Awake At Six Am

It's six a.m. Outside it is beginning to turn from night to day. The wind howls faintly as it makes its way around my house. Rain patters chaotically on my rooftop as I lay here looking at the ceiling. I can barley see it through the darkness that hangs around me like a fog. The central air kicks on and it's hum drowns out the tip tap of the rain bombarding the roof. I pull the covers up to my chin and sigh. My eyes are heavy but my mind is racing. I think about a novel I have been reading. I think about money. I think about work. I consider, for just a moment, rising to don the hoodie hanging on the post at the end of my bed and wandering lazily into the kitchen where my journal lies open and a poem I was writing earlier slumbers on the open page waiting to be roused and finished. I hear my neighbors truck roar to life and glance at my alarm clock. Six twenty two. Outside the darkness is losing its battle with the light--if it is a battle--and I can just barley make out, behind a lonely oak barren of leaves, the tail end of a gray cloud against a bluish gray sky. It will be a rainy day today. Soon I will sleep and when I rise the barren tree outside my window will not have moved. The clouds will be different (according to the weatherman I heard on the radio they will be darker) but the sky will probably still have that drab lazy blue hue. I think about clouds for a few minutes. I wonder if they have feelings. Then I imagine two clouds talking about how some other cloud thinks he is hot stuff and that maybe they should rain on his parade. Then I drift off to sleep....