The Sweet By and By (or, Curried Beef and Eggs for Breakfast) for Tony Hayden. by Jason Ryberg

The only answer, really,

to a morning after a night

of too much curried beef and bourbon

is, of course, more bourbon

and maybe some brown sugar

(if you have it) mixed into a mug

of hot, tar-black coffee,

an old tattered bathrobe,

an even older folding chair,

a pair of cheap sunglasses (seriously,

never pay more than ten bucks

because, sure-as-shit, you’ll lose them

or sit on them or something equally

catastrophic),

a book of 800 Years of Ancient

Chinese Poetry, a cool(-ish),

moody wind in the spindly,

spider web trees (strung, here

and there, with invisible chimes

it seems),

a smelly mutt named Murph

or Zeus or Lucky to bring you

a stick to throw, from time to time,

left-over curried beef

and eggs (over-easy)

warming on the stove,

a muddy river sliding

lazily, by and by, and there,

in the distance, a rustic,

country Charon, maybe,

ferrying some recently

departed soul on over

to the other side.

Jason Ryberg is the author of twelve 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 collections of poems 

are Head Full of Boogeymen / Belly Full of Snakes(Spartan Press, 2016) 

and A Secret History of the Nighttime World (39 West Press, 2017). 

He lives part-time in Kansas City with a rooster named Little Red 

and a billygoat named Giuseppe and part-time somewhere 

in the Ozarks, near the Gasconade River, where there are also 

many strange and wonderful woodland critters.