GAS Featured Poet: Jason Ryberg

 

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 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 “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. 

 

 

 The Slippery Slope

of Infinite Regression

Those far-off and fleeting buzzards 

of indeterminate feeling,

pyrning and gyring on the horizon,

those flittering moths of thought 

recently seen accumulating, at the oddest times,

on the shimmering quicksilver edge

of your mind’s magnificent fish-eye lens...

they’ve been rapidly devolving

into dubious notions and bizarre insecurities

concerning the teleological motions

of moth’s wings and the polar ice-caps of Mars

(and their collusion and subsequent influence

over your own precarious place

in the grand schemata

of people, places and things)...

And what about that sweet, young thing, there,

givin’ you the cheerleader sneer

from across the bar?

What is that, exactly, that she’s beaming out,

so radiantly? Loathing? Pity?

Some subtle shade of pathos, at best?

Or that grizzled, hoary Ahab

of a character shootin’ you the stink-eye

from the back window of a passing bus ...

Maybe it all adds up to nothing much,

but, something both all-knowing

and faintly unwholesome was

most definitely transmitted in the brief,

teleo-scopic instant of that

thousand-yard stare.

And those little clickity-clicks

and distant kettle whistles

and whispering phantoms of white noise

you’d swear, sometimes, just like

billowing clouds of gnats and other no-see-ems

(hosting the reincarnated souls

of grievous sinners, no doubt)

always mucking up your receptions

and transmissions.

What could their involvement be

in all of this and to what possible purpose

and degree?

Sabotage?

Subterfuge?

Hostile take-over?

Zen masters, fortune cookies

and bar-stool philosophers,

street-sweepers, antique dealers

and the capricious daughters

of Mexican generals, alike,

will tell you, 

it is precisely at these moments 

that one must immediately 

pull the rip-cord and nullify all contracts 

and pre-arrangements 

with the world,

let loose the horses,

release the hounds,

and set free the birds of primeval light

that have languished too long in their cages,

but, most importantly,

one must stalk and chase and feed,

voraciously, upon the hot, dripping, 

still-beating hearts

of wide open spaces.

GAS Featured Poet: Jason Ryberg

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 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 “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. 

 

 

Van Gogh Stars

 

 

Out here, the sky is

alive and swirling with Van

     Gogh stars and the wind

     is an orchestra of tree

     frogs, cicadas, and crickets.

 

 

A Small Rabble of Sweat Bees (Sleight Redux)

 

 

It’s just a bird singing through an open window, and a

woman closing the door to a dream of a lone tree on a

hill with just a single leaf on it (the tree, I mean), and

opening another one to a bowl of peaches, apples,

nectarines and clusters of grapes, just sitting in the sun,

on a wooden table (like one of those old paintings of

some rich lord or lady’s spread, back in the day, but maybe

also featuring, there, a few fish and some game hens,

recently caught that very morning, no doubt) crawling

with what looks to be a small rabble of sweat bees.

The fruit, I mean.

 

 

 

  

GAS Featured Poet: Jason Ryberg

Jason Ryberg is the author of fourteen 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 Are You Sure Kerouac Done It This Way!?

(co-authored with John Dorsey, and Victor Clevenger,

OAC Books, 2021).

Evening Report,

8-7-2021, 9:17pm

 

 

Just a few scattered stars,

here and there, though I suppose

 

the stars are always there,

night or day, as well as always

 

rushing away from us (and each other),

they say, towards some ever-receding

 

frontier or event horizon-like moment

of maximum elasticity when the whole

 

thing has spread out about as far

as it can to one uniform temperature

 

and consistency and slowly begins to

contract and reverse-engineer itself back

 

into a condensed and combustible state

that’s ready for another big bang.