First Hours (Tabula Rasa)

The first hours of each day lie between this world and the next.  All roads yet swallowed by darkness beyond the last streetlight.  The nearest planets and the bluest stars fading against the chill slate of sky.

News flows purple from my television.  I switch feeds.  The talking heads change, but the words remain the same.

Out there somewhere, the ghosts of Michael Jackson and David Bowie are dancing across clouds that will blossom to light only when the dancers disappear.

The white horse is not yet standing at the fence by the road where newspapers are delivered to our mailboxes.

I poke my smarter-than-me-phone to life.  Unread text messages blossom like marigolds in a flowerbox.  Other events ping to populate chains of communication in the background.  The old and the new.

I switch to another television feed.  An old black and white rapidly swarms into a solid image.  The hair styles and the clothing odd.  The automobiles cartoonish.  Every movie star on the screen having now been gone for decades…and, yet, there they are back before me again.

--Mitchell Hegman