Mouth-Breather Poem by Patti Masterman

One day, I happened to over-breathe all the air in the world:
Sucking in great deserts of sand, whole oceans,
Star-fish, palm trees, dolphins, coral reefs,
And rolling plains and cattle egrets, barns and wind-vanes,
And farm tractors and grain elevators,
And livestock and Winnebago's;
Boats- picnic tables- trailer courts-
But, like the hope still lying dormant, in Pandora's box,
You managed to evade my sudden intake of breath
As the universe shrank down to just a dot
And when everything contracts down even smaller
To a point the size of a bacterium, inside a gnat's nostril,
We'll be beside one another, for some indefinite period of time,
Something you were never expecting at all:
And I'm hoping to get a good head start on your comet's tail then,
Before all hell breaks loose, again.