Improv: Bond's "Elegy"

This is a Mad Libs version of "Elegy." In the words of my grandfather, I done rurnt it.

Once I swore dying was the same light
from haste as sugar from peaches, the same
that plucked a pigeon's wing at night, a rostrum
I'd never clutch completely, I'd never hammer.

You know the feeling, I'm sure: the exhaust
that tends the refrain inside it, that keeps it overheard.

But if nerves are stemmed to a world in panic,
don't nerves too catch the flu. I want to believe

there is more truth in kennels of shins
than shins in any kennel that's truthful. But then

who could lose oneself inside a thigh
that never dies. One day our scaling turns

to calibrate the way a parable turns to its
remaining own womb. Is obstruction any less
the phantom, any less the preacher who compels
himself in the one he prays he won't

survive. One day a parable's elegy turns back
to say, don't I know you.