Kansas City – Borderless

Cafe Terrace by Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890) From Public Domain

MAKING THE ROUNDS 


You
     can
see the
       pink street lights
coming on at that
      exact point where late afternoon
makes the exchange with early evening and you can
       still smell the White Magnolias in the night wind
as it sweeps the sky clean of any last
      clouds, and the streets are all deserted now except for
cats and crows and the odd patrol
       car out making their
rounds. And some-
       where 
not 
     too 
   far
     from here,
              someone is 
                        playing the cello.



ON-HOLD

Eight hours on-hold with
     Public Assistance would make
the Dalai Lama
     madder than a rattlesnake
          caught in a hot clothes dryer.


NEVER GET OUT OF THE GODDAMN BOAT! 
(Sleight Return)

It’s a wet, grey morning in mid-December, here in South 
Central Missouri (the less fashionable foot-hills of the 
Ozarks as it’s known by some), not exactly pouring, but 
a fairly constant and consistent plip, plip, plipping, and not 
exactly warm, but an unseasonably tropical 50-some-odd 
degrees (almost balmy, you might say, for this time of year, 
anyway) and I have only just woken from a strange surrealist 
montage of dreams, broken by the sudden subterranean 
trainyard rumble of thunder (though there haven’t been any 
trains in these parts for decades); dreams of deer roaming 
and snuffling, freely, through the sleeping streets of Kansas 
City, Missouri, dreams of star charts on my inner eye- lids, 
milk-white phantom dreams, blue-black storm dreams where-
in, every night, I go up the snaking circuit cable of the river, 
and every night I get out of the boat and walk deep into the 
sweating jungle to confront what must be my inner nemesis, 
only to be stalked and devoured, again and again, by the 
brightly burning tiger’s fearful symmetry.

Jason Ryberg is the author of eighteen 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 collection of poems is Kicking Up the Dust, Calling Down the Lightning (Grindstone Press, 2023). He lives part-time in Kansas City, MO with a rooster named Little Red and a Billy-goat 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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(Otherwise) Ridiculous

The lone Bos primigenius on the hill at night, do you suppose she ever wonders in her laconic, bovine way what the stars could possibly be? Does the Tyto alba contemplate the moon’s topography (from his hayloft perch) or what mysteries might lay on its darker side? The Nephila clavata centred in his jewelled web, does he receive strange frequencies (or just old radio transmissions) on its taut wires and filaments? What about the sleepless philosopher/ poet taking his thoughts out for a late-night walk around the neighbourhood? Does the universe leave cryptic, fortune-cookie clues and candid little Polaroids of the Bigger Picture lying around for him to find and piece together later? Or is this semi-educated fool merely adrift on a sea of his own imagining in the leaky rowboat of his skull and nothing but a kerosene lamp, a stone jug of his uncle’s corn liquor and an old typewriter on which he may compose such (otherwise) ridiculous and impertinent questions?