The Sentence

This word shivers with anxieties
From being given a long sentence,
Long as one of those Herbert prayed for,

Like a suspension bridge, an abyss,
Like an oak, a great valley, a world
Made of dreams, which is the kind of world

You shouldn’t want to be sentenced to,
Where words are abused and assaulted
By memory, by the free-range brain,

No longer fenced in by the senses,
Doing as it pleases with the past,
Vivid and dark and disorganized,

Interminable paths where the words
Trudge along through long shadows, the woods
Of what can’t possibly be expressed.