4 Poems by Jason Ryberg

Hot Wired

It
seems 
as if
we’ve never
quite abandoned our
belief in alchemy (or some-
thing almost like it) even though we may never be
able to always properly define what
     it means, exactly, when caught off-guard, and
apparently it’s widely held by many of our
fellow travelers on Spaceship
Earth that poets are
directly
hot-wired
some-
how
in-
to 
the grand
motherboard
of the universe
and allegedly possess the
gift of prophecy as well as the ability
to divine deep meaning from wild circumstance,
     which is, of course, simply ridiculous.  

ping
apologies to Ted Kooser

Throughout the night, the
slow dripping of the kitchen
faucet has become 
     the ping of a submarine’s
     sonar searching for something.

Three Monkeys and a Buddha on the Dashboard

Hell, he said, washing
     down his blood pressure meds with
a pull of bourbon-
     spiked coffee, it took me more
than forty some-odd 
     years or so to figure out 
that what that little
     statue, there, really means is
even a monkey 
     knows that trying to do your 
damnedest to “hear no 
     evil, see no evil, and 
speak no evil” don’t
     mean that there ain’t no such thing
as evil in this 
     world, and you better speak-up
     when you see it and hear it.

October (Tanka) 

A Halloween wind
is moaning a low oboe
tone through October's
dark haunted forest of strange
     birds and boney xylophones

Jason Ryberg is the author of twenty-five 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 countless love letters (never sent). 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 work has appeared in As it Ought to Be, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Thimble Literary Magazine, I-70 Review, Main Street Rag, The Arkansas Review and various other journals and anthologies. His latest collection of poems is “And When There Was No Crawfish, We Ate Sand (co-authored with Abraham Smith, Justin Hamm and John Dorsey (OAC Press, 2025)).” 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.