time to be awake

As in the freight yards when two impossibly large and impossibly quiet freight cars are inched closer and closer together until at last, with a the importance of an industrial clash, they couple and are ready to travel in a bonded and unified direction, so is the travel from sleep to wakefulness, it seems.

Inching, inching, inching
Quiet, quiet, quiet
Until there is no longer any denying or escaping...
There is a link -- CRASH -- though it is impossible to parse what, precisely, is linked to what.

 It is time to be awake.

Awake requires the searching out of well-worn habits to delineate what up to that moment had been comfortably and comfortingly undelineated in the night. Wake up? What for? If it ain't broke, why fix it?

I search out luxuries to lubricate the transition, small grist for the "awake" mill: Strong, black, caffeinated coffee and a cigarette are one such luxury, one such habit, one such lubricant. The possibility that I won't have to cook supper is -- however unlikely -- another.

Others come awake in other ways, I imagine. But I have my doubts that a sense of grudging is absent. There is something contrived and energetic about being awake and contriving takes energy that has all the earmarks of being wasted.

Here is a land in which the fleet of mouth rattle off trite observations about "who" is asleep and "who" awake. They are sincere and very tiring ... in much the same way that those who proclaim their willingness to surrender to the night are fatuous and wise.

"Sometimes," it is said, "all we are left with is words."

"Fuck off!" I sputter in reply.

"Sometimes," rather, "all we are left with is silence."

And if this is true, why pester and nudge? Just crash and be grudging, I guess.

It really is delicious to hear the silence as those enormous freight cars inch closer and closer and closer and...

CRASH.