Jason Ryberg

Phone Numbers, Addresses, Poems

                    Just

           how

                       many

                                phone numbers,

                addresses, poems

                                       have I lost to washing machines

       over the years? Best not to invest too much bandwidth and

                    time into such pursuits, lest one risk playing

            a hybrid game of musical chairs

                            and Russian roulette with one’s own sanity,

          while the DJ / arms dealer

                                        in his dark corner,

                        cynically

                                       grins a

                              gold

                                            tooth.

 Unseen

Aint

nothing good

can come from

followin’ another

man back to his

storage space

after midnight

and a night of

drinking no matter

what the reason,

any more than

there is to go peakin’

in another man’s

bedroom window;

for there are webs

in the dark recesses

of this world that

to merely be made

aware of them is

to become forever

changed, enmeshed

and incriminated:

things once seen that

can never become

unseen.

A Hungry Man

You’d

think

by now

that it would

be pretty crystal

freakin’ clear to just about damn

near everyone with half a freakin’ brain that them what

got the goods (the wealth and power, privilege and

protection, the insider info and

all that other good stuff (which is why they call it

the goods, baby)) are mostly concerned with maintaining

the hold they have on it as well as

accruing and concentrating more and more of it into

the hands and wallets and off-shore bank accounts of them

and their families and friends and circle-jerking cronies

and other interest-vested and like-minded law

maker and big financier types via all the

various channels (be they economic and/or

legislative), that they all have

at their command and disposal, yet, still somehow

remain unaware that them who are

increasingly without even the most basic means

of just barely getting by and

surviving on a

day-to-day /

one pay

check

from

the

street /

hand-to

mouth-level

of existence are

still increasing in number… and

they say a hungry man is an angry man, and an

angry man is a desperate man with less

and less to lose and fewer fucks to give.

Son of It

Sometimes It comes to us

early in the morning,

just before the Boss Man turns on the big light,

or in the middle of the saddest,

most haunted part of night:

some kind of slavering,

black behemoth, from what little we can see:

all teeth, tusks and talons,

snuffle and snarl

and primal, predatory aura.

A lonesome and sorrowful thing, 

that looks to be part wombat,

swamp gator and slithering bottom-dweller,

mandrill, bloodhound, wild boar

and raging woolly mammoth,

as well as something distinctly ...

other.

Sometimes It batters at the gates

of my brain with its great paws

and its battering ram of a skull

like the giant fist of an angry

underworld god, shaking the walls

of  this remote, little city-state of mind.

Sometimes It just rubs its back up against

the great tree trunk of my spine,

thrumming and thrumming

with what surely must be the funky frequency

of warm fuzzy love,

or, at the very least, the manic need

to satisfy some maddening metaphysical itch

(his or mine, I’m never sure).

And, sometimes

It’s content to merely loiter

and look on, inquisitively,

studying our most insignificant routines

from just inside the tree line,

just beyond the reach

of our guard lights,

nothing but your classic dark silhouette

and glowing set of eyes ...

But, of course, it could never really

charge out of that dark forest

of the wild night world of the soul,

and, by some freak cosmic occurrence

of a just and loving god blinking

or even looking the other way,

make its way into our safe, little,

climate-controlled environment.

Could it?

Old Man Winter

Well, the stars are all

singing and the crickets are

dreaming and Endtimes

are still at least a

week away, and the coyotes

are calling and the

leaves are done falling

and the wind’s gonna carry

us away, and the

moon is rising and

the crows are all in hiding

and they say Old Man

Winter got nothin’

but icy water in them

rusty old veins, any-

way, hey-dee-hey, dee-

hey, hey-dee-hey… hey-dee-hey,

dee-hey, hey-dee-hey…

Jason Ryberg is the author of nineteen 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 countless love letters (never sent). He is currently an artist-in-residence at both The Prospero Institute of Disquieted P/o/e/t/i/c/s and the Osage Arts Community, and is an editor and designer at Spartan Books. His latest collection of poems is “Bullet Holes in the Mailbox (Cigarette Burns in the Sheets) (Back of the Class Press, 2024).”  He lives part-time in Kansas City, MO with a rooster named Little Red and a Billy-goat named Giuseppe, and part-time somewhere in the Ozarks, near the Gasconade River, where there are also many strange
and wonderful woodland critters.