My Run-On Sentence Poem by Onyi Ogwumike

My whole life tends to be one big run-on sentence, birth to death commas stare in awe at my tragedy, periods skip and run over the lines of my burdened breath, semicolons style their way into my heart beat, colons trying to list the times I let my smile weather your blows to my ego, lists overrun over the edges of my brittle, thin film of written pangs. My first real sign of pausing shines like a crimson dropp on the snow, my paper has mercy on me, it coos and woos, it sways and lays on my desk blank of all things, half- void of my truths though the ghost still hangs heavy above it, I stick my face in its breeze and its sings, my run-on sentence sings, it spits it screams it sings it stings, it’s my own auto- run on sentence and it stays in existence, a melody locked in the golden safe in my thump-thump-thump, towering over my breaths; listen to your thump-thump-thump intertwine with mine morph into a thump-ump- whump like a symphony playing my run on sentence, and when the violin string breaks with a twang and the thunder claps with a loud applause in approval of your sonnet that rings through the night and loops around the moon my thump-thump-thump shakes and quivers, shaken to its core by the foreboding sense of being ripped from your black vinyl, we strengthen again, ripping and rejoining forming jagged scars along my ebony and your rays of fiery light.

I let my run on sentence run on like it should, dodging pauses and periods no stopping me now, I’m running my marathon with your concerto guiding me along my way.