Well, there’s the bartender, of course, pouring me another
drink even though I’ve still got one in front of me (half full
and un-paid for), and there’s big screen tvs to the front, rear,
left and right of me (no escape, apparently, so I guess I better
just deal with it and have another drink) and Stevie Nicks is
silently dancing in all her ‘80s, gypsy-black, gauzy, gossamer
glory (Lord, just send me Stevie in my dreams and maybe keep
all mamas and babies safe for at least one more day) and now
the Red Hot Chili Peppers are really funkin’ and rockin’ out
and the Dodgers and the Angels have hit the 7th inning (at 7
to 7, no shit, guess we’ll see who gets lucky tonight) and the
Goodyear blimp is in retrograde as the ghost of Kurt Cobain is
coming to us live and unplugged (did he really mean to unplug
and sign off for good when he arrived at his ultimate dark
nadir of despair or was there something else going on there?)
and I could use another drink about now and the bartender
has been MIA for sometime and the conspicuous odor of pot
smoke is wafting from the men’s room (seriously, am I the only
one noticing this!?) and there’s an old gal in back who
looks a lot like my mother (like unnervingly so, like one
of those separated-at-birth kind of scenarios, like multiple
double-checks and, seriously, what the hell is my mom
doing in a bar in Pittsburg, KS!?) saying HELLO!?
HELLO!? into the payphone and now some old boy is
moaning the Medicare blues, bent over the trashcan by
the backdoor with a bloody nose, who, it turns out is an
old harp player I used to know, as he sits down on the bar
stool next to me (vodka on the rocks!) like nothing ever
happened (pretty sure we chased a possum together down
Broadway one night in 1995 behind the Stillwell Hotel)
and I say Hey man, you’re part of my poem! Bending
his ear lower and closer to me, he says I had a feelin’.
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.
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.
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