Monday

Did we jinx the world
with our optimism?

Each morning seems like a new punishment for
crimes we didn't know we had
committed. 

Or perhaps we were always living on
borrowed time. 

Monday morning stretches and writhes, I wake well before dawn in a sweat, the ancient radiator bucking and weaving under a pressure of its own making. We've all been there, buddy. In my dreams, I am in Africa, I am at a coffeeshop in Italy and only French comes out, I am alone in someone else's big house and worried about intruders, nothing seems to go right. 

But when the pink strokes of dawn wash over the cruise ship in the Buttermilk Channel, and you take your layers of clothing against the deep freeze to walk across the bright white snow crust at the end of the pier, staring straight into the sun as you go, 

It's like you survived a darkness 
and didn't just come out the other side alive
but for a moment, 
for this moment,

Living.