7:00AM

February 2014

I awake in a hot sweat,
baseboard roaring, windchill flooring those
brave enough to exit their homes before 7:00AM.
The sky has dropped a steel grey backdrop,
the color of this city a metallic sheen during long winter months.
My skin is burned,
Pink from twelve minutes of artificial UV happiness.
Icicles forming in my arm hair,
I am another human stalactite of early February.
Skin slick with perspiration from a broken nights sleep,
no rest for the wicked, the damned, or those
who allow figments of
horrific imaginations manifest
in bedroom shadows at dawn.