I’ve been assured there’s no such thing as a stupid question
So many times that it’s easy to forget
How difficult crafting one really is.
How lives are shaped by the questions they pose,
And civilizations erased by those they don’t.
How the grammar of public life is structured
Around two-dimensional shadows of cylindrical options, and
How answers swirl around me as if the eye of every morning’s hurricane were
A period
In response to a question knocked into an ocean I’ve never seen
Startled by the sigh of a man I’ll never meet.

Perhaps I’ve been stupid to assume that
When they assured me that any question would do
I didn’t consider that, perhaps, a question to them meant a mere invitation
To hear comforting echoes off the stainless steel walls they’d welded around them
With every word spoken in response to any stupid question.