Written for W3 Prompt #160:
Pick a single abstract noun that carries weight, mystery, or tension for you—something like liberty, danger, truth, love, exile, justice, forgiveness, joy, grief, silence…
Don’t use it until your poem’s final line.
Start each line with a description or action that leads us toward the noun, not from it. This is called left-branching syntax—it means delaying the main subject or verb.
You’re working with delay, accumulation, and unfolding. The noun you’ve chosen arrives only at the end. Until then, build around it, toward it, beneath it. Let readers feel its shape before they hear its name.
From Deepseek:
The word “opia” is a fascinating and relatively obscure abstract noun that captures a very specific, almost paradoxical feeling. It refers to the ambiguous intensity of eye contact—that unsettling, electric sensation when you lock eyes with someone, and the moment feels both intimate and invasive, vulnerable and powerful.

as wolf eyes in the gloom,

catching light,

a subtle, fleeting stare;

a mirror ball shaken by each boom,

a wincing fright,

enraptured to suddenly share;

is it a gander or a gawk?

tension-charged,

a piercing wonder;

translating a silent talk,

pupils enlarged,

enraptured to suddenly ponder;

uncertain at the exchange,

intimate invasion,

objectified by the gaze;

spine-tingling and strange,

a powerful persuasion,

enraptured to suddenly amaze;

a possibility of aggression,

observer and observed,

at the edge of scopophobia;

or a dance towards affection,

both slightly unnerved,

enraptured in this sudden opia.