Poetry

Good Friday, 1 PM

by

Jack Phillip Lowe

Good Friday, 1pm.
Fluffy white flakes fall from
the charcoal Chicago sky with
“Fuck you!” regularity.

The snow knows
that I must be at work
in two hours.
The snow knows
that I know it will make
getting to work a bitch
which is colder than
snow itself.

The whistling I hear
under the door isn’t wind—
it’s the mocking laughter
of a million ice-holes
blanketing the road
they know I’ll be
driven to take.

They mock me because
they know I’m afflicted
with a work ethic—
an affliction which will
force me to ignore
every cell in my body
begging me to stay home,
sit by this window
and make like a
halfassed Greenleaf Whittier.

(NEW STANZA)

They laugh, because they know
I’ll blow this opportunity
to brave a storm of
a million middle fingers,
to risk life and limb
to put in one more night,
which will become one more
number on one more check in
a string of checks which
I’ve sweated for and forgotten
just as soon as they were spent.

They laugh, because they know
I’ll do this instead of
marking the day in which
God stepped on the train
of His very own cloak by
making it snow on Good Friday
as if it were Christmas Eve.

They laugh, as do I,
as I step out into the storm
and our voices become
one and the same.