The Icy Breath of the Cosmos

 

Jason Ryberg in the River

—Poetry by Jason Ryberg, 

Kansas City, MO 

(and elsewhere in the Ozarks)

—Photos Courtesy of Jason Ryberg 

and Public Domain

 

THE GIFT OF FIRE (or, Kansas City
to Raleigh in 24 Hours or Less)
      for Will Leathem, Ed Tato and Mark Hennessy

The night is long and in full-effect
and there’s nothing but bad radio, stale coffee
and a bright, five-battery-flashlight of a moon
that’s been keeping a steady pace with us
ever since it came out from behind the clouds.

Sometime around 4am we barely miss
most of what must have been a buffalo or bear:
a meandering trail of animal and automotive viscera
visible, here and there, for nearly a mile along the road.

But we keep on keeping-on, anyway,
with a suddenly renewed and invigorated sense of purpose,
the radio low and everyone in the car suddenly
adrenalized, awake and alert for anything else
the universe might unexpectedly hurl our way
(be it deer, cop, phantom hitch-hiker
or 24-hour truck stop).

But, inevitably, we are forced to answer
nature’s shrill and relentless call
and pull our (clearly ill-advised and
poorly planned) cross-country pilgrimage
over to the side of the highway
(where there surely must be
all manner of nightmarish caricatures
and creatures lurking just out of reach
of the lone, guttering torch of our dome light).

And it would appear that we have
officially arrived at that time of night
(inversely proportionate to however many miles
one is away from home and how many miles
one still has left to go)

when the far-off / way-out voices
of hell-fire preachers and UFO abductees
crackle and whisper, in and out,
of the troughs and peaks of static
foaming from the car’s stereo speakers,
out and out into the great, starry firmament
surrounding us,

when the icy breath of the cosmos whispers
dirty jokes and grand unifying conspiracies
at the backs of our necks,

when unsettling thoughts and inexplicable intuitions
of eternal recurrence begin to smolder and smoke
inside our minds and we just know, somehow,
that we’ve all been here before, right here,
on this very spot (or one indistinguishable from it),

same time of dark, eerie, pre-dawn morning,
pissing in a ditch by the side of a highway,
and everyone of us can’t help but contemplate,
however briefly, at least some of the great,
existential / metaphysical mysteries and conundrums
that have stalked our species ever since that
evolutionary leaping-off point of no return

when we discovered that for all its many gifts,
fire is still the originator of the long
snaky shadows that it casts
and causes the dark around us
to grow only
darker.

 

 

Jason in his truck 

 

ZEUS-X-MECHANICA (or, Broken-Down
Truck Stuck in the Weeds)

 

Got no spare, got no jack, you don’t give a shit


you ain’t never goin’ back.

                                 —Tom Waits

Some days,
you feel like you’ve thrown a rod,

like all four tires have gradually gone flat,

like your body is riddled with rust and buckshot,

like there’s a beehive in your glove-box
and a family of mice living in your guts
and you’re OK with that,

like you’re nothing more than
the quasi-poetic cliché of a broken-down truck
stuck in the weeds, by the side of a road
hardly anybody seems to use anymore,

a broken-down truck
abandoned right where it finally died
(finally gave up the automotive ghost for good,
this time), who knows how many years ago,
by someone who finally just said fuck it,
lit a cigarette and walked away
into the vast and starry planetarium
of just another night in America,
never to been seen
around these parts again.

Hell no.

Not if they could help it.

 

 

 

 

MADAME LEVEAU, FORTUNE TELLER AND
POLICE PSYCHIC, GIVES ONE POSSIBLE
ACCOUNT OF HOW IT HAPPENED

Whereby, with much fire and lightning and thunder
jumping down from great heights, Heaven did give birth
to unfathomable open spaces and closed inner spaces of
the dark, which, in turn, did give birth to the mountains
and valleys and plains, the deep waters of the oceans
with their schools of fish and sharks, its rivers running
over into inland lakes, and, with many hurricanes and
tornados full of rain, wind and snow did, in turn, give
birth to various prototypes and earlier versions of
flowers and other plants, spiders and snakes, frogs and
toads, mice and rats and birds and of course their distant
and lumbering cousins, the dinosaurs, which, maybe, by
some combination of disease, climate change, giant
rocks falling from space and the over-all inability to
accommodate these things, did fade and pass away,
returning to the compost heap that is (ultimately) the
earth, in turn, giving birth to (or at least ushering in) the
age of men and women and all their eventual (maybe
even inevitable) issues, obsessions and compulsions
concerning death and sex and noises in the dark, failure,
success and poverty, being all alone as well as being
in large crowds of other people, any number of which,
at any given time, they seem to have issues with and
/ or are preoccupied by the constant falling in and out and
in and out and in and out of love with.

 

 

 

 

DOGS GNAWING SOUP BONES ON
THE HARD WOOD FLOOR OF HEAVEN

No, that’s not thunder,
that’s dogs gnawing soup bones
on the hard wood floor of heaven.

No, those aren’t dogs,
those are dragons wolfing down the clouds
and shitting them back out.

No, those aren’t bones,
those are the balustrades of mountains,
finally cracking and giving way
from holding up the weight of the sky for so long.

