.
In the finale,
the rubble is not only stone.
It is kenopsia,
hiraeth,
the sacrosanct self
rendered scree by gentleness.
A serendipitous synergy of ruin,
where the physical demolition
and the emotional collapse
are one ordinance,
one augury,
one soft, sapient sunder.
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