Apple-Polishing Rag
It’s 1:30AM on Tuesday.
I have a job interview
scheduled for today.
But I don’t want to go.
The job is dull and dirty.
It will not offer me
enough payroll hours,
a wage equal to
my years of experience
or satisfaction of any kind.
It will offer me
a weekly paycheck—
the dreamcatcher
that I lack right now.
Still, I resist.
Why am I up
playing Bukowski,
sucking on a bottle
of bone-dry red from
Les Vineyards de Walmart
and zoning out to a rerun
of Cannon from 1974?
I’m tired; bed is calling.
I don’t care for red wine
or fat-assed detectives
wearing fat ties and fat lapels.
Yet here I sit,
drinking and staring.
My lone explanation?
It’s my way of telling them,
through clenched teeth:
“You don’t own me.
I’m My Own Man.
Nobody. Owns. Me.”
Later that morning though,
My Own Man shows up
for the interview—
on time—in spite of
a razor-edged hangover,
smiling and waving
his apple-polishing rag.
Jack Phillips Lowe is a Chicago area native. His poems have appeared in Cajun Mutt Press, Clutch 2025 and Bold Monkey Review, among other outlets. Lowe’s selected poems, Flashbulb Danger (Middle Island Press, 2018), is available from Amazon. His newest chapbook, Brautigan’s Blue Moon (Instant Oblivion Press, 2025), is eagerly awaiting you at lulu.com.