No, that’s not a wood floor,
that’s the tin roof of a rat-infested shit-house
in the boggy backwoods of Mississippi.

No, that’s not the backwoods,
that’s the back-40 of an abandoned farm
being slowly reclaimed by time
and a primordial swamp that’s haunted
by the ghosts of slaves who never made it North.

No, those aren’t ghosts,
those are gusts of wind
carrying the words of people a world away.

No, that’s not the wind,
that’s all the forests of the world
inhaling and exhaling in unison.

No, those aren’t forests of trees,
those are armies of the skeletons of giants
that once walked the earth, waiting for the wind
to bring them the words that will finally
wake them up again.

No, those aren’t skeletons, those are structural profiles
for buildings of an alien and non-Euclidian
architecture that began construction long before
humans ever walked up-right.

No, those aren’t prototype homo erecti,
those are bears, owls, coyotes walking through
the sleeping suburbs at night,
wearing their human skins.

No, those aren’t the suburbs,
those are future ruins and landfills
built on the ancient burial grounds
of the first Americans.
No, those aren’t burial grounds,
those are the resting places
of forgotten gods and monsters
of the ancient world, dreaming of the days
when they were the top of the food chain.

No, that’s not the fitful stirring of
gods and monsters in their sleep,

it’s just a little thunder.

 

 

 

 

THE POET’S PRIMER FOR THE EARLY 21st CENTURY
     (with apologies to Harley Elliot)

The Poet does his inebriated little saunter along all our
tangled barbed-wire lines of reasoning and the world’s
various alphabetic avenues (drunk on wine, poetry,
virtue, what-have-you).

The Poet likes nothing better than rubbing elbows,
shoulders and frontal lobes with the hyper,
meta and sub-textual members of high, middle
and low-brow society, alike.

The Poet loves to loll about on grassy knolls,
bus stop benches and the back seats
of Cadillac convertibles, prefers not to scriven,
scrape, scurry or supplicate and can often be found
hunched and hunkered down among canebreaks
and cornrows (chowin’ down on a watermelon
or stolen gooseberry pie).

The Poet carries entire constellations of on-going
conversations in the portmanteau / gutbucket of his skull,
a blowtorch song in his heart of hearts and a paperback copy
of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (or Leaves of Grass)
in his back pocket.

The Poet’s pen and tongue can very often drip
with equal parts Vinegar of Snarky Irony
and Raw, Wild Honey of Lingua Franca.

The Poet only picks race horses with words like
mustache, hurricane, silky or pharaoh in their names
and delights in the lighting of candelabras
and kerosene lamps at any and all occasions.

The Poet chops and chops at the uncarved block
at the dark heart of the forest primeval of the world
only to come upon it, incredulously, again and again,
each morning, completely reformed.

The Poet voluntarily faces the wildly indifferent
firing squads of a post-post-literate society with eyes
wide open and a cigar in her mouth, finds the Good,
Just and Beautiful in the most unlikely places,
stops traffic to rescue turtles and shatters all previous
world records for juggling chainsaws and number of
metal spoons magnetized to the body.

The Poet discovers, routinely, that it’s all been discovered
before / heard before / said before yet still needs to be
re-examined, re-interpreted and re-packaged every time.

The Poet sits, covered in the early morning dew of 4am,
listening to the glistening blades of Blue Stem,
Purple Top and Goat Grass, insisting to the rest
of the tribe that she can hear it growing all around us.

The Poet stinks just a little too much, sometimes,
of the smoky, smoldering compost heap
of his own compounded yearning.

The Poet often soars too close to the sun (much
in the same way as the moth to the bug zapper)
on wings made of duct-tape, cardboard and coathangers,
only to be reborn every morning at the bottom of the sea
and wash ashore to do it all again and again and again...

The Poet refuses to cooperate or incriminate,
can neither confirm nor deny, is currently unaware
of any such activity or operation, nor would they be
disposed to discuss such an operation
if it did in fact exist (sir).

And always, always
The Poet swears that they’ll never fall
for the same old, tired, bullshit routines and yet,

here we are again…

_____________________

Today’s LittleNip:

Poets are damned… but see with the eyes of angels.

—Allen Ginsberg

_____________________

Jason Ryberg is the author of eighteen books of poetry, six screenplays, a few short stories, a box full of folders, notebooks and scraps of paper that could one day be (loosely) construed as a novel, and, a couple of angry letters to various magazine and newspaper editors. He is currently an artist-in-residence at both The Prospero Institute of Disquieted P/o/e/t/i/cs and the Osage Arts Community, and is an editor and designer at Spartan Books. His latest collection of poems is The Great American Pyramid Scheme (co-authored with W.E. Leathem, Tim Tarkelly and Mack Thorn, OAC Books, 2022). 

 

Jason lives part-time in Kansas City, MO with a rooster named Little Red and a billygoat named Giuseppe, and part-time somewhere in the Ozarks, near the Gasconade River, where there are also many strange and wonderful woodland critters. Welcome to Medusa’s Kitchen, Jason, and don’t be a stranger!

In Sacramento tonight, Joe Montoya’s Poetry Unplugged features Silas Wanje plus open mic. Click UPCOMING NORCAL EVENTS at the top of this column for details about this and other future readings in the NorCal area.

______________________

—Medusa

 

 

 

Jason Ryberg

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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