Jason Ryberg is the author of seven books of poetry, six screenplays, a few short stories, a box of loose papers that could one day be loosely construed as a novel and a couple of angry letters to various magazine and newspaper editors. He lives in Kansas City, Missouri. His latest collection of poems, Blunt Trauma (co-authored with Iris Appelquist and released by Spartan Press), is available at www.prosperosbookstore.com.
EVERYTHING GONNA BE ALL RIGHT
(OR, TRADING BODY BLOWS WITH
THE GHOST OF VICTOR SMITH)
The night was thick, black and nasty
and my mattress was a raft, drifting down
a mighty Mississippi of memory-
a Viking longboat in which my broken
warrior-poet’s form had been placed
and sent downstream through the grey mists
of eternity and on to the far bright shores of my
forefathers and their fathers before them,
only to be turned away from those fearsome
gates for being “insufficiently deceased.”
And, lately, it seems like I’ve been waking up
in varying stages of dream-state, at all my
“former places of residence,” feeling around
the bed for some imaginary “former spouse
or significant other,” freaking out about
being late to some “former place of employment”
and whatever it is I’m gonna say (this time?)
to assuage whichever “former employer.”
I can’t help but believe if things continue
at this rate, eventually, I’ll bolt awake thinking
I’m late for my first day of kindergarten
(though, hopefully my mother will also be
on hand to say, “It’s OK, little man.
It’s only Saturday. Go out and play.”).
And then there’s that recurring one where,
in what some new age, metaphysical,
guided meditation counselor type might
call “a deep subterranean cave of me,”
some here-to-fore unknown (or merely suspected)
part of me suddenly cracks and snaps off
like a massive icicle or stalactite, morphing
on its way down into another more fully actualized me,
a new and improved me, you could say,
and hits the ground, running, like Jesse Owens
at the ’36 Olympics.
And let’s just say, for the sake of the poem
(and your brief relationship with it),
that this new and improved me is actually you
and it’s not a slimy or treacherous cave floor
that your feet have found but a cool, rain-slicked street,
late at night, in some industrial part of town
you don’t recognize
and, just over there, to the right,
maybe fifty, sixty feet away, at most, there’s
a freight train blowing out its big brassy basso profundo
as it slows down to take the curve and it's not
even an issue of nerve or wanting it bad enough
'cause you know you can make it, this time, man,
and you don’t even have a suitcase or bag or anything
but that shit don’t even matter ‘cause everything’s
gonna be different from here on out if you can
just catch that train, man, everything gonna be just fine
if you can just keep runnin’ and sayin’ it
and sayin’ it and sayin’ it:
"everything gonna be alright,
everything gonna be alright,
everything gonna be alright,
everything gonna be alright... "
THE UNIVERSE DOES PROVIDE
For Steve Bridgens
Even after the sun
has long-since gone down,
the raw, kiln-like intensity
of a day like today
(here, in this overgrown cow town
in late July) can still be felt
well into the night.
The sidewalks and driveways
and newly resurfaced streets
continue to throw off enough heat,
all our overgrown yards enough jungle steam
(due to a brief but mean little thunderstorm
this morning that not even
the weatherman had forseen)
that our clankity old window-unit
is forced to shift down a few degrees
into a lower, more determined gear.
Still, something has called us all out here
to the front porch, tonight;
maybe those recent reports of lightning on the horizon?
constellations of fireflies churning before our eyes?
the tidal pull of a fat, blood-orange of a moon?
or, just the inevitable madness of tiny rooms?
All we really need to know
(here on this not-so-disagreeable-night
in Kansas City, KS in late July) is
there's an hour of Mingus
coming up on the radio,
a 'fridge full of beer getting colder and colder
and a one-hitter already loaded up for you
and ready to go.
So, even though we all got jobs
that come calling way too early in the morning
and bills and debts that, over time, have become
highly resistant to our attempts at neutralizing them
and despite all the headlines and sound-bites
(detailing the latest home-grown inanity
or gruesome instance of international mayhem)
that appear to be conspiring to reinforce
the near-blasphemous notion that can
so easily lead one to believe otherwise,
from time to time
the universe does provide.
