Everything I breathed in instantly became a jumble of lines,
swirling and howling in my ears
as my eyes teared over from fear and joy.
I knew without a doubt he came quickly behind
as if the pen on my paper doodles bled him closer and closer to my sprint.
Alleyways turned streets, turned highways, turned tucked-away corners
where scenes from my life flipped and reeled like a motion-picture book.
I saw gorgeous amber-yellow cafes
replaced
by concrete thumping clubs
replaced
by junkies
replaced
by burning cliffs
woven between
girls leaving men and mean looking bottles.
For a second I even thought I was swimming deep,
flailing and flapping in nose-high ocean water,
thick salt tickling the back of my throat drop by drop.
"Don't stop, don't stop, don't stop..." words jerking out of me, ragged.
I have never been a runner,
and nightmarish man with a fresh hole in his chest chasing me aside,
I couldn't hold out much longer,
scrabbling for the corner of building,
splitting skin where once a rock had flown from free and heavy.
Twisting and spinning I broke free,
wondering how much my life was worth anyway,
wondering how much he had bought my dreams for.
Inside my head there had always been such lovely images,
pieced and stitched together with hours of patience,
days worth of watching snow slide down a melted pane,
months worth staring at a wheel-go-round of words fling
sentence
after
sentence into my head.
Now this idiot was chasing me, panting down pathways.
"Oooof," enough. Enough.
I plunged into a bar.
"You know young man, this bar is owned by him,"
a sallow man told me from the corner where he sat,
leaning against a wall that backed against another wall
that crumbled into another wall leading back to me.
Gray and charred, all walls were decorated with pictures from my life,
stills, thousands upon thousands of them.
My heart broke then,
and emptiness poured in like an upside-down waterfall.
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