i love that word, puttering, my adjective
of early morning rambling, world examining,
in the early AM, treading barefooted
from room to room, a list prestablished,
+ tidy up the prior evening’s laziness,
unload with complete silence the
prior nights dishwasher, homework,
prep the couch back to pre~beat~up presentability,

make the first 16.5 .oz of Blue Mountain
Hawaiian coffee, in my art history
McIntosh mug(1),
prepare the first of the day’s bitesized
edibles,
a:k:a, Kashi crunchies, so the coffee all
falls down  to a well~recv’d internal welcoming

the timing is off, the clock has changed,
it is early but not really, I’m constantly
recalculating ‘real time’ until confused,
substituting the internal locked-in clocking that ultimate divination of right and wrong,
the betting app informs us of the
under/over hours really slept line
set by Las Vegas oddsmakers

but as usual, the digression omens come
fast and furious, up in the sky apartment
is an oasis of cloud quietude,
(where the latitude and longitude
inter-sec, where the cleansed sun softly)

ah quietude, an envelopment noun
favored over the pedestrian quiet,
my ears,
fulfilled by music via noiseless earbuds,
fills the soul, it is the milk in the
morning coffee brew of the
crossover silence, tween the skyed division

check on the woman, deep asleep,
(pronouns: she/her/mine)
her arm thrown across my empty pillow, as if holding my place in line,
like besties in second grade, a warning to other potent interlopers,
so
withdraw silent to finish the routine that
is so comforting, the polit~noise chatter has
not yet invaded, all of its associated
malice’s tumult, kept away at bay
with forethought,
and instead, thus, I, write,

in this quilt of solitude, not alone,
write of this companioned morn~born~rituals that
will be one day,
be renamed,
as a

mourning ritual,

when
when life ruefully states in its
arrogant ~ don’t ~ care, no ways,
now that,

When,
one of us, be
sleeping permanent, and the
silence be reformatted, recalculated,
the coffee will taste different, and
the footfalls no longer unsqueaking,
no need, cause the solitude is just
renamed as loneliness, and though
the tears emanate from same tear ducts,
the causal reasoning is reversed,
no longer
celebratory, and with no one to show it off,
to share,
no punch in the arm gasp
of loving recognition,

I perforce new habit,
will read this puttering,
now stuttering poem

someday as a new summary,
a substitutable morn chore,
absent
a chorus of a
singly
singular
beautiful quiet but only
memorized,
silenced applause