3 o'clock

There's only one time of day when the sun is brightest.

Blooming vines creep slowly up cold stone steps. Neighbors lay in grotty flats tangled in bedsheets, motionless, sleeping, sundust dancing lazily across their tired skin.

There's one time of day when it's too late to be asleep, too early to dance or paint

or sit alone by glassy ponds. When reading philosophy feels wrong, and Tolstoy has no flavor. When love lies dormant in the cracks of a dried, old oil painting, hung on a wall of peeling paper.

It must be the sun at 3 o'clock, a burning, laughing sphere, bleaching the life out of everything it touches. It must be its fiery tongues that drive me to the coffeeshop, in search of a sort of calm,

a way to contain the frightening rays in a cup, and swallow the fear sip by sip in a bitter french brew

until nighttime falls again, bringing with it a sigh of relief.