I get high off watching the sun rise, it reminds me that I'm still alive, waiting at dawn to stake my claim in today. I am the mainstay of constancy, of evolution, the leopard lurking in darkness, pawing stealthily past moonlight. My strength magnified in magnolias, my ability to break open in silence, my willing fragility exempts me from the need to fall to pieces. I cuddle up to the command of now, wrapping it around my will like I wrap my tongue around the notes of its song, like silks looping around my present, to my world, my fullest attentions, my richest intention, my ultimate salvation. My lineage sings survival of the fittest. Our rigorous love of self, of others, is the ticket, the tributaries to the endless river within us, bridged by the calls of cardinals, flitting from pine to sky, rescinding all the litter of Earth's surface to drift off into varying existences.. I am awake.