run on
The sentence that runs, as if from death, exhausted and sweat-beaded, torn by blackberry thorns, bloody dust on its knees, each misspelling a shudder of breath, each comma a banana peel in a cartoon scene, how it gets up and continues through the canned laughter, ringing with all it has collected and let go of, as the old man pulling the great fish back to shore, with its guts trailing out and being eaten away by tinier fish, the ringing that continues after the meaning is unraveled and lost, the music that becomes the meaning, blessed by each space between the word, each pause and intake of breath and cursing its weak lungs, all 26 letters of its grotesque body, the trust and distrust of its map-less pathway, drunken and wholly instinctual, the sentence that runs knowing the place that it will inevitably arrive, a black spot, single poppy seed, the center of an eye, a bullet hole in brick wall, a cigarette burn in a couch, the inverse photograph of a star, the head of an ant, the sentence that arrives there, amazed that in the gathering speed of its momentum it would ever stop, in disbelief of what it once was, like the rain that doesn’t know it was once the sea, the rain that falls into the ocean at night, the last drop released, sighed out, that hits the surface and ripples outward, the sentence arriving there, back into oblivion, back to the end that had chased it so lovingly towards itself.