Suspended gracefully like an acrobat

between reality and sleep’s resort,

my mind calls out to your image:

A king wandering in pilgrimage from his throne

seeking a more noble crown of humbler sheen.

I fight to believe in or against you

Not knowing yet if it’s safe to reach out,

or if I’m simply imagining hands within my reach,

promising to swing me to stable platform.

Yet I have seen you in life,

Tasted, touched, smelled you

Died in your bliss

And respawned a jubilant stranger to myself.

Somehow, you are real

• Or I am delusional,

Telling myself of your realness.

Are you simply a dream I ran too far in to?

Did I lose more than my concept of time on your lips?

But the memory of the electric energy in even your lightest touch,

The masterpiece built into your voice,

The strength that pools deeply in the intellectual hazel eyes

that cast unfathomable power over any in your gaze,

The courage of your heart, outsizing your doubts,

These are all more real to me in you

Than the concepts themselves associated with men;

You are no false idol built on stereotype,

But a reality only the life of the living could design,

And I soak in your complexity,

Draw boldness through my palms on your skin,

Glide in the ideas of your creative mind,

And winnow the finest parts of myself for display at the pleasure of your smile,

The cadence of your laughter,

Sowing in me the most elated of thrills…

On a deep sigh, I cast myself into the dreamworld night after night

With the surety of a blind acrobat

Putting faith in the hands of sleep to catch me

And allow me to continue this act outside our beautiful reality

As I fall into the dangerous blending

of fantasies realized

and reality

fantasized.