It is very difficult to get out of bed at 5 AM, and the practice doesn’t get easier. Anyone who says otherwise might be lying. But the hours before dawn are charged with a particular loneliness that agrees with me; they are when my creative work gets done. Yes, the first few minutes I’m awake, I stumble around the kitchen bleary-eyed and disoriented, especially mornings after two or three unnecessary ounces of after-dinner whiskey. But the coffee inevitably gets made, the blood begins to flow, and I can inhabit the emptiness and make it mine.
Right now, it’s 1:40 PM in Chicago on Saturday, February 22, and I am sitting at a two-person table in Cafe Mustache, a coffeeshop in my neighborhood that serves subpar bagels but rich espresso. I’m listening to bluegrass through a single earbud, because if I go too long without hearing a bent note, I miss my dead grandmother’s kitchen to distraction. A group of 6 people have combined tables across the room; two of them are pecking at laptops, and the rest are scratching at notebooks. Maybe they’re plotting a surprise party or a complicated D&D campaign. I can’t hear what they’re discussing, which suits me fine—leave it a mystery—but I can hear the pair of retirement-age men at the counter to my left arguing the particular merits of their favorite hardware stores. Their talk takes me back to the cramped shop on 34th or 35th Street NW in DC where I once bought wire cutters and was offered a swig of milky liquor from an unlabeled glass bottle, which I declined at the time but wish I’d accepted. (Regret instructs. Don’t ignore it.) A woman just took the table to my immediate right, and her perfume smells like potting soil spiced with tobacco and ambergris. Beer or seltzer cans rip at regular intervals behind the bar.
Right now, it is 1:44 PM, and over the course of the last 240 seconds, I’ve experienced several curiosities, as well as a quick detour a decade into the past, all by virtue of where I situated myself in space and time. My senses are tuned to this amalgamation of ten thousand accidental trajectories, which is a wonder, for sure, but also an occupational hazard for me as a poet, because I rely on stillness to conjure chaos and make meaning. Even if I were offered a lifetime of peanut butter cups, I couldn’t write a worthwhile line here, now. Crafting poetry requires focus and meditation, which are two brain states I find impossible in the presence of strangers. To write a poem, I need nothingness; I want the world sleeping so I can be alone with my brain, free from people and our alarming constancy.
It is very difficult to get out of bed at 5 AM, but it is necessary. Morning after morning, the two-ish hours preceding sunrise reintroduce me to my unstimulated mind, which—yes!—is often overwhelming in its boredom but provides the necessary canvas to recall and record, remember and revise. Of course, public clamor is necessary too because if I didn’t exist in the world, I would have nothing from which to retreat. Strangers!—y’all are so interesting, and I invite your objections, opinions, and interactions. I celebrate that we share this odd temporal moment! But your presence makes poems impossible, so in the predawn depths, I hide in my quiet corner of the guest bedroom and emerge only after I’ve made a good-faith effort to place words I deem worthwhile in a particular order. I then rejoin the living to observe and enjoy, eavesdrop and take notes, become saturated with conversation and arguments. And after yet another ride the sun, I set my alarm, and I steel myself for tomorrow.
Sam Wilder
is an Appalachian writer whose most recent poems have appeared in Qu and Rabbit Catastrophe. He earned his MFA in Fiction from American University and currently lives in Chicago.