A LITTLE TOO MUCH TO DREAM
LAST NIGHT (OR, MUSTA THOUGHT
IT WAS WHITE BOY DAY)
with apologies to The Electric Prunes,
Quentin Tarantino and Lawrence Ferlinghetti
She
with the ab-so-lutely hypnotic,
interstellar-black hair
and maliciously exposed mid-riff
(meaning that radioactive area between,
but also including,
upper-most hip bone
and lower-most rib)
asked me to stay
past last call, promising
to spirit me away
from it all (meaning, I suppose,
my otherwise meaningless life
of de-meaning, semi-skilled toil
and celibate drudgery)
to some as yet undisclosed,
but no doubt, exotic locale
for a volatile psycho/
sexual concoction which she guaranteed
would be equal parts intensive research
into the depths of human depravity
and dogged dedication to exhausting
my mental,
physical and
moral reserves.
Whereupon,
I immediately snorted awake,
hours later,
sprawled Golgotha-like
on my living room floor,
my moment of truth
too good to be anything but
a cruel, booze fueled dream,
an alcoholic alien abduction
leaving me
bedraggled
and discombobulated in its wake,
wearing nothing but
a t-shirt and a single black sock (with
big toe protruding through
as if to say “helllooooooo”),
front door and fridge wide open,
every light in the house on
and blazing
like a mid-day desert sun,
one hand clamped on some kind of
suspicious looking Dagwood sandwich,
the other around a half-full beer,
a movie blaring out
into the early morning dark
for all the good people
of the neighborhood to hear,
someone sinister saying,
"shiiit, he musta thought
it was white boy day.
It aint white boy day,is it?
"Naw, man,
it aint white boy day."
GENERATION “WHY ASK WHY”
Oh, by the way,
I ran into an incarnation
of The Buddha the other day
(and a strange variation, I gotta say),
with a mile-high pompadour,
razor-sharp chops and wrap-around shades.
He was comin' out of Davey's Stagecoach Inn
as I was walkin' in like it was fate that
we were somehow supposed to meet, there-in,
('cause I could see it in his eye
and I could tell he could see it in mine).
So, I said I'd been contemplating, lately,
the idea of entering a monestary,
at which he smiled, placidly, in that placid,
all-knowing Buddha sort of way, and asked me "why",
to which I artfully parried with "perhaps
you could first provide an example of what
a proper response might sound like"
but he just replied with "there are no proper
or improper answers, only
the questioning and the answering,"
to which I then said, "purple,"
at which he smiled again and, with what I'd swear
was a tear forming in the corner of his eye, said,
"very wise, little cricket, very wise."
So, of course I shot him where he stood
(you know, just to watch him die);
the Great Modern American Mantra repeating
happily ever after in my mind,
"Why ask why,
why ask why,
why ask why?"
I CAN NEVER REMEMBER EXACTLY
Sometimes, when,
for no reason at all, even,
I'll just bolt upright
(like I been on the road too long
and almost nodded off at the wheel
and then suddenly snap to)
from one of those
deep-freeze sleeps of the senses
that the modern man-in-the-street
seems to be so prone to,
somewhere along the tracks
of my (admittedly extreme) elliptical path
around The Creator's mountain-top tower,
I can never remember, exactly,
whether I'm supposed to be
playing the part of a mouse
in the eye of a falcon,
a falcon in the eye of a storm,
a storm in the eye of The Creator
(of all mice, men, falcons and storms),
or, the "I" somewhere near
the core of a poem
(about a guy, by the way,
that's dreaming he's a mouse
(that's dreaming
it's just some guy,
not a king, not a big shot, not a hero,
just a regular dude)),
a poem forever revolving
around its own foci
like a stake that it's been chained to,
a poem that, according to
the latest estimates and indicators,
will more than likely remain,
for the rest of its unremarkable life,
completely unnoticed.
BIO:
Jason Ryberg is the author of seven books of poetry,
six screenplays, a few short stories, several angry
letters to various magazine and newspaper editors,
and a box full of folders, notebooks and scraps of paper
that could one day be (loosely) construed as a novel.
He is currently an artist-in-residence at The Prospero
Institute of Disquieted Poetics and an aspiring b-movie actor.
His latest collection of poems is Down, Down and Away
(co-authored with Josh Rizer and released by Spartan Press).
He lives in Kansas City, Missouri with a rooster
named Little Red and a billygoat named Giuseppe.
Feel free to look up his skirt at jasonryberg.blogspot.com
