It’s 5 am. The thinnest slice of a curved moon hangs above the silhouetted trees. A robin talks and tweets her head silly. She has news to spread. The horizon begins to blush – barely able to keep its secrets, the embarrassment of riches it’s about to usher in. Sky lightens. World awakens.

A mourning dove coos her evening song. Everything grows tired: the fading light, the snoring dog, the head nods towards an open book. The cursor blinks and winks waiting to be fed, the cellphone buzzes with text notifications. The electronics are insomniacs. I whisper to them sweetly, listen to the dove’s lament.

I left the bar strutting past the paraplegic – self-conscious, ashamed, and almost proud of the way my legs worked. Outside, a driving rain and cold wind straightened my back the way one stiffens at the first touch of waist-high, cold ocean. I’m drenched. He’s still at the bar next to his wheelchair.

This deck of words has two jokers. I shuffle syllables, deal descriptions. A bird cuts across the sky. A cardinal as red as a heart sits on a clubbed fence post. A pair of squirrels folds leaves into the shape of diamonds under a straight tree. The world is flush. I say hit me.

In the warm sunlight of morning, I finished reading a memoir. It ruined me to reading for the rest of the day. Which means I don’t know what to do with this afternoon light, this sound of music in the distance, this soft breeze, or these paper-thin clouds. Enjoy it, I guess.  

A vole or a mole came in through a hole at the base of the door this morning. She wandered around sniffing the ground, scurrying across kitchen wood flooring. She climbed the screen door never quite sure how to get out of the house. A silly tale of a vole not a…

Sardine skies and coconut eyes, the wind shimmers in the trees. The brown-headed cowbird is a brood parasite – look it up. A groundhog has been digging at the mulch I used to cover up her den. I imagine the groundhog babies I might have accidentally trapped.  A sparrow picks at the gutters.

AQI. Apparently, it’s not good. The tickle in my lungs and throat already told me this. There are fires burning – which feels like a loaded statement about late-stage capitalism. We fight over whose suffering has been worse. “Now you know what we deal with.” Sympathy. None of us are getting out alive.

Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Lazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Crazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Hazy