Condensed

Death is to dying as
God is to the unknown,
An idea about something

You viscerally feel,
A tale, a character,
Embodied argument,

A play in pantomime
Persons donning costumes
To act out all your dread,

But not a thing itself,
Nothing you can measure
Or hold up to the light—

And frankly, all ideas,
All poems, words, all of us,
Are equally distilled

And condensed equations
For what you sense but can’t,
But won’t be, not as dust.