These are the dark hours, between night and dawn. when the sudden sound of a car is still unusual, and the all night hum of the high tension wire still dominates.
These are the hours when it seems everything slows, with the clock timorously approaching the moment it's meant to blurt into sound, for it's modern cock-crow to echo through the layers of sleep and bring the day to it's start.
But these are the hours which have eluded sleep once again, made a mockery of the alarm and it's purpose, for here one sits, waiting, as though to deceive the timepiece and allow it a moment more of fulfillment.
In youth, these times would have held some trepidation for most. It being a moment to grasp half-awake, desperately climbing back from whatever dreamworld we occupied, into the perhaps harsher environment of the quotidian. The time to bid a fond, or not, farewell to whomever might have shared the dark. Or to fumble through morning spasticity into a blast of water, as though for a moment to return to the womb. Regression supplied by a shower head, a moment to be savoured.