Before dawn each day—
impossibly
high, impossibly far away
uncountable
savage blast furnaces
fire
just to power
the weak light
that yawns through
the kitchen window
by which you like
to sit and sip tea
and thumb through a few
pages of Marlowe,
or maybe
sketch a fragment
of your own about
cornflowers—
before the slightest flutter
of one lid
of one eye
pitiless factories
galactic in size: all working
triple-overtime
toward an infinite quota—
completely for free—
just to manufacture
those sanitized
unbreakable
I-beams of time
which later you
will blithely call
small hours.
