EARLY RISE

I remember walking the streets expecting to see
        him. Then returned to a different apartment.

Because I do not remember any more dreams,
                I wake up into one. It was,

even before it started to be,
                before it started to already not be any more
        though each time I swear never to return,

but once the day had crossed into,
        once shopowners and their dogs started again
digging to find rivers that course beneath our streets,

                to dive into concrete memory expecting a splash,

I must try to go back--shutters
                be slammed!--to change it all by changing myself

by taking a little nap, avoiding what the day
        wanted to get done, and in this, I have memories.

Please let me not look at the clock,

        I do not want to know this moment has come to an end.
I have been orphaned by the passing of too many moments already.
                Each time, I swore never to return.

What begins impossible becomes more impossible,
                but I knew he would turn up.
The walls were fading, cracking, peeling, the walls of night.

        This morning is a gift given to me by a rooster,

and for each rock in the dirt there is a flattened plastic bottle,
        water or transmission fluid. I notice the sole of a boot upturned,
no bigger than a four-year-old's foot.

                Fixed to burning edges of the clouds rising above Sierra Madre,

he sat, or maybe slept, but I had yet to arrive.

                As I continue on, more boot soles from under the surface emerge
and float there, in the dirt, but when I climbed
        not quiet enough he was waiting, fixed to burning edges

of the clouds that rise above.
        Even from the distant reaches of the solar system

the sun still has to rise, I figured, and had a seat
                        after climbing ten steps past.

"Only your blood will quench the forces that replenish cosmic creation."

                Our highways have always run through ruin, but in that morning
looking back over his shoulder
        reflecting off of my presence ten steps further up

I become no longer an immediate threat, so he gets lying down,

        springs up to spin around--avoiding my gaze,
                turning away, towards his tail--

to find the spot he was looking for, back to sleep with a yawn over pavement.

                "Did you always go through life as easily as it seemed you did?"

The response was loose and bouncing on the penumbra

                but then escaped. Awake now and with no one to play against, the team
knew not what to do. The answer was a play on words,

        a statement more obvious than fact, a pre-fact, a circle,

and left each member with a choice to be made unto each self.

        Supplied with too many options, I want--

and fear--them all, resulting in a loss
                of circulation. Language, blood of consciousness,

                now that my thoughts have begun to trip over themselves,
        impeding and accumulating the liquid confusion that I ride through this day,
perhaps it is time to stop perceiving and write a little.

                The balcony and my notebook have become too distracting.

As I fall towards the couch, fingers and eyes preparing the task,
        alarm clock tearing off into another room
in the apartment interruption,
                eandings are always so sure.