running

only when it’s coldest do salt lamps sweat –

no liquid in man or outside makes less sense

than those elemental flashes which appear

when the tears on a face would already have dried

devolved to the chalky mineral inside, never to melt again –

now you’ll watch me sprint until my hamstrings tear

my Achilles tendons blast away from the heel

my agony sacs excoriate each other

my heart want so badly to beat for the last time

I have to turn purple in order to economise breaths

to sprint purple-faced until nothing, no landscape, is left

only rabbit bones and painlessness pasted over

those bleak flatlands – you’ll watch me do that

from high over the city on the rise where you said you lived

but I wasn’t sure, and your urgings didn’t sway me

either way, your binoculars freezing like metal

tools left lying on a worksite through a winter’s night

on your eyes, the plastic smell of the lanyard caustic

the focus wrecked – all you see is a streaking blob

all you can see are the dyes of your old world running.