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.
