2 Poems by Jason Ryberg

And When There Was No
Crawdad, We Ate Sand

An
old
postcard
of William
Burroughs sitting in
a folding chair, holding a bull-
whip in one hand and a cane in the other (rumored
to house a sword that was routinely sharpened,
of course), his weathered Stetson fedora
jauntily cocked on his head, a thin smile and a look
in his eye that, for some reason,
made me think of the
old Arab
proverb:
There
are
no
signs
in the
desert that
read “Do Not Eat Sand.”


Waking from a Fool’s Dream to the
Clear Morning Light of Reality

 
Just
a
black
speck
of a
crow in a
lone spindly tree out
there on a wind-whipped hill-top, just
outside of Lebanon, Kansas – a real no-wheres-ville
to most, known mostly to a select few for
allegedly being the smack-dab / x-
marks-the-spot / geographic center of these United
States, which seem to feel less and less so, these days,
for more and more competing theories and
reasons, when it was all probably just a fool’s
utopian dream from the start, from
which we all must eventually wake to the clear
morning light of reality
in a Motel 6,
let’s say, some-
where out
near
a
two
lane
highway,
the curtains
open to a sea
of tall grass and a small bump of
a hill in the distance, the crow gone
for some time, now.


Bionote

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.