After Night

Can't shake her from my walking, working, bus-card-slapping dreams...no, it won't disappear as long as I reach from the hunger in my heart to hold her.

Now it is time to lay my head down in a dark room with swirling ghosts circulated from a droning fan. I will awake 4 times before the alarm and every time I stretch outward, I find an empty bed.

The morning is transit card beeps, bouncing nodding half sleep in hard bus seats, the Bible reading, the routine elevators, my cube, and the omnipresent hate 15 floors above the beggars and beaten forms languishing below.

Lunch is the hopeful funny, the interesting tale, the strange dish. Lunch is short lately.

The afternoon stretch tempts my limits of smoking and not getting into trouble with my employer for smoking too much. After 4 I find that time changes into some kind of downward slope that I slide on until I rest on a transit train headed for home. Sometimes the Bible reading resurfaces.

I walk a good clip, maybe a mile?, and it is just considered exercise to me. It is part of getting back to my not-home where I reside, to go into my disconnected shed for slap-it-together art and old music and too many cigarettes amid forgotten warming beers.

And then I pause on the front porch to smoke out the night with finality cigs and the dregs of beers and clouding crickets and these very thoughts I pour out now are mere reflections of what spins around in my lonely thoughts night after night after night after night after night.