Blue Hour

Blue Hour | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian

“It’s too late for caffeine,/ too early for wine,/ this hour between dog walk and wolf whistle, …” Courtesy of smilla4/flickr.

The last late rain-scaled light has swum
along the office wall.
An aggrieved

mosquito-whine of all you’ve not achieved
needles. But your pen’s aphasic.
Each hypnotic tick

of keyboard pecked by finger
only deepens torpor.
Sleep you’ve skimped

drapes its limp
gauze across your focus.
You yawn, procrastinate,

succumb, drawn downward
into an abyss
of click-bait,

the screen a lamp
you cannot brush the charred
moths of your attention from.

It’s too late for caffeine,
too early for wine, this hour between
dog walk and wolf whistle,

the daymind and its lunar eclipse.
Light slips
further into shadow.

Time to go.

Still, spent as you are, you linger,
meeting in the witness of the window
slowly becoming mirror

an oblique blue
attuned
to failure,

discerning a wordless
yearning in you, intent
though silent, to be

somewhere else, or
someone different.