Loaded Dice and Poisoned Candy
Hardly even know it’s there
most of the time...
after all, we can be a (somewhat)
fundamentally oblivious species:
whether posited, serenely, in proper lotus position
in the middle of some shimmeringly pristine
mountaintop scenario or deeply steeped
in some sweaty, chaotic configuration of love,
or (just as likely), broke down
on the side of the highway,
I-35 let’s say, just south of Topeka, Kansas
(with five pallets of National Enquirers,
bearing the tear-streaked face of Miley Cyrus,
that has GOT to get through):
a weathered cargo ship
run aground under a brutal, relentless sun,
one-o-one in the shade
and a beer can rolling along all of a sudden
like a tumbleweed in an old cowboy movie,
(and now a dog barking off in the distance,
as if on cue).
So, we are allowed, now and then,
an absolution, of sorts,
from our inherent obligation
to fundamental attentiveness
to most of the obvious
and at least some of the finer points
of the subtext, metatext and copious footnotes
to the post, post-modernist novel of Life.
But, still it hovers and circles,
always lurking just out of the corner of the eye,
waiting for the perfect opportunity to strike,
dolling out fate and fortune,
good, bad and indifferent, alike,
the free-floating nucleus
of the all-encompassing,
all-permeating physics of context,
the fluid matrical mechanica
of how things really are,
the constantly shifting locus
of the very shit that happens to us,
again and again and again
in sloppy viscous loops...
The moment ultimately coming to a point,
like the point of a big red arrow
on the Metaphysical Highway
Rest Stop Map Of Life,
like the finger of God pointing,
just a little too accusingly,
at you (and you and you)
as if to say
YOU ARE HERE
(and here you are)!
Hell,
everything else
is extenuating circumstances
and low-grade
accommodation,
loaded dice and poisoned candy.
One More Cup of Coffee
-with apologies to Bob Dylan
The day starts with a bang
as the bed-side radio alarm
blows a hole in the fragile,
little submersible of your sleep
with one more report (in a seemingly endless
series of reports) about a seemingly endless
supply of bombs, of which at least one more
has gone off in a mosque or market place
or public square somewhere in a faraway land
where the very cradle of civilization
is said to have once been, and continues
to be rocked, endlessly, it would seem,
by hot desert winds made all the hotter and meaner
(if not full-on Old Testament-ly wrathful-like)
by all those bombs and various other ordinances
constantly going off (as well as the general,
over-all exhaust and roar of the Great American
War Machine doing its business as usual,
invasion and occupation of a foreign,
sovereign state thing).
And back here on the home front,
we’ve rolled up our sleeves and hiked up
our britches as we all pitch in to do our part
for the post-war, Mission Accomplished
phase of the operation by continuing
to borrow and spend, consume and purge
at a here-to-for unheard of and unprecedented rate,
which is maybe why even some of those
state sanctioned think tanks are starting to say
that there’s probably going to be a few less
haves for the next couple of years
and a few more have nots.
But hey, let’s not over-extend our speculations
and estimations of possible outcomes
‘cause back here on the home front,
maybe even a little farther inland, still,
at the over-worked, poorly maintained heart
of The Heartland, the back-rent is lagging
farther and farther back and the front-rent
is a gleam on the horizon.
And you’re into a couple people
for a couple hundred bucks
and maybe there’s been a medical bill or two
as well as a few other unforeseen
financial / psychological burdens.
And it surely can’t help that you’re living
in a city sorely lacking in love (for a fella
that’s just a little down on his luck, anyway).
And sometimes it seems if it weren’t for bad luck
there wouldn’t be much luck to speak of
‘cause there’s just no decent jobs out there
these days that don’t require some kind of pedigree
or credit check or Big Brotherly certification.
And, no matter what those government stooges say
or how much money the top whatever percent
is making, the goddamn economy has gone to hell.
And the weather outside is, well… frightful —
cold, wet and grey, the clouds hanging
all ominous and low, throwing down
a mean, stinging sleet that the guy on the radio
says is building up to a nice, solid sheet
of tail-bone-cracking ice on the sidewalks and streets.
So, you loiter in the shower just a little while longer,
hoping the water and steam might possibly
warm your soul a few more degrees
closer to the idea of going out into it all.
You gobble up a handful of vitamins
and maybe half a bagel or piece of toast,
throw back a shot glass of apple cider vineager and honey,
and maybe you pour a little brandy in your next
cup of coffee and roll your first cigarette of the day
while you listen to a song about some other guy
having one more cup of coffee (and, you can probably bet,
another cigarette, too) before he, like you,
must eventually, inevitably go
out and down into the valley
of the world below.
The Time, Being (or, Run, Forest, Run!)
Better get busy livin,’ or get busy dyin.’
