Poet in the Graveyard (Whistling Dixie in the Dark) for Brandon Whitehead. by Jason Ryberg

It was mid-July

and had rained most of the day

(so you can bet your ass it was humid

and sticky as hell) and I had this goofy tune

bouncing around inside my head

that I just couldn’t shake: way down yonder

in the land of cotton, old times there,

they aint forgotten, look away,

look away, look away ...

You know the one.

And the moon and the stars

were nowhere to be seen

and the locusts and the crickets

had their maniacal cartoon calliope machines

cranked all the way to eleven.

And I was seriously entertaining the idea

of turning the hell around

and taking the long way home

WHEN SUDDENLY! (and aint it always

suddenly in situations like this?)

I found one of my feet sunk knee-deep

in what I soon realized was a very recently filled

(very recently rained-upon) burial plot.

And the moon and the stars

were still refusing to show

and I’d swear my spook show

accompaniment of crickets and locusts

came to an absolute dead stop.

And yes, I believe I very nearly soiled myself

(very nearly filled my britches

as my Uncle Mikey used to say)

as I sprawled and struggled, there,

in the oily, mucky, mosquito-infused dark.

And sure, I’d like to say that’s how they found me

(the groundskeepers, the cops,

the EMTs, whoever),

that I was babbling and raving wildly

and had obviously gone mad,

my hair turned completely white, even,

that I’d clawed my own eyes out at the sight

of some horrible thing that

just should not be,

that something down there

had grabbed my leg and pulled

and pulled (not totally dissimilar

from the way you may think

I’ve been pulling yours, I’m sure),

that I’ve written this whole thing

while resting and recuperating, indefinitely,

under strict observation at a minimum security

mental health facility (in that classic

Lovecraftian fashion).

But no,

eventually I Christ-all-mightied,

motherfuckered

and son-of-a-bitched my foot free

just as it began to rain again.

And, eventually,

I collected my scattered faculties

and somehow summoned the desperate,

drunken courage to reach down deep

into that slimy suck-hole and retrieve my shoe

(now, pretty much ruined),

then shamefully shambled

and squelched my way home.

And all the while,

that sinister and perverse musical phantom

pin-balling around inside the empty

Victorian opera-house of my skull,

tormenting me with its cloying,

insipid adulation for the Lost Confederate Cause

and the grand old antebellum South...

But I’d be goddamned if I was gonna give

whatever smug and smirking gods looking

down on me the satisfaction,

no matter how goddamn catchy

that goddamed tune was.

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.