The Raving Poets - Michael Appleby

Blues For An Early Morning Haze

My alarm clock emitted a electronic whine in intermittent waves, the red digital numbers were flashing red…6:00…6:00…6:00…6:00…6: until my heavy hand reached up from the dream of fondling the lifeguard's ample rack to flick the switch and bring a dismal silence to the black venetian blind darkness of my bedroom in the morning haze. My eyes didn't want to open. My eyelids felt like to leaden weights cast over the eyeballs and, with Herculian effort, were being lifted upward by some mythmaking strength. I couldn't remember what day it was or why I was forcing myself to wake up so early. I was dormant beneath the shelter of my warm goose-down quilt, waiting for any recollection to dawn on me. There was work to do. I had a job to go to. I had a wage to earn to pay my bills with. 'Nobody should have to endure this unabashed contemporary slavery,' I thought. 'What a wonderfully modern world we live in that a man should still have to wake up at an unholy hour like 6:00 a.m.' Where were the cities on the moon? Where were the robots to do our toiling? At that moment, all I wanted was one robot to get into my car and drive to work and sell clothes for the day while I slept. That's all I wanted. 'It's the government,' I thought. 'They can't stand to see the working shlub enjoying his life so they put him to work. It's a fucking conspiracy to make me get out of bed. Those fucking sadists! I'll see them to their cold, taxpayer funded graves, those fucking maniacal Hitler-esque pieces of torturous man-waste! How dare they ruin the bliss of my womblike bed. Ottawa will burn in the hot fires of Hades!' I reached up again and set the alarm for 6:10. 'Just 10 more minutes, it's all I need. Just 10 more minutes of sleep and I'll wake up and I'll be brimming with the joy of life in Canada. Just 10 more minutes with my hands squishing the lifeguard's breasts, burying my face in their heft, nipples tickling the edges of my ears.' I was panicked. I couldn't fall asleep again. I was so worried about returning to that perfect morning sex dream that I couldn't relax enough to fall asleep. This was Hell. Not only weren't the lifeguard's lovely orbs of quivering flesh blocking out the sun around my face, but I also had to be at work in…wait a minute. If yesterday was Monday that would mean that today is Tuesday. I'm not scheduled to work on Tuesday this week. Today was a day off. The sound of God laughing at me must have echoed loudly in Heaven that day, but all I could hear was the barking of the neighbor's dog scaring off a stray cat that had wandered into the lane followed by the quiet sound of sobbing that buried itself in my pillow.