Watering the Tree of
Reason with the
Blood of Poets (or,
How’s this for
First Thought / Best
Thought Pt.3?)
With wings I stitched together from silk pillowcases,
sheets and lady’s lacey underthings (pinched, admittedly,
from a country clothes-line or three), I sit here, once
again, waiting (in the wings) for the wind to draw a big
breath up, up, up from its deepest, most sub-subterran-
ean wells and bellows (down, down, down where the only
light to speak of emits from phosphorescent gems and
jewels, which, we can, of course, remote view with the
invisible and buoyant looking-glass of the poem) and
blow, man, blow and then O-U-W-T OUWT! I go into
The Big Wide Open, out into The Big Who Knows, out
into The Big Nowhere /
Everywhere / Anywhere / Where-
ever / Whatever, I’m gone, gone, gone ... And should
these wings of my maiden flight (from the maddening
plight of constant and futile border-warring and inner-
skirmishes of attrition), instead, fail and this Hefty Bag of
bones and meat I call my body, my me, my very being,
flail and drop like a load-stone, Wile E. Coyote style,
would it really be so bad if the blood (if not just the sweat,
piss and tears) of this on-again
/ off-again ex-patriot /
armchair philosopher / one-note
poetaster watered, one
last time, the roots of the tree of reason?
Jason
Ryberg
Jason
Ryberg is the author of twelve books of poetry,
six screenplays, a few short stories, a box full of folders,
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
Zeus-X-Mechanica (Spartan Press, 2017)
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.
Tags:
Poetry