Life’s Grammatical Imperative

Identity was his name.
Searching was the fire beneath his ribs.

He hunted verbs like a starving traveler
hunts distant lights across a winter plain.
A noun without its verb
hung in the air like a lemur over a cliff edge—
fingers spread,
heart pounding,
caught between leap and fall.
He connected together sentences from questions:

what,
where,
how,

until the right adjective modified him
like sunlight breaking through storm clouds,
and the period fell into place
with the click of a combination’s final opening number.

Behind him stretched the wreckage:
misspellings of ambition,
misused tenses of hope,
paragraphs of failure scattered like torn pages
across the windswept road he had climbed.

And when he began the last chapter,
he found the premise hidden in plain sight:
Without movement,

a man becomes a dangling participle of stagnation,

swinging above a blank page,
forever an unfinished ending.