by Jason Ryberg
Those far-off and fleeting buzzards
of indeterminate feeling,
pyrning and gyring on the horizon,
those flittering moths of thought
recently seen accumulating, at the oddest times,
on the shimmering quicksilver edge
of your mind’s magnificent fish-eye lens…
they’ve been rapidly devolving
into dubious notions and bizarre insecurities
concerning the teleological motions
of moth’s wings and the polar ice-caps of Mars
(and their collusion and subsequent influence
over your own precarious place
in the grand schemata
of people, places and things)…
And what about that sweet, young thing, there,
giving’ you the cheerleader sneer
from across the bar?
What is that, exactly, that she’s beaming out,
so radiantly?
Loathing?
Pity?
Some subtle shade of pathos, at best?
Or that grizzled, hoary Ahab
of a character shootin’ you the stink-eye
from the back window of a passing bus…
Maybe it all adds up to nothing much,
but, something both all-knowing
and faintly unwholesome was
most definitely transmitted in the brief,
teleo-scopic instant of that
thousand-yard stare.
And those little clickity-clicks
and distant kettle whistles
and whispering phantoms of white noise
you’d swear, sometimes, just like
billowing clouds of gnats and other no-see-ems
(hosting the reincarnated souls
of other grievous sinners, no doubt)
always mucking up your receptions
and transmissions.
What could their involvement be
in all of this and to what possible purpose
and degree?
Sabotage?
Subterfuge?
Hostile take-over?
Well, maybe you’ve even thought to yourself,
from time to time, “how strange
to always be found, lately,
playing the part of the sad, little
Charlie Chaplin of a clown
in Life’s three-ring sodomy circus.”
Zen masters, fortune cookies
and bar-stool philosophers,
street-sweepers, drug dealers
and the capricious daughters
of Mexican generals, alike,
will tell you,
it is precisely at these moments that
one must immediately pull the Universal Rip-Cord
and nullify all contracts and pre-arrangements with the world,
let loose the horses,
release the hounds,
and set free the birds of primeval light
that have languished too long in their cages,
but, most importantly,
one must stalk and chase and feed,
voraciously, upon the hot, dripping,
still-beating hearts
of wide open spaces.