Poetry: Selections From Jason Ryberg
These Days
What with the way things
are
going, these days, every-
thing and everyone
on a
screen and in your face
and in your ear, all
the
time, 24 / 7,
keeping you informed
and
inundated and up
to speed with up to
the
minute up-dates of the
latest horrors and
insanities
and mind-
less inanities
happening
around the globe
or in your own home-
town
or in your own house hold,
even, well you’d have
to be
crazy not to be
a
little crazy, these days.
Burning Down the Forest
You’ve reached the point where
you’ve
failed so many times to
catch that fiendishly
cunning
and contrarian
part of yourself that
has
caused so much mischief and
mayhem in your life,
over
the years, that you’re now
finally forced to
burn
down the old forest
in
which it’s alleged to live.
No Defeating the Darkness
Despite what them that
want
to sell you something might
tell you, there is no
defeating
the darkness, no
negotiation
process
or making it sit
still and behave: there's
only
the life-long struggle
to keep The Beast at
bay.
If you were born with it,
attached to you like
some
kind of mutant, in-bred
twin brother (always
whispering
and urging you
to go out and do
questionable
things), or, just
somehow managed to
catch
it later on like a
nasty cold you just
can’t
shake, or the unwanted
attention of a
cruel
and wrathful god that
has fixed their crosshairs
on
you, well, there ain’t but two
choices I can see:
figure
out a way to make
peace with it, somehow,
give
it a room of its own
somewhere inside your
head,
set a place for it at
the table, and read
it a
bedtime story each
night, promising to
leave
a light on and the door
open.
Or, it kills you. Dead.
God’s Good Eye
Should you attempt to
pluck out God’s remaining good
eye,
you better have
an exit strategy and
an air-tight contract with the
Devil (should things go side-ways).
Uncle Lemmy
Guttural V-8
grumble
and a three pack-a-
day rasp, every last
jagged
word laced with sun-down
shades of Jack Daniel
Brown,
Marlboro Red and the
black-as-pitch of 3
AM.
Yes, he’s come to town,
once again, just to
open
up his barbaric
snaggle-tooth yawp for
us to
peer into, and watch
in amazement as
he
fires up the miniature-
scale model of the
noise
machine of chaos and
war that he keeps in
his
pocket on the end of
a chain, to blow our
minds
with campfire tales of teeth
and claws, spears and guns,
lies
and tears, rat-fuck bastards
and love gone way-wrong.
Every
family’s got one, the
vaguely exotic
distant
cousin or crazy,
waaay-out uncle who
shows
up, unannounced, to the
family reunion
cook-outs,
once every decade,
or so, with a new
girlfriend
half his age and a
gallon handle of
whiskey,
scaring all the old
folks shitless who wrote
him
off for dead, years ago.
So, what’s up with this
guy? What’s
his story?
What’s he all about?
What
does he really do? Is
there more to this dude
once
the thundering, howling
and the stomping get
put
back in his little black
doctor’s bag? Is he
merely just
a post-modern
incarnation of
the
trickster mythos and / or
the uber anti-
hero? Or
maybe he’s the
phantom highway man
barreling
his way across
the barren waste land of the
zeitgeist
on his chromium
steed, signaling his
turn
for the fast approaching
apocalyptic
off-ramp.
Jason Ryberg 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.