God damn right.-Irish Red
The hill has been taken
for the time being,
the flag reclaimed
and the first-born bastard child
of every household has finally returned
from his or her aimless wanderings
and night errantries abroad
(demanding parental validation
and their compounded allowance).
And the priests and politicians
and insurance salesman
are quietly slipping out of town,
and the future wives of upper-middle America
are planning weddings to men they haven’t even met.
And the guards of the gated kingdoms
have nodded off at their posts again,
allowing Night and its gypsy gothic entourage
to slip right in.
And the whole slapstick, tear-jerking
tragic-comedy of it all will one day be recorded
on the walls of the deepest caves
for our great, great grandchildren
to one day find and wildly misconstrue.
And all the while, Life and Death
continue their heated Mexican stand-off
in the middle of the restaurant
while the rest of us look anxiously on,
staring into our Denver omelettes and Belgian waffles
and veggie-tofu scramblers, hoping, praying, pleading,
wishing we were having our breakfast anytime
any other time than this.
But really, now is probably the time
to learn to play the piano,
time to lose those troublesome twenty pounds,
time to drain the bad blood
from the abscess of the family,
to go back to veterinary school,
to come out of the closet,
to finally ask that waitress out,
to write The Great American
post-post-modern crime / noir / sci-fi novel,
time to do that thing (whatever it is)...
You know, that thing you go on and on about,
ad nauseumly, every time you hit your requisite
number of drinks?
Seriously,
better get to it,
better get steppin,’
better come on with the come on,
‘cause the time, being
what it is
(was,
will be),
won’t just
wait around for you
indefinitely.
Story Problem
It’s that time of night again when
all the little segmented and many-legged
critters of the mind’s darker side come creeping
out of their slimy little hidey-holes
and the city seems to sporadically come alive
with sirens from time to time (and then
die back down again like nothing ever happened).
And the moon is seated up there
in its royal couch of clouds,
shining like someone’s back porch light
out into the summer nighttime, backyard
jungle-world of childhood (even though it’s really
October 2008 as I’m writing this, way down here
at the court-side seats of the big Here and Now).
But, that fondly (and often rather fuzzily)
remembered time of our lives, for many of us, anyway,
has long since sailed on, out into that great, grey fog bank
of eternity (and, it’s easy to think, sometimes,
the best things in this life with it (meaning, I suppose,
those moments and events and things that people
so often write children’s books and memoirs and even
the odd weepy or wistful poem about)).
Yes, it’s that time of night, perfect also, for otherwise
less-than-fond memories of the past (be it whatever
randomly assigned childhood or adolescent scenario
or your early to mid to late twenties or just last week, even,
for that matter) as well as those Standard Issue Fears
of the Future, that plague so many of us,
to make an unannounced appearance
(or at least their presence felt),
not unlike mice in the walls, maybe,
or the manic skitter and scurry of squirrels
in the attic or a dog out there, somewhere in it all,
that you’d swear was barking at the wind.
And the mighty I-35 continues its non-stop
guttural grumble and growl.
And the trees are scratching and tapping
at the house like maybe they were feeling
for a way in, or something.
And tonight, it all seems to have come down
to this seemingly simple story problem:
1 last beer in the fridge,
1 inch of bourbon in the bottle,
13 (or so) minutes until the liquor store closes,
roughly 5 minutes to get there (if you go right now),
an unknown quantity (x) of the usual frisky demons
to keep you entertained for an unknown quantity (y)
of sleepless hours before you.
And of course, now, you have to factor in
how you’ve recently been trying to cut back on it all
(the booze, the coffee, the fried food,
the staying up too late every goddamn night
to carve this self-indulgent crap into the sacred wood
of the uncarved block),
get back in some semblance of shape
and back into the game
before it really is too late for you
(and, like the man said,
aint nothin’ worse
than too late).
So,
what do you do?
“SMOOOOOOTH”
There’s a humming-bird, trapped in an empty Carlos Rossi jug
with a thin layer of what must be vinegar, by now, at the bottom,
and a coating of dust all over it, from mouth to butt, with three
large X-X-Xs traced there-in, sometime ago, it would appear,
as if it were an old-timey cartoon jug of hooch from which some
hoary, old hillbilly pappy patriarch type in threadbare bib overalls
might take a generous nip from time to time, whereupon his ears
would instantly become two steam whistles, his face a straining
empurpled tomato, eyes bulging with veins and tears and maybe
even a small mushroom cloud appearing out of nowhere, right
above his head, a depressurized deflating hissing sound and then
“SMOOOOOOOTH,” leaving him, you’d think, with just the kind
of clarity we could use, here and now, to help us figure out how
to get a humming-bird out of a fucking jug.
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 is an editor
and designer at Spartan Books. His latest collection
of poems is Fence Post Blues(River Dog Press, 2023).
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.
