By Joshua W.J. Brown

The calendar said leave.
The sky said no.

This is how authority gets confusing:
one line in blue
pretending it can outrank weather.

I had a tape measure in my bag,
a notebook,
the little professional theatre
of being ready to make a wall remember
people I did not know.

I had already spent the fee
six times in my head:
wood, metal, lift, hands,
the person who knows what a bolt
can hold when gravity is honest.

Then thunder.

Not metaphor.
Not an omen.
Electricity finding the shortest argument
between cloud and ground.

The rule was thirty minutes
after the last sound.

Imagine that:
a rule that wants you alive
more than it wants you punctual.

I stayed inside.
Somewhere, an empty stairwell
continued being a stairwell
without me.

The names could wait.
The wall could wait.
Money could remain money
until a contract taught it
what it was for.

My body, for once,
was not a contingency line.

Maybe that is what a life is:
learning which deadlines are real,
which are merely printed,
which walls deserve a name,
which storms are not asking
to be overcome.

Joshua W.J. Brown is a Toronto writer, filmmaker, researcher, and poet from the St. Clair River corridor in southwestern Ontario. His recent work has appeared in Canadian Dimension and The Galway Review, and his poetry moves through memory, bureaucracy, place, ordinary speech, and the systems people build when ordinary systems stop working.