1500hrs and all is well.

2300hrs

This is a time for lovers. As the rest of the world makes their way home, rests beneath their sheets, sleeps on the MRT, beats their wives, runs out of things to say to their friends, makes plans to meet hopefully sometime again this year, wonders why their children are not home yet. As the rest of the rest of the world, the lost and the wild and the exuberant, brushes teeth and puts on makeup, tries on six different outfits perhaps meant to seduce or maybe merely meant to restore some sense of self-worth, the only way that's left? As they slink their separate desolate ways back to their respective sanctuaries/hells, into their double locked gates and abuse or their dark clubs and gyration and excess and loss of self.

These streets are for lovers. The sidewalks meant for two and the two-seat benches at parks and the alcoves barely sufficient for two bodies bound by the belief and the fear that the world consists only of the other.

The quiet is for lovers. For murmurred declarations of love, for philosophy and the separate pursuit of the only question that matters: is love enough? and the follow up: how can it not be? For frenzied-hand-scrabbling in the dark and the urgency of motion.

0400hrs

This is a time for nobody. For the nobodies who make up so much of everybody. As the rest of the world dreams, lies in restful oblivion. As the rest of the rest of the world slips out of darkened spaces, makes plans for real food and real sustenance despite fatigue and drunkenness and disappointment, pretends desperately that life is not slipping away, that the excesses of youth can be replicated without any consequences.

This is a time for regrets and terrible decisions. As you lie awake at night wondering at the consequences of all these things over all these years, as you make unsound promises to yourself to effect change at last, as you begin even to believe yourself and that these 4am epiphanies actually represent a turning point in your could-be-so-much-better life, as these late-night visitations of wisdom and revelation occur again and again and again, as you wonder how much anything has changed at all.

1500hrs

This is a time for [fill in the blank]. Who are you without the urgency of the night and the madness of deep morning? Who do you think of in the middle of the day before you are assailed by the doubt and loneliness and sorrow of nightfall? [Who thinks of you?] What do you mean most of the time, unmasked by sunlight, stripped of shadows and the poor excuse of alcohol and the mumbled pleas of sorry I'm just really tired?

This Vast Wilderness

And loneliness is the cry
Of your soul into the vast
Wilderness
That is human life

And love is the improbable
Impossible
Imperfect reply.

/

Falling in love reminds us
Of what it is like to be young again
Hopeful, unshackled, invulnerable
Desperately, beautifully,
Myopic.

Love, then, is growing up.

When passion and desire
And the light in your eyes
Have long since burnt away
As we emerge from our bunkers
Surveying our burnt out remains

And the answer remains:
Yes

But Oh!

And you who thought you were too smart,
Too sensible,
For love -
Eventually fell too.

But oh how wrong you were!

You were not too smart,
Not too sensible -

Not in love.