I wake up to birds and bulldozers

Sun’s at half mast. It’s half past 6 and I’m blasted by the drowning sounds of birdsongs beneath bellowing engines. Grinding rhythms pierce the window pane and catch my ear before I get a chance to press the “five more minutes” button five more times…

My daily routine.

I pounce on the snooze button….I know it in the dark better than I know the curves of my own hand. It’s smaller than the others and three raised bumps dot the surface, as if the manufacturer was aware that even blind people don’t get up the first time the alarm goes off.

But after a sixty second symphony of men with big trucks, bigger egos, and spectacularly bland agendas I’ve lost the urge to rest. I hadn’t thought much about the people building a parking lot in my backyard until now, but there’s something about the mechanical hum and click of mother earth’s demise that unsettles even the laziest sleeper.

I peek out through the blinds to watch monstrous claws puppeted by cheap labor and it makes me kinda’ sick. The machines swing Mom’s flesh back and forth, digging in and filling out. It’s a cosmetic surgery that doesn’t look so good, but makes an excellent foundation for make-up.

“I am the eyeliner, you are the base,” I say, realizing immediately that lines like that belong to a dingy hippy at a beatnik bar. I can’t help but laugh at myself., still thinking that we have our own ideas of beauty; some of us are just generous enough to keep them to ourselves.

I decide to write a beatnik hippy poem, since I seemed to be filled with corny metaphors this morning.

“Those who take pride in crushing bleeding hearts beneath a pachyderm’s foot while undermining minding your own business as a fundamental right for all.

The fathers of sprawl,

replacing sprawling landscapes with sober handshakes and money under the dinner table during grace.

Their crossed fingers keeping pace with the beat of the feet who march in their place.”

This is the point where I can’t stop laughing through my tears so I just take a pillow to the other side of the apartment and close my eyes. I’m still owed one snooze for the morning before getting political, and believe me, I’m gonna’ take it.