Jason Ryberg

I Swear to God

 

 

sometimes it seems like

the goddamn cynics and nihilists

and various other strains of nattering

nay-sayers of hopeless negativism are right,

that nothing really matters

in the grand scale of things,

that there’s no real meaning to anything,

as in nothing you do can really mean

or change or add up to something greater

than just a lumpy sum of parts.

Or, at least that’s the line of (quasi) reasoning

I use, occasionally, to justify and / or excuse

those days that come along every now and then,

when you wake up around ten or eleven

and maybe it’s grey and raining

and thundering out there, or,

better yet, one of those quaint,

postcard perfect / phone book cover photo

of a perfect spring day kind of days;

either way, probably best to spend

the better part of it in bed (just to be safe),

the shades pulled down most of the way,

some solo Monk or Red Garland on the radio,

a box fan blowing out a rough accompaniment

from the corner and nothing to do

but drink beer and write poems (maybe even

one about drinking beer and writing poems)

in bed all day.

 

 

 

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.