Bologna

What do you do on a rainy afternoon as this? Nowhere to go, really, Unlike the little cars and big rigs humming by down the rural highway outside the window Competing with the lighter and heavier downpours of this storm for the louder expression of indifference, passing by without seeing you And the winner is . . . neither! The winner is the TV news broadcast. It’s in the way the light from it right now outshines that coming from the drenched and dull windows The hum of the outside world that newscast carries, more distant and indifferent than even the most dreary highway rain, further away than those clouds and travelers heading to a sunnier afternoon – it’s the only thing that could make this afternoon worse. So what do you do? I’ll tell you what to do! You take the bologna off your sandwich and bite eyes into its face, eyes you can imagine will see you this afternoon when nobody else seems to, and You bite a smile into it so someone might smile at you when nobody else will do that today, And you stick it over the newscaster’s face on the TV screen, then laugh as you let the bologna tell you the news this afternoon. Soon the light in the window will outshine that light through the bologna and it’ll be alright again, and you can bet that those travelers on the highway don’t just travel away – they come back And the sun does, too.