Saturday, March 19, 2022

Jason Ryberg Contemplates The Nostalgia Of Panasonic Boom Boxes, Bukowski Schtick, And The Great Grandpappy Progenitor/Original Sinner Of The Species

1) Skipping Your Ten Year

High School Reunion


Then there was that time

me and Big Earl Corby were

out there on HWY 40, driving 

around just like old times in his 

primer-grey pick-up truck (that 

was somehow still holding together 

and running after all the years) 

with a twelve-pack of Schaffer 

or Black Label or one of the other 

old reliables and one of those basic, 

standard-issue Panasonic boom boxes 

(also somehow still holding together 

and working, despite the wear and tear) 

that everybody had at some point 

back in junior high or high school 

in the late 80s before, presumably, 

moving on to bigger and boomier things, 

and an old cassette tape (once again, 

still somehow working, despite the odds) 

with Black Flag’s Rise Above on one side 

and the Dead Kennedys’ Fresh Fruit for

Rotting Vegetables on the other, 

and we’d flipped that tape four or 

five times by then that day, just 

retracing the old back roads we

used to explore way back when

we had nothing better to do and, 

yessir, it was damned near

like old times.


2) Dead and Buried 


The last of them what could still get away with that 

schtick (at least in a no bullshit / in your 

face kind of way) probably would had to have been


Bukowski, and they made damn sure to bury him 

deep and seal the tomb up good and tight when 

he died just to be sure the last whiff of a trace of 


the spirit of the rebel / outsider  / rock star

poet stayed dead and buried in there with 

him to serve as a warning  and example to 


any others; so you might as well deal with it 

now and just move on: cuz nobody and

I mean nobody gives half a flying fuck-all


about the sad and lonely sexistential angst 

and pain of middle-aged white male poets,

and all their demons and their old baggage, do they?


3) Tripping Me Up


Seems like I’ve spent the better part 

of the past two decades reviewing and sifting 

through all the old security tapes, 

going over all my hastily scrawled notes, 

retracing my footsteps back through 

the winding, rollicking lollapalooza of it all, 


trying to track down and identify 

the one original misstep (in a life 

of so many notable missteps), 

that set things into motion and 

would come into play, over and over, 

for years to come. 


We’re talking the Prime Mover / 

Pater Familias of all FUBARS, 

the exact x/y coordinates from which

the continuum of its progeny of lesser faux pas, 

fumbles and faceplants have ever since issued forth 

for their own respective moments in the sun, 


replicating the original memetic material 

in various mutated forms, to the best of their ability,

but never again quite regaining the former glory 

of their great, great grandpappy progenitor / 

original sinner of  the species, 


but still, to their credit, somehow managing 

to jam my frequencies and trip me up 

whenever they can.



Jason Ryberg is the author of fourteen 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 Are You Sure Kerouac Done It This Way!? (co-authored with John Dorsey, and Victor Clevenger, OAC Books, 2021). He lives part-time in Kansas City, MO 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. 


Wednesday, March 2, 2022

Mark Wilson Contemplates The Phallic Oar, The Fugue Flux Odyssean Complex, And The Sirenshrouded Houdinis

                                                    Mythopoeia


(i)


The phallocentric epic enters

the gynocentric counter-epic,

& is all but swallowed up.



(ii)


Modernity, Myth, Sign are a fugue-

experiment, trying hard to forget

that flux is Necessary Angel

who arrives: ironic, blunt as Asrael.



(iii)


Parian, plastered, admiring ‘rosy fingers’;

marmoreal is my liquor-dark ocean.



(iv)


Slough off Mauberley’s skin,

shed your Odysseus complex.

A phallic oar suffices,

marginally better than limited

edition print-runs to the elect.



(v)


Literature’s no friend to sinecures,

Mr Nixon advises from his gilded deck.

Friendship only with equals,

opines Kung fu Tcheo with know-how

of the obvious; so take down this memo

which still mesmerises millennials:


We dock with little-known circumspection,

latterly dine with asphodel-ridden scops

during the lock-down. Why not turn down

that radiophonic poem because it carries

on appalling your sensibility?


(vi)


Helen’s currently in high definition,

all her hermetic traces are occluded

by the airbrush’s scythe.

(H.D. faints in Elysian cornfields).


The Mysteries are common or garden lore.

No-one manufactures ethics or a praxis any more.

Indiscretions are de rigueur.

Confessionalism is the condign currency.

The Sphinx plays Chinese Whispers with Tiresias

eye-deep in the Tunnel of Net Gains.


Before you have time to climb

this rusting tree of your theogony,

Surveillance, juridical flamingo

of the state, issues your subpoena


not a micro-managed second too late.



                                   Sectioned


Inside White Mariah: sirenshrouded, her inmate

mot-swinging at windfarms in gloria excelsis,

tempest-tost your mind out-Houdinis its internal

triple-locked schoreograph, claims only an End-

gamer’s phanic-zone in paradise of slycensed fools

& zanier mountebanks. Inside the Cream Mariah’s

futerus are padded walls which aerily enwomb

your antic-dispositioned scop, whose only hope

for taolvation’s to be twice-born in the nicodemus

of time, to samsara thru the swarm-maternal cavern

& re-hibernate through wintry-jiscontent season;

hopefully emerge a sans-formed monad: Lazarus-

seawildered, staggering out of antiseptic kinema-doors

conscious only of a fulti-framed sweetholymarie

vision, absolutely lantern-elided & unleathered; who,

in the oapposite mirror, is that alien shaven-headed?



Mark Wilson has previously published four poetry collections: 'Quartet For the End of Time' (Editions du Zaporogue, 2011), 'Passio' (Editions du Zaporogue, 2013), 'The Angel of History' (Leaky Boot Press, 2013) and 'Illuminations' (Leaky Boot Press, 2016). He is also the author of a verse-drama, 'One Eucalyptus Seed', about the arrest and incarceration of Ezra Pound after World War Two. His poems and articles have appeared in: The Black Herald, The Shop, 3:AM Magazine, International Times, The Fiend, Epignosis Quarterly, Dodging the Rain, The Ekphrastic Review and Le Zaporogue.