Fifteen tiny scenes pass in front of a speaker who is warm, mostly indoors, and often awake when the rest of the world isn't. The poem opens with a lit window "after 3 am" and closes at "3 pm on Tuesday," so the sequence runs from deep night to flat afternoon. The number in the title hints that it belongs to a longer run of haiku, but each stanza can stand alone. Together they ask what a person should do with the world's noise: the news, the neighbours, the cruelty and comedy of a city.
The form is loose. Each stanza has three lines, and many sit near the traditional five-seven-five pattern, but "after 3 am" and "One bright orange balloon" bend the count. There is no rhyme. The music comes from sound. "Ash tree scratches air" rasps with its sh and sk sounds, and in "Crackle of the rain / as it smacks, then zigzags down" the hard k and z sounds imitate water hitting glass. The odd word "sluck," where the preacher's bus ride ends, reads like a blend of slush and muck, a sound that squelches. Short, flat statements and abrupt ellipses ("lost to the wind…", "…then out into sluck") keep the rhythm jumpy, like the glimpses it records.
The central tension is between comfort and everything outside it. "History is made / about two blocks south of here / I'm warm in the dark" is a confession as much as an observation: something important is happening nearby, and the speaker stays under the blankets. The next stanza turns this into scorn, "History? Foolish," and claims that within two nights "we'll all note / our place, our station." That line is bleakly funny, since it suggests big events change little about where ordinary people end up. Even the afghans, "kept close; that's enough," sound half like contentment and half like self-justification.
Yet the poem keeps looking out. A dog barks inside a storefront "locked for years," which the speaker calls "puzzling evidence" and leaves unexplained. A preacher on a northbound bus shouts, "I love you! Who else loves you!" The question can sound like comfort or like a threat. Then a woman sings only "three syllables" to Prince, which is exactly the length of "Purple Rain," while "war news scrolls, silent." Her gentle song and the silenced war sit uneasily side by side. A few stanzas later another woman, "Croaking," recites "I am the light, and the way…" with "her bags, her black eye." The line echoes biblical language, but here it comes from someone who looks worn and possibly hurt. The poem doesn't comment. It sets the grand phrase beside the bruise and lets the gap speak.
Humour keeps the sequence from becoming grim. The cockroach "has a birth date and death date / much like its landlord," a joke that levels pest and property owner in one stroke. The orange motif ties the stanzas together. The lost balloon is "the sky's only color," and later "Two cranes almost kiss / orange to orange," which presumably means construction cranes. The bright, drifting toy has become heavy machinery, and the "almost kiss" is the poem's one tender image of the city's hard surfaces.
The ending answers the opening. Early on, wind carries the balloon off, and the ash tree restlessly "scratches air." In the last stanza the speaker is "Still mind, still body," and "the wind simply is." The wind no longer takes or scratches anything. It just exists, and the speaker lets it. After fourteen glimpses of loneliness, noise, and quiet violence, the poem lands on acceptance rather than a solution.
That is its quiet achievement. It doesn't argue that history matters or that it doesn't. It shows a mind trying to stay warm and attentive at once, noticing a stranger's bruise without pretending to fix it, and finding in plain observation a small, stubborn kind of peace.