Growing up is normally told as a story of gain, and the title of Brian Burch's poem turns that story upside down. "Absurd" suggests something senseless, and the poem shows where the senselessness lies: a person once laughed "without apparent reason" and now needs a reason, a role and a correct face for everything. Its central idea is that adulthood, as the speaker sees it, is a slow exchange of spontaneous joy for managed performance. By the end, even the freedom that might have rescued us seems no longer worth wanting.
The first three stanzas work by repetition. "Once" opens the poem, opens the second stanza, and returns as "at one time" in the third, like someone going back over a favourite memory. Each memory is smaller and more ordinary than the last: joy that was "sufficient," a stranger's smile that was "reward enough," laughter with no cause. The vocabulary is oddly economic, with words like "sufficient," "reward" and "enough." Joy was once a currency that settled every account, and the poem implies that it no longer does. The opening lines are slightly puzzling, since the speaker says it "did not take blandness / to provoke action." The most natural reading is that the dull, flat motives that drive us now, such as routine and obligation, were not needed then. The word "blandness" also anticipates the grey adult world the poem goes on to describe.
The turn comes bluntly: "all that is gone." There is no lament and no exclamation, only a flat statement, and then the poem's one sustained metaphor arrives. Life becomes theatre. "The costume must be chosen with care / the makeup must be correct for the role." The word "must" is the grammar of obligation, replacing the earlier "would," which had belonged to habit and pleasure. Notice, too, who is doing the choosing. The speaker gives no audience, director or villain, so the pressure feels both everywhere and nowhere, as social expectation often does. Costume and makeup also suggest a face that has to be covered, which fits the poem's loss of unprompted laughter. The smile of a stranger was once a gift, but a rehearsed smile is merely part of the outfit.
The final stanza is the longest and the most broken. "Once you tried freedom" has the casual tone of someone who sampled a dish, and the answer arrives in a staircase of fragments: "no longer / for you / freedom has become / too bitter / to live." The isolated "for you" points a finger, and the move from the earlier general "you" to something more personal feels almost accusing. "Bitter" is the poem's only taste word, and it sours the earlier sweetness of smiles and joy. The ending also has a double edge. "Too bitter to live" can be read as too bitter to live *with*, or as a verdict on living itself. The line break after "bitter" lets that darker possibility hang before the final two words close the sentence. The poem does not say what the freedom cost, but the contrast with the costume suggests an answer: to be unmasked is to be exposed, and a role at least offers shelter.
Formally, the poem is free verse. It has no rhyme, no punctuation and no capital letters, and its lines are short and close to speech. The effect is deadpan. The speaker doesn't dress the loss in grand language, and the flatness of the telling mirrors the blandness that the poem identifies as the new driver of action. The shifting line lengths, from the steady chant of "once" to the near-silence of the last stanza, make the reader feel the loss as a thinning-out.
Part of the poem's strength is that it treats a very common feeling without sentimentality. It does not blame anyone or offer a cure. It simply sets a child-like ease beside an adult's careful performance and lets the reader see the gap. For a student, that is worth pausing over, because the poem asks a question it never answers: if freedom feels bitter, is the fault in freedom, or in what we have become?