The Sentence

Some believe the suffering for a particularly heinous crime should be sentenced to include the cessation of that person's greatest passion in life. In making that passion cease to exist - you are sentencing the person to real living madness, the deliverance of a deserving punishment. Although who is to really judge what qualifies as heinous, not knowing the intricacies of a whole lifetime that may have led up to that moment.

A poet was sentenced to life imprisonment in a gray cell with a small lone window, low enough for a single view. Trapped inside of a gray cell, any puny view would be breathless. He was sentenced to this locked gray room never to be given a pen or paper. They pictured just a single sentence in his head forming in the finest fragility, clawing for the not hopeful chance to cling to his memory. They knew a certain madness and real sense of desperation would not fail to descend upon him. Assuming the poet would have been willing to deliver the burgundy ink of his own blood to the gray walls to birth that sentence. That didn't seem a feasible option as he would have to gnaw himself alive, as there was nothing sharp enough in that gray cell to gash the slowly turning madman's inner inkwell, his own veins. A fragile suspended beautiful single sentence about that lone view admist the ugly eternity of cruelty in life, and no way for the poet to record it. That must be a satisfactory form of agony inflicted by the sentencer's.

But what they do not take into account, is that the poet's eye is so rare and deep and connected to peace. A sentence doesn't always need to be written to exist, to be alive, flowing in his own blood. A poet is always silently sentenced to the beauty and tragedy of his mind - but with a poet beautiful thoughts prevail even if they are never born into a sentence. He will die with a beautiful sentence about that view, vivid upon his mind.