This is the hour of food poisoning,
of car alarms
and firearms,
of someone creaking up the stairs.
4 a.m., the digital glares,
the hour when
wrong numbers ring,
sore throats begin,
drunk exes make their drunken calls,
a dog starts barking down the street.
The lumpy pillow, sweaty sheet,
and through the thin apartment walls
a neighbor loudly hacking phlegm
will always come at 4 a.m.
So many hours we’ve spent fretting
the praise that so and so is getting,
the good not given, love not taken
at 4 a.m. when we awaken,
the work not done, the bills not paid
(and yet not doing it or paying them).
The endless piss,
a night of drinking’s dehydration,
and diarrhea, constipation—
all rouse themselves at 4 a.m.
Would James Bond lie awake like this?
A godless hour,
the stomach sour,
again the digital red glare,
and we are suddenly aware
of birdsong filling up the skies
and blue beginning at last to creep
through curtains, blinds, and half-closed eyes
and with some luck fall back asleep.

Fellow urbanite, how could your race
survive—convinced I can’t see you this close,
hunched next to our back porch, your grinning face
hidden behind a bag of Ranch Doritos.
In our next door neighbors’ headlights, your eyes shine
Heineken green, and you keep eating, heedless.
You forage in the cracks of our lives and dine
on our debris, jaws crammed with infected needles.
By day you play dead in a dumpster—poke
you with a stick, your whole being explodes.
Primordially stupid, tireless joke,
you waddle down the shoulders of our roads,
loot gardens, lie in our bed of impatiens,
finding the hidden gaps in our foundations.