CONSTANTLY FLIRTING WITH PERVERSITY
Constantly flirting with perversity
and irrelevance, hilarity
and mayhem (and whatever
other furies, fates and/or muses
that may or may not come forth)
whenever he performs
his wickity-wack schtick
before the giant
disembodied bobble-heads
of the court,
the poet,
like the contortionist or alchemist
(though really more like
the civil war re-enactor
or HAM radio enthusiast)
must attempt to lasso the spotlight of world opinion
away from his fiercest rivals;
Top-40 radio and Cable TV
(with a golden, truth-revealing lariat
of his own weaving)
and all the while trying to kick ass
and look good at the same time,
maintaining a confidant smile
and not breaking a sweat or breaking
for a smoke or to take a piss or nothing.
For he is supposed to be
the super-duper-surrealist who must (of course)
do battle (via his art) with his arch-nemesis;
the man behind the man behind the curtain;
the Usurper-Realist;
he who hath conscripted and distorted
fair Truth and Beauty and pimped them out
to the lowest and meanest of common denominators
(for whatever nefarious experiments
and other lurid purposes).
So, good people of highest, lowest
And most middlest America,
let us take a moment of silence tonight
to drink one for ambulence drivers
and elevator repairmen,
for neurosurgeons and airline pilots,
night watchmen and day laborers,
high school science teachers and hostage negotiators
and all the Jack O Lanterns, Wandering Jews
and Flying Dutchmen, out there, far from home
and lost in night, keepin it real and fightin the good fight
(or, just tryin to keep a low profile),
but, also one for our anti-hero, here,
this little mighty mouse of a character daring
to triple-dog-dare The Great Dragon Of The Airwaves
(a.k.a. The Giant Spider Of The Inter-Webs)
to come down from its top-floor office suite
and step into the ring.
SOMETHING TO SAY
Consider a moment
those dank, primeval basements
and mud-flooded sub-basements of the brain
where the fish and lizards
and monkeys of our formative years
still wriggle and skitter and scurry about.
If we peer deep enough inside ourselves
we can see them, there, still completing
their respective lengths of circuitry,
still telegraphing up their two-cents worth,
from time to time, despite all our attempts
at processing and refining them away
down the spiral staircase of the spine
out into the Big Nowhere.
Look, for example, how the Gar
with their jagged, maniacal grins
are all lustfully eyeing the little pink toes
of our haplessly bobbing frontal lobe,
while the Catfish are fatly content
to sift and slither in the rich,
fertile muck of prehistoric memory.
And the skinks and Geckos and Chameleons,
all contoured and layered together
in their crevices, are dreaming of the days
when they ran the show.
And the Monkeys,
that coffee and smoke saturated
back-room gaggle of gag-men
and speech writers, all hunched and contorted
over their cranky, old Underwoods,
are up against a bitch of a deadline.
For the Alpha Male needs something to say,
something witty and charming,
yet, still somehow mysterious and aloof.
And he needs it
yesterday.
STORM A' COMIN'
There's a blanket of black wool
that's been pulled over the city,
over this little nameless hole in the prairie.
There's squadrons of orn'ry flies
buzzin' about and stingin' and the faded,
ringin' reports of car horns, here and there.
There's pages of splayed-open books
on auto repair and "Common Missouri
Wildflowers" whipping and flipping
in a nervous Missouri wind.
There's cats and dogs
conspicuously ducking for cover
and birds takin' the last bus out of town.
There's a heavy incandescent density to things
like the boiler-rooms of all the world
are just about to blow
and everybody, everywhere
secretly seems to know it
and even though it's only 4PM,
the only light to speak of
is the ghosted-out flourescent resin
of oxide lamps just now "ghostin' in."
And over across town,
on the far side of the train yards,
right next door to Big Maybelle's
Beauty Emporium,
there's two old boys sittin' on the front porch
of a boarding house, hootin' at all
the sweet, young things as they come and go,
sippin' on their whiskey drinks real, real slow
in sweetly calibrated synchronization
with the melting of the ice cubes.
Their bones are ancient humming architectures
of radio towers and tuning forks.
Their pop-bottle bi-focals peer deep into the future.
One of them leans over a little
and says to the other,
"Storm a comin.' "
"Yup."
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