dead Jack, the guy in the back / requiem for Jack Kickabuck

for those who go down to the snow

at the helm of fierce machinery,

there echo's a distant romance in falling

to endlessness from behind the hand-

powered scoop, I know.

but old Jack Kickabuck layered his clothes

from skin to the outermost cloth, trudging out there

without fear, forging a pathway to an open road

guiding the rattling gas-burner with its auger's blades,

his crawling machinery altering the timeline of his life.

good old Jack would not be spared the frozen hand of god.

the undertaker has changed his socks, but his attitude

remains the same as it ever was; to collect the fallen

like old Jack Kickabuck laid bare upon his fatal snow,

and move the dear departed to deposit him to another

frozen space, and so it goes from time to time.

Jack Kickabuck, the guy in the back fell dead of heart failure upon a soft

bed of snow during a fierce winter day in 2017.