The morning. Or not quite.
Where the stars joined a thin strip of white appeared
Linking them into sentences like constellations.
Staring downward, the tiny eyes
Bright in the dusty cosmos
Until the hands of time, delicate frost
Brushed off the black grime
And made the sky as immaculate as the stars.

A girl sleeps in the serenity before this.
Her eyes can see no twinkling in the night,
No movement as Time cleans its haven.
Darkness is her refugee, glowing
Upon the leaden eyelids of rest.
Sometime later her mother enters
Thinking about this wonderful day, this cold morning
Which, now, at 5 A.M., would be the perfect time
To teach her daughter the formulas and equations
That will make her smart.
A simple ambition, translucent in the waters of desire
Yet as impulsive in the feathers of silence
As a stone plunked in a motionless basin.
Awake! That was the word.
A heavy shake of her body
Like a crying earthquake
Colored into motion.
Sunlight, not yet come, peeked a curious eye
Through the curtains, then disappeared. A cup of tea,
Thought the mother. That will surely do the trick.
When it was steeped and hot, though,
There was no motion of the girl’s purple fingers
To capture the warmth of Sunday, a swollen pustule
Floating in that shiny ceramic cup.

It was not long before the other being in the room left
As quietly as that pebble being retrieved from a muddied pond
And left the dreary air to calm.
For a moment the warmth whispered rumors.
Suddenly, the girl sat up and cried.
A hole in her head–-the hands flew up like crows
And tried to conceal that irrepressible sinkhole
Which was tiredness.
For a moment she knew she was going to crumble here
When she could bear no more
The heavy weight of aborted mornings
Under that spirited hand which lifted her so brutally
From her evergreen coma.
For a while she thought but her head was a mist of colors
And she wondered what it was like
Not only to know, but to see yourself
Emerging from that well of drunkenness
Where you’d left your awakening.
When the silence settled once more, like autumn foliage
Weightier than a rock, she fell again
Into dark, dark caverns.