wake

I wake to the floor dark and quiet. A blank crouching sheet beside me. A pillow with no face whispering sometime in the dream you vanished. I am left to reason. You being bright, the starving night sucked the window open and ate you. I blame the need for breeze. I blame your restlessness on whaling black midnight and charred draining streets, on someone you may meet you haven't met yet.

The sun peeking through the window and pointing at my face. The sun laughing at my wet startled eyes. Your bone ground against the rickety bridge of daylight. Your simple somewhere else makes blinking lights seem dangerous and a quiet room indignant with guilt. Your body chewed by night's diamond teeth. I consider sleep and refuse myself. I put on a torn blue coat and run about like a crushed bug. I dirty my feet on the hallway floor. I cut them on the crust-glass stairs. Pacing the roof? I rub my eyes. Empty roof.

I have schedules and jobs. I have an art I practice with some regularity. How strange you should need to think. I have a reasonable set of friends I can occupy myself with and yet the discussion of a world, the concept of my time, the understanding of a thumb upon a page within a book upon a desk that I once bought is defined...my time is defined by your absence.