Jack Does Not Play Games, Anymore
We played Office Bingo my first few
years, squares of administrators’ actions
and catchphrases—Simmons’ six sips
of coffee before presentations, Clark’s
Don’t-reinvent-the-wheel-laden memos.
In our cubicles, we made membership cards
for the Future Corpses of America.
I served two terms as Vice-President
of Disorganization. No one knows how long
they lasted. A new hire suggested Current
Corpses, was fired after three days.
We needed to pretend work was not
important, that our lives mattered more
than ten-hour days followed by cocktail
chasers, but we were nothing more than
boys and girls playing games like Hi Ho!
Cherry-O or Chutes and Ladders, let
adults tell us what time to wake up,
when to be in bed. We whined
about working weekends when we wanted
to fly kites, a key tied to the tail,
hoped life would strike like lightning.
….
This poem is from the book Jack Imagines a Different Map by Kevin Brown (Finishing Line Press), and can be found at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/jack-imagines-a-different-map-by-kevin-brown/
Kevin Brown is a high school English teacher in Nashville, TN. He has published three previous books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. You can find out more about him and his work on social media sites at @kevinbrownwrites or at http://kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.
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