Making Strange [two stanzas]

In theory, we approach the world dreaming in black and white, and some will call this life: poets, dreamers, others of compact imagination. I’m thinking of Whitman, who wants us to expand our souls till the finely beaten filament of the stuff that is us stretches to infinity: an aerobics of spirit, stretch up, up and away until everything is consumed: life, death, man, child, woman, and the pimply bag boy you didn’t think you wanted at first. There is nothing to spare in this infinity. And when the last atom of life rolls itself into a ball for one last fling, one last day in the sun, we see how unutterably small everything has become: sucked in, the belt pulled tight, everyone comfy, ready to go. This is our death, uh, life—our filament pulled taut, the spirit stretched. We are everything sucked in. Compact. Imagine.

In the evening the tenderness of loneliness, a soft tread of something you forgot to do in childhood. Peace murmurs below any comprehension while your husband catches the shrieks of crows and twists their tortured song into his own music. And your own…breath that twitches your body an itching in the skull. The mirror, its double, the kiss you give yourself when no one .is looking. The drool on your pillow, the leftover dream. In the morning burning coffee in the kitchen and the need for this day to be exactly like the day before and nothing like it at all. After all, there is only one question: what transforms the forms of experience already received as form? Part of you is bored. Who will remove…the--Who will remove…[missing stanza?][and?] Sometimes you let the bullet come home to give the rise out of everything