Cloud Journal #1

22nd December 2018

I ended my day with the sunrise.

I can hear the rubber slippers slapping from the veranda, sharp plastic metronome keeping time with the dawn. It was Mr. Menace ambling in his habitual slouch on the sidewalk, right through the smoke that blew from the garbage heap not twenty feet from the wharf.

5:55 AM on a Sunday in December. Kids are out on their bikes chattering as they swoop in and out while traffic steadily builds to a trickle, at six or seven it’ll be a stream. But for now, birdcall still dominates sharp and ferocious.

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Mornin’ soup

The air was frigid

Like soup left on the table

The wind blew in forceful gusts

As if blind the to long dead heat

 The night was a hungry child

Hummingbird

I sit on the roof. It is a cap roof, if a wind should blow with gusto at a certain angle my house would be decapitated. Get it? I sit here dangling my bare feet whilst the sunrise emerge like a growing splot of spilled tea soaking into my grandmother’s Colgate-white table cloth, but in fact it was black in the beginning of things. In a multitude of pinks, lavenders and sly bright oranges, the colours bleed across the skyway.

I smell morning smells. Felt morning feelings. Saw morning sights. I stay awake to feel the world shake the night like a favourite fuzzy blanket, reluctantly. I think of how recently I was taken by the urge to chop off half of my below-the-waist chestnut hair. I can’t say why for I don’t know yet. I made my mother do just that a few nights ago. She did so, also, reluctantly. Another thing, I have taken to wear my post-braces retainer again. My gran frequently reminds me of what a waste two years of self indulged pain was. I finally decided to put the damned thing on, freaking aesthetic compulsions.