Morning Glory
by Derek Hugen, 1-11-04, written at Raging Sage Coffeehouse
Seven roses.
Seven roses
sweat the morning, and they are draped across the white bed with the swirling grey stitches
and you.
And you,
with the draped covers which had been pulled so closely the night before. As you turned with your tossing dreams, they became unraveled slowly and stupidly in a fit of cause and effect, like momentum, like a chair tossed against a wall in anger where the wall still stands and the chair no longer sits but lays in an abandoned heap on the floor and
in the night.
In the night
where you had first thought these thoughts and fought the covers in a not-quite epic struggle, with the abandoned sheets and the bed and you, and
seven roses.
Seven roses
you hadn't noticed the night before, but now they slowly glisten in the sunlight which emerges victorious from its battle with the mini-blinds, and that's what life is, a constant battle, a struggle that will never end, and the only peace you have come to is ironically
with this battle.
And you begin to notice the pattern that the morning is always conquered by the night, and every night is finally brought to death by morning. At night, stars glisten like sweat in the sky, and in the morning, deep shadows forebode their way into the corners. Everything sits in some sort of yin-yang balance. Although if you had to diagram it you would make the circle of light in the darkness much smaller, because even with the contrast it is hard to see any sort of light in that nothingness.
And now the sun rises and pours through the stripes of mini-blinds. It doesn't have the standard affect of an epiphany of awakening like it should, but instead, it blinds you until the colors of your head swirl in a pattern that doesn't make sense to you, like a piece of art that you can not bare to look at because it hurts your brain to think in that sort of a context. You know it is beautiful even for the fact that you cannot look at it.
It takes about forty seconds for your eyes to adjust into a squinting headache of perception. In maybe another forty seconds you start to see the room. and everything clicks into place like Lego pieces. and eventually you awaken.
Then you see the seven roses. The seven roses which glisten in the warm sun reality before you. The seven roses which I have left for you.
And as your eyes awaken, you begin to understand that it isn't about the night or the day or the protection of the covers or even so much about the roses, but it is about you and me and the moments we spend together in the lingering daylight which will continue to stretch itself before us like a cat after a long nap. | 
