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”