When I look at you intently,
look inside you like a prying space probe,
listen to you
like my life depended on it;
when I let you occupy my entire perception,

yes – when you truly are the ONE,
beyond good and bad,
past all defining qualities,
where time and space and you
are identical,
I get scared:
you change, I change
and someone I know and don't know
comes forth
with all the abandon and immediacy
of the purest familiarity
and the most venomous strangeness,
from the heart of the sunrise
and the core of matter,
from the vicinity of the next second
and the remoteness of the silent roar
of exploding supernovae,
slashing the elements through space,
building hearts and minds -

and I realize that familiarity
is but repetition, but habit, but concealment;
that no thing, no one, can be familiar
out of the evolutionary constructs of time, of space,
and I begin to understand those bouts of strangeness
that scared me out of my wits at age five, six, seven,
when, standing in the kitchen,
my mother, doing some household chore,
suddenly seemed to me like a strange animal,
leaving me with sinking, catastrophic feelings,
visions of whole blocks of tenement buildings
crashing in on themselves;
all rules breaking in erupting anxiety attacks,
as reality was un-masked,
its lizard constituents revealed,
Tao flowing in and out
from its all-encompassing generative tissue
to the details we like to name people,
days, thoughts, mountains, clouds, ideas,
and where our sense of familiarity rides habit
and repetition like a family horse,
on the outside of everything, of your spouse,
trees, cats, flowers:

In your imagination, peel the skin off your spouse,
investigate the organs,
have the eye-balls dangle
from the nerves that run their course
into the back of the brain;
wind the blood vessels around your forearm,
spray some hormones in the air,
feel the consistency of the meat: familiarity, anyone?

And I think to myself:

“This is not my beautiful home,
this is not my beautiful wife”