My Flesh and Clothing Have Been Torn
for the OAC gang

There
is
a house
on stilts, deep
in the piney back-
woods just off HWY D, outside
Cooper’s Hill, Missouri, where there are also 8 or
9 broke down cars and trucks and other farm
           implements, including most of what must have
been a tractor. And my loyal guide dogs abandoned
me a long time ago, and my
flesh and clothing have
been torn by
bramble
vine,
and
I
swear
I heard
whispering.

Scenes From 39Th St., Pt. 1

The Poet with The Hole in His Throat
was busy soaking copies of Black Like Me
in gasoline, shouting I told you crackers
what I’d do the next time I saw one of these things!
And the Eastern Academic Elitist Poet
(from (eastern-most) Hoboken) was
attempting to set Tennyson’s Charge Of
The Light Brigade to jaw harp, tone box and oboe.
And the ferocious Celtic / Valkyrie Poet
was feasting on the still-beating hearts
of all the fallen poets foolish enough
to have fallen for her Celtic siren song.
And God’s Angry Poet was casting out
the undercover Homeland Security Man
with Lilies of the Field and various
lyrical incantations and the street preachers
were ladling snake oil from a fifty-gallon drum
while some faintly unwholesome character
claiming to be the latest incarnation of the Bodhisattva
was saying to everyone and anyone on the street
HEY, PULL MY FINGER! PULL MY FINGER!
And then the ten-thousand myriad archetypes
became strangely quiet and still, the stars all stopped,
momentarily, in their places and the angels
and demons ceased their square-dancing on the heads
of pins and ten-penny nails, everywhere.
And still the Lonely Backwoods Bukowski-
Wanna-Be Poet sat there in a dank sub-basement
corner of his imagination, mindlessly ringing
wind chimes made from throwing stars, winding
and re-winding the ancient mechanical cricket of his art.

February / South-Central Missouri

A two lane black-top
     twisting through the trees and hills
     of February
     in South-Central Missouri
     like a river of tarmac,
          cracked and potted, here and there.

Um, Goldman Sachs?

It
all
started
with a BANG,
BANG, BANG at the door
and it’s 7 o’clock in the                         ?
morning on a Saturday, which, I only do, these
days, for $30 an hour (or more)
     but really would prefer not to do at all
when 8 or 9 or even 10 is such a more
     reasonable and civilized hour to haul one-self
     up from the deep wishing well of dreams, like
you were some kind of recently reanimated corpse
     that must have been violently
dispatched and hastily disposed of only the night
before, now rudely disturbed to
find what can only
be described
(kindly,
of
course),
as
a
gaggle
of dowdy
and bovine old gals
standing on your porch, asking you,
(free of irony): Sir, do you know who rules the world?

Soon to be Forgotten

A faded pick-up truck (what once must have been
     something between powder blue and sea foam green)
     sits out another season by the edge of the
field, nearly over-taken and claimed for one of their
     own, by the wood’s ever-expansive
layers of saplings, soon to be forgotten by the
outside, busy-body world of
people, money and
the witless
passage
of
time.

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 sand wonderful woodland critters.omewhere in the Ozarks, near the Gasconade River, where there are also many strange and wonderful woodland critters. 

You can find more of Jason’s work here on Ink Pantry.