Awaken: (into this)

 

 

The damned alarm clock sounds again.

     -It is beautiful music 101.5
waking the dead
from the land of pleasant dreams.

I sit on the edge of the bed
     -dizzy with morning sinuses.
Is it really a new day again?
Already I hate the day's events.

I try to get my bearings a little at a time.
     -I'm overcome with flashbacks from the past
but I'm already organizing today's life
hoping it is all a dream within a dream.

I can't get the justification for this.
     -I wonder what it is like to be dead.
The only thing motivating me at the moment
is that I have to take a bad piss.

I look down at my hands in the dark.
     -They could be a black man's hands.
     -They could be a hispanic man's hands.
The morning fog slowly burns away,
delirium becomes necessity even as I fight it.

I'm in this half-baked life of my own doing.
     -A bird on the roof chirps outside my window.
Why was I born into this body and not the bird's?
This is no existence for an animal.

I rise and walk into the half-lit hallway, coughing.
     -This is my great achievement.
I see the familiar crack in the plaster.
I've reached the same spot I was at yesterday.

Mark David Jordan, 2011