Outside Last Night

What is it you want to survive?
The next moment? The next decade?
All the octogenarians

Who still get up and go to work?
Why? You won’t make it to the end
Of the stars you saw past midnight,

When you woke up from dreams of flight,
Of trying to not let goodbyes
Make you too late to catch your plane,

As if dreams or the surrounding
Night, or all the myriad lights
Burning gravely, kept to schedules.

Since you shouldn’t have been awake,
It was striking to stand outside.