I relish the days I wake up with a cleanish slate. All I want before I first open my eyes is to feel her next to me. Around her, my entire geography takes form and becomes. And then the words, and then the noisy insistence of the day, the dogs, the words, one foot and then the next foot, finding glasses and on to coffee and tobacco and words. The world, the world, fast and faster, slow and slower, becomes and unbecomes, folds and unfolds

before the machinations
interfere. But that
is rare.

I feel for her to make sure I’m still waking into the same dream. Always the sensation in my limbs, the vestiges of dreams incomplete when the body has enough, when the mind that is me today decides to drive the body machine. The static from the back of the brain tunes in like an old radio dial, finds a station that rings clear and all I can hope for some days

is that it’s a song: The Beatles or Lucinda Williams or The Bangles or Stone Temple Pilots or Lita Ford or Joe Strummer or [ ]

and not some news reel
that will bleed horror in the lens
before I even get my coffee and my first smoke of the day.