Few feelings are as hard to name as the one just before something changes, and "impending change" doesn't so much name it as stand inside it. The only thing given with the poem is the name cr0, so everything rests on the words, and they are busy ones. The speaker doesn't know whether the coming change means "doom or to flourish," only that it is "a change in any case." That phrase returns almost word for word in the next line, and it becomes a stubborn kind of comfort: whatever happens, something will.
The first thing that stands out is how much the speaker hedges. The poem begins with "a kind of nervousness," not nervousness itself, and then keeps trying on labels: "an uneasiness, an excitement," then "a heartsickness, a longing," then "an embarrassment, a harassment." None of them quite fits. Several are set side by side with their near-opposites, with uneasiness next to excitement and doom next to flourish. The speaker can't tell fear from anticipation because in the body they feel the same. That is the poem's central idea: the moment before change is a blur in which dread and hope share a single set of nerves.
The sound of the poem acts out this jitteriness. Line four is packed with echoes: "about to burst, about to fall, impending thirst, precariously balancing all." Burst rhymes with thirst, and fall with all. The repeated "about to" tips forward like someone leaning over an edge. "Impending thirst" is the oddest phrase. Thirst is a want not yet satisfied, and it borrows "impending" from the title, so even the craving belongs to something that hasn't arrived.
Then comes a small joke. Across the line break, "balancing all / too much coffee?" slides in the idiom "all too much," and the speaker checks whether the jitters have an ordinary cause. The answer, "no, none at all," rhymes back on that word "all" and rules out the easy explanation. The humour lets some air into the poem and keeps it from becoming melodramatic, and it makes the speaker sound like a real person taking stock of themselves.
After that the lines turn into questions built on either/or: "is it here or is it far?" and "is it me or is it them?" The structure is parallel, but the speaker can't answer either question. They can't place the feeling in space, and they can't say whose fault it is. The poem never says who "them" might be, and that gap is part of the effect. The words "embarrassment" and "harassment" click together by rhyme, as though the mind is grabbing at whatever sounds close enough.
The form supports this. Everything is lowercase, no sentence ends with a full stop, and semicolons and question marks interrupt each other. The lines vary in length, and the longest gather in the middle, where the speaker is most overwhelmed. It reads like thought happening in real time, not a conclusion reached afterwards. Even the title, set in guillemets, looks like a phrase lifted straight out of the speaker's head, though that is an inference.
The ending shifts in tone. "This feeling wobbling like a wave, reminiscent of what saudade gave / the feeling of soaring." The w sounds in "wobbling," "wave" and "what" make the line wobble too. Saudade is a Portuguese word for a deep, often bittersweet longing for something absent. It fits beside "heartsickness" and "longing," and the choice of a word from another language quietly admits that English has not supplied one for this feeling. The final line is short, has no punctuation, and hangs in the air.
"Soaring" seems to tilt the answer toward flourishing, but the poem doesn't let this settle into safety. A wave wobbles, and a few lines earlier the speaker was "about to fall." The lift is real but unsteady.
The poem is worth reading because it trusts a familiar experience, such as waiting for a result, a decision or a new beginning, to be interesting without a resolution. It lets form do the feeling's work, with rhymes that rush, questions that go unanswered, and an ending that stays open. It suggests that being unsure whether you will fall or soar can itself feel like flight.