Drunk Man Laughing At A Silver Dollar Moon (Or, The Night Grogger Fell Off The Front Porch) by. Jason Ryberg

It’s another sticky, windless after-hours

here in Midtown KC/MO

and the porch is all tricked-out with strings

of multi-colored lights (left up year-round

for years now, and proud of it),

and it feels as if the Great North American

Imp of the Perverse has been released

once again to practice its particular

designer / name brand of mischief  here

in the dark heart of the Heartland.

And Grogger is swaying on the front porch stoop

with a beer in his hand (and an indeterminate number

in his belly), cackling Jack Nicholson / Joker style

at the face he keeps insisting he can see grinning

down at us from what we’ve all agreed, repeatedly,

must be the fattest, fullest, most silvery moon

any of us can ever remember seeing.

My moon! he says, that’s my moon!

Ooooh fuck, he’s all fuckered up,

we all half-amusedly / half-nervously eyeball / ESP

to each other, as he’s making moves like he’s actually

thinking about climbing on his bike

and pedaling his drunk ass home.

Oh, no you don’t! Morales says,

but it’s too little / too late as Grogger puts his foot

where there ain’t no footing and WHOOSH!, BAM!,

he goes, ass over tea kettle, right off the ledge,

and it’s a five foot drop (easy) from the porch landing,

totaling more than ten from Grogger’s (unstoppable,

but thankfully helmeted) head to the (indifferent

and immovable) pavement below ...

And it’s just past 2am, and the wind

is suddenly kicking-up out of nowhere,

and an ambulance is out there,

somewhere in the thick, oily hobo stew of it all,

getting closer and closer (but hey,

this is Killa City, MO, baby,

it could be heading anywhere).

And Grogger is finally coming around

as the lights and sirens are strobing and yowling

down the street (thank God they didn’t bring

the ladder truck and SWAT team, this time).

But we all know he won’t be going

to no gotdamn hospital! no matter

how much we try to reason with,

cajole or threaten him,

so we just sign the release form

and put him to bed.

And the Great North American

Imp of The Perverse is done, here,

for the most part, and is, no doubt

needed, urgently, elsewhere.

And Grogger’s moon must surely be

grinning down on us, now.

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.