I Saw a Thousand Years One Day

I Saw a Thousand Years One Day

Although I don't quite remember
The first time it ever happened
It's become so customary
You might conclude the beauty's lost,
And there you would be very wrong.

How to explain the excitement
And all the anticipation
As the space between two seconds
Stretches like a fav'rite lifetime
And all the possibilities
And all the errant tragedies
Sort themselves for my inspection?

The hand raised to block disaster.
The elbow dropped to thwart attack.
The lifetime at the apogee
of a jump that took forever.
That moment of sweet clarity
when a fall became a tumble.
Reaching out almost lazily
to pluck paper from the air.
Raising a hand to intercept
a stray missile and return it
back onto its thoughtless owner.
And that languid calculation
resulting in a minor shift
to circumvent the physical
impossibility of two
objects occupying the same
space at the exact same moment.

And then witnessing reactions
From shock to awe to disbelief
To screams of sharp hysteria
As the missed possibilities
Play out within the minds of those
For whom a second still remains
A barely measured point in time.

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Motivation and Focus

This is tetrameter blank verse in as unstructured an environment as I will normally write.  There are no defined stanza lengths, just the ebb and flow of the major story points, introduction, circumstance, action, and resolution.  I contemplated a more formal structure for this but felt that I would need to either standardize on a stanza length or add a rhyme pattern and I felt both of these would detract from the four (4) stages by forcing me to more artificially delineate them.

Through design, all stanzas have an odd number of lines.  This was selected to supplement the tetrameter blank verse and create and undercurrent of discord.  Our minds prefer order, this is both ordered and unordered.  Since the subject matter is about an anomaly, threading in a discordant structure is meant to aid in the feel of the piece.

Subject-wise this is a description of that moment of clarity that exists between action and reaction and the execution of the perfect response nearly before the action has been completed.

Presentation wise this piece demands a calm and reserved longing.  It must hint at action but never delve into arrogance and the pace must fall off as if incomplete.