The Literary Mirror

6 a.m. is not a colour. It is a sound —
buses starting, badges beeping, a hundred goodnights
said to people who are only now saying good morning
on the other side of an ocean that doesn't care.

We call it a shift because something does shift:
not us, exactly, but the light around us,
which forgets, every twelve hours, which one of us
is meant to be tired and which one rested.

I have stopped explaining this job to people who sleep at night.
I have started, instead, just saying:
I keep a different clock. It runs on time.
It is simply not your time, is all.