The early hour is much more calm; a void in time split by alarm. Careful steps in total black, whisper soft that you’ll be back.

Slip shoes around your stretching toes, and gently push the door to close. Fill your lungs with untouched air, and feel how still it settles there, as if to quench a thirst unknown. Alone you know each breath’s your own.

Perhaps the universe started so, some restless spark just decided to go, woke up before six, before one, before then, crashing about, woke every quark in its den, jumped into its shoes, and kicked down the door, tore our through the darkness, to seek and explore,

and perhaps it is now settled here in my breath, or in the palm of a hand that will save me from death.

Lulled by false promises of comfort, I take the hand of apathy who leads me into a stuffy room, sits me down, flicks on the TV, and shuts the door.

“There,” he smiles, “isn’t that better?” “Huh?” I manage, unable to unstick my eyeballs from ten-eighty-p.

But that truer part of me pulls my head, the glue stretching from my pupils ‘til breaking point, then snaps, pings, slapping back into my skull like the starter cord of a lawnmower,

my brain splutters into life, puffing from the spongy grooves, a throbbing, greying mass of matter, self-aware once again, and knowing that this is no day to be locked up inside.

I’m haunted by comparison; sporadic, transparent anxieties, ghosts of aspirations I never held flashing and torn from consciousness – a moth-eaten fabric of cotton thought, too soft, or frayed, or sodden with apathy, wrung out in the sink, swallowed whole by the legacy of former invention.

Wash it down with the rest of your lukewarm beer (your latest excuse for indecision) lest you take responsibility for all you do, for all you are, and are not, and could be, but won’t, because the only choice you ever made was to compare distress with action.

They never even had a clue or planned that it be so, but made to move as if they knew and found their ground in tow.

When skin was thin I dug right in and mined for all I pleased. Each night I’d write until first light and wake each day with ease.

I sliced and diced, not once, not twice, and scattered my heart to the weeds. It’s true some grew, hell, some even bloomed, but I failed to take heed of the breeds.

Now callous and dry, my skin holds no lines, only roughness and a will to secede. I long to delve deeper, and now know why the seeker will cut just to see how they’ll bleed.

Don’t brand yourself the villain; those burns will scar a drama into every motivation. You’re acting up to just how bad you think that you might be, but you’re not wicked or perverse to think or say or look or feel, to experience your existential, and writhe amongst your world.

It’s a sensory bonanza, full of immaterial rules; to pander to their censorship is slander to your soul.

Absorb, digest, imbibe, and breathe those hundred-thousand reasons to ponder, wonder, live and love, to run and walk amidst, amongst, to fit between, pass through and through; be HUMAN, fool. What else? Be you.