"The more you know, the easier it gets" is the kind of reassurance people repeat without thinking, and the speaker of "d a z e d" overturns it at once: "The more I know, the more the maze tightens." A maze that closes in is a claustrophobic picture of love, and it sets up the poem's central tension. The speaker knows the beloved better than "the million eyes" that judge only by appearance, and that knowledge is what traps them. Tenderness, anger, thirst and fear are braided together here, and the poem never claims to untangle them.
The form carries this confusion. The poem opens with a long block of breathless, conversational prose full of "you know" and "tell me how could I." Its sentences run on like an argument that won't stop, with hands at the throat, a "sore" voice and a thirst that "doesn't ever satisfy." The most unsettling moment comes when the speaker says the lover's staying is "where I know it's real." Offering endurance through anger as proof of love is something readers may want to question, and the poem leaves room for that, since the very next sentence admits "so is the fear." The speaker then draws a tilted astronomical picture: the beloved shines "like the earth to my moon," while the speaker is "merely a rock" under "diamond soles." A moon shines only with reflected light, so the image may hint that the speaker's brightness was always borrowed. That is an inference, but it fits the lover's offhand remark, "You used to be brighter, I guess," which the speaker cannot answer.
After this, the poem breaks into short lines and loose, chiming rhymes: sea and me, ink and sink, mine and shine. The rhymes are imperfect and drifting, like a half-remembered song, which suits a daydream. Sound does more work than rhyme alone. "Daydream," "haze" and "daze" echo each other through the poem, and the spaced-out letters of the title force you to read slowly, as if the word itself were blurring. Colour shifts in the same way, from "silver" to "blood red" to "rose" and finally "technicolor," moving from cool and dreamy, through violent, to sweet and artificial. Technicolor is a vivid, heightened colour, and the word suggests a world brighter than reality.
Water saturates the verse too: "sea," "sink," "salt," "waves," "drown." Salt on the lips is romantic, but it also hints at tears. The lover's kiss can "make waves smile and the sun shine," and the next line, "brighter, I guess," returns the earlier insult without quotation marks. It now reads as the speaker's own thought, an accusation absorbed until it sounds like private doubt. The phrase also echoes the speaker's earlier "I am different now, I guess," so "I guess" becomes a tic of someone who cannot trust their own certainty.
The break comes with the mirror. The speaker looks at the lover and sees "a cracked illusion / unpuzzled and sprawled." "Unpuzzled" is an invented word that undoes a puzzle, and it answers the maze of the opening. Then comes "make / Or / break," with the capital "Or" stranded on its own line so the choice hangs in the air. The speaker offers to "gladly leave that upto you." Notice the capital "I" used throughout the verse, which becomes lowercase only in the last two instances: "i'd gladly leave" and "i will always drown." The self shrinks as it surrenders.
The ending is sweet on the surface. Morning brings "lemonade and the strawberry shakes" and "a sight tinted rose," the sugar of childhood and the cliché of rose-tinted glasses. But the final verb is "drown." The speaker is not fooled, and sees the danger clearly and chooses the daze anyway.
That is what makes the poem worth reading. It does not decide whether this is devotion or surrender, and it lets both feelings stand. It leaves readers asking when being lost in someone becomes a way of losing yourself.