BREATHLESS

In that moment between heartbeats,
When life hesitates, and hoping becomes
An illusion of fulfillment, you appeared as
A lucent mist smiling with extended hands.
Lamenting though, as I was, an epigonic misfit,
Confused, striving, briefly, in so many words,
To shift the eminence of illusory judgment
Across eons of possibilities – you took the time
To transilluminate those things hidden in me,
Those things capricious.

In supple fleeting moments I found myself dancing
With sunbeams and wind, as intangible escorts sought
To illuminate and extrapolate those treasures, for
Decades hidden, and reiterate them as curios on shelves.
Groaning opaquely, you slathered innovative ideas, as thick dew,
Across neuronal voids, impassively sighing, as tender synapses
Began firing in organized fashion. Chortling, you pointed again
Mulishly at my old thinking and debilitating habits, and sought
Out discrepancies and anomalies to further exacerbate my desire
To remain rebellious, as if it was nothing more for you than
Equus Caballus swatting flies with the tail.

With the smoothness of hot honey, and the groaning
Of tectonic plates, your ideas melted my staid thinking
As those glaciers in boxes that once bound me in shadowy fetters.
In that moment between heartbeats, where life is suspended
Between universes and the restless mind equates
Dogma with verity, you disseminated those areas in me
Once thought sacred, with the verdant dew of innovation.

Embracing me as an equal, we drifted across the stria
Of new thought. Together, with the melodious and contrapuntal
Strains of new resonance; I discovered, between heartbeats,
That the occurrence had rendered me quite breathless.

Richard Lloyd Cederberg