afternoon shift

Too much morning is here in these liquid hours.
This morning exudes great liqueurs of lights,
and anyone who is unstable will lean sideways
under bouquets of early fullness like rapture.

It is simply and entirely too much --
an intoxication demanding movement.

Youth doesn't flinch. It pushes into morning
and soaks up the ripeness as fuel for action.
Youth transforms the dripping early lights
into solids and into flourishes of living art.

But if you wake up one morning and find yourself
a gypsy hermit dodging the morning's personality,
you must concentrate on what later will come --
the afternoon and its dry suspenseful character.

How affirming the afternoon's preposterous slant,
as if a tilted wing is slicing into the hours edgewise --
dividing the morning's mass and molecules of night.
The opened layer in between does not drip urgency.
The texture of an afternoon calls for stupefaction.
A fine afternoon tastes like the food after funerals,
astringently relished, these delicious servings of voids.

Well...that all sounds slightly ridiculous!

Yet...the years bring an attitude of afternoon ennui.
Suspended there, one need not bribe a croupier god.
Afternoons come bizarrely, halfway between living.

Morning is for dreamers, for action, for the hopeful.
Later is for connoisseurs of light sinking anciently.



Copyright 2011 -- Tim Buck