Poetry: Do Electric Sheep Dream of Androids?

In the mornings, 

when my blood stands stagnant in my veins and 

the compulsion to breathe does not yet grip me, 

when the birds chirp their strangled chirp and 

the cars roar steadily and competitively through my open meshed window, 

before the cold air touches my naked chest and goose pimples my skin, when my mouth tastes like rust from biting my tongue in my sleep and the thick popping grease from the kitchenette invades the air and then my nose, while I examine the creases in the colorless ceiling above me and command the blood to move through me and 

my lungs to begin pumping. 

Like sweat-laden, load-bearing men shoveling coal into the engines of a sinking ship, as the day slowly cracks open like the splitting of a re-glued geode, and the blood flows, in between the not doing and the doing 

but in the not doing, not dreaming, and in the doing, not dreaming either, in the moments between 

nothing and something, 

action and inaction, 

paralysis and motion; 

in these seconds, 

like all the young people of my moment 

who you were and who I am and who I will become or who I will never become, 

in these seconds, I dream of war.