Ode to Killa City, MO
Whether or not it’s
a cop-copter prowling the
nighttime grid of side-
streets, alleys and back-
yards with its all-seeing eye
or Life Flight flying
some unfortunate
soul in from a twenty-car
pile-up, out on the
highway, or POP-POP-
POP! a few short blocks away
(remember one’s back-
fire, three’s gun-play): who
knows, maybe it’s just the price
we pay for proper
cuisine, a little
nightlife, The New York Times and
decent espresso.
Lone Crow on a Telephone Pole
Certainly a lone crow
perched on a telephone pole
at a foggy country cross-roads
at 7:37 on a Monday morning
in mid-October must be
some kind of sign,
some kind of portent or
hoodoo or sinister hex,
some kind of harbinger
of impending doom that
is starting to resemble,
(ever) more and (ever) more,
Poe’s imposing raven
sitting on its bust of Palas,
‘specially since the son-
of-a-bitch won’t do anything
but squat there and stare down
at you, no matter how
many times you honk
your horn, flip him the bird,
and mutter out, Oh yeah?
Well fuck you too!,
because despite all your
alleged hard-wired,
country boy, backroads
sensibilities, you’re the one
who somehow keeps
making all these stupid
wrong turns that keep
returning you, again
and again, to the same
(presumably inhospitable)
place you started from.
Not him.
Fool.
Bus Rides, Birthday Candles
and Blowtorches
He leaned over and asked me
if I was a birthday candle
or a blowtorch?
Hey man, I got a girlfriend, I said,
which only made him lean in closer
to make himself more understood, I guess,
a half-empty pint of Cutty Sark nearly
tumbling out of his jacket.
Christ, what was it with old guys and Cutty?
I’m asking you what kind of man you are, son—
a birthday candle or a blowtorch. You ask me,
there’s too many pretty birthday candles
preening and parading around these days
like a bunch of swishy runway models
all trying to get their pictures taken,
when what this country really needs
is more goddamn blowtorches
to get it back on track.
Am I right, he asks, handing me
the bottle of Cutty,
or am I right?
Dead and Buried (Sleight Fau-ku Redux)
The last of them what
could still get away with that
schtick (at least in a
no bullshit / in your
face kind of way) probably
would had to have been
Bukowski, and they
made damn sure to bury him
deep and seal the tomb
up good and tight when
he died just to be sure the last
whiff of a trace of
the spirit of the
rebel / outsider / rock star
poet stayed dead and
buried in there with
him, to serve as a warning
and example to
any others; so
you might as well deal with it
now and just move on:
cuz nobody and
I mean nobody gives half
a flying fuck-all
about the sad and
lonely sexistential angst
and pain of middle-
aged white male poets,
and all their demons and their
old baggage, do they?
Bottom Feeders
The ghosts of old dreams
are washed out video-shadows
milling about in salvage stores,
train yards and vacant lots,
muttering state secrets
and family recipes into the wind.
The ghosts of old dreams
are fleeting quicksilver gleams
in the corner of the mind’s eye,
and then, suddenly,
in a flurry of back road dust
and magpie wings,
are smoke.
The ghosts of old dreams
are fat bottom feeders, much like
their not-so-distant cousin the catfish.
In fact, they often dine
at the same greasy spoons
and bed down at the same
flophouse hotels …
a hollow log, a tire, a Christmas tree,
(a chamber in the heart,
a cavern in the skull),
maybe a washer or refrigerator, whatever,
wherever there’s a vacancy
or a free meal.
They do what they can to survive.
It has been said
that there is a giant catfish
somewhere at the bottom of the world:
bigger than the blue whale,
huger than the ever-meditative brontosaurus,
more gigantic, even, than the ancient,
fabled leviathan that still haunts the sleep
of poets and deep sea divers, alike.
And many believe
this surly old boy to be god —
way down deep there
among the jutting pillars
and slowly eroding walls
and steel skeletons
of his first clumsy experiments
with civilization,
slithering and sucking about,
sifting and breathing out our days
from the primal mud and muck of life,
accompanied only
by his angelic battalions of advisers,
his armored corps of engineers,
the crawdads.
And look,
there they are,
rippling out around him
in concentric circles
and billowing coronas of silt,
hard at work,
sniffing,
tasting,
testing,
triangulating,
picking, meticulously, over the tiny,
time-filtered bits and pieces of the past,
reworking the problems of the world
from the bottom up.
It has also been said
that no other creature of his creation
can withstand such depths,
except perhaps
(if you believe in such things),
the ghosts of old dreams.
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/c/s
and the Osage Arts Community, and isan editor
and designer at Spartan Books. His latest collection
of poems isThe Great American Pyramid Scheme
(co-authored with W.E. Leathem, Tim Tarkelly and
Mack Thorn, OAC Books, 2022). He 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.
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