Dawn

I saw the sun rise the other day. This came on the tail end of being up for some ungodly stretch of time. As I wandered the streets of 6 a.m. downtown Toronto, it was painfully obvious that this was a much more godly hour than, say 4 or 5 a.m.. There were construction workers at every site; the only people who walked the streets otherwise seem to have been "characters" and speed freaks. (I could not, to save my life, identify a speed freak. Just so you know.) Also, I was hopped up and actively crashing on more caffeine than I cared to remember; my retinal ganglions danced in front of--or perhaps as part of--my vision like a cloud; the little bitty caffeine molecule reached out and touched its best buddy, cAMP phosphodiesterase, with reasonably high affinity. Later that morning I stared down a floor and everything was moving. I wandered further among statues and shrubbery; I jumped some fences familiar to me, all under the leering of construction workers and nightwatchmen who looked bitterly disappointed that I was not "some broad". I shouldn't be that harsh: how many of the nightwatchmen are lonely sensitive poets who never got their break?, and how many consctruction workers are actually hidden Bodhisattvas, arms akimbo upon the interlocked girders at the top of human society?; how many are skywalkers crying their noble tears which get misted across the hubristic sidewalks? If you recall, I spen many years among them, but they are not my people. And what was I to them? A witness? Surely nothing that patronizing. I was just some guy walking the streets and looking at the piled up homeless, surely some of them what is left of speed freaks. I was isolated and senseless and thinking of biorhythms and how mine were telling me to get the fuck to sleep. But I was inspired. And I tried to translate that onto the internets, but I've mostly botched that effort. But I had to try, for surely sleep deprivation means something, right. Surely when I argue with myself the whole world can hear it. Surely I see the same colours of dark-blue turning to lighter-blue. Surely the ground will quake and I'll have a final moment of Basho. But I got confused and went to sleep: back to the regularity of sleep/wake, back to fruitless attempts to be a Renaissance Man, back to eye strain and free-floating anxiety. I manage to range far and trip over every rock on the way.

Consider: "A prostitute was forgiven by Allah because, passing by a panting dog near a well and seeing that the dog was about to die of thirst, she took off her shoe, and tying it with her head-cover she drew out some water for it. So, Allah forgave her because of that."