Passion Flowers and Puzzle Boxes Scientists and poets alike have yet to find whether certain experimental hybridizations of radio waves and silver go-go boots in any way affects the erratic trajectories of UFOs. Though, they now know that the geometry of fireflies may have some influence over the delicate symbiosis of communication satellites, train yards and Blue Turtle migrations. However, despite recent controversial reports there has been no independent confirmation on whether the random arrangement of orange blossoms on a city sidewalk, slick with rain, has any more relation to the performance of a North Korean featherweight in the 9th than a performance of Beethoven’s 9th by the South Korean Philharmonic does to the discovery of designs for a steam-driven engine written on papyrus. But, one doesn’t need a steady diet of coral calcium deposits or subterranean cold-storage of arcane information to see that a cracked engine block is bound, cosmically, to a crack-baby found behind a dumpster in an alley (alive and doing well we’re told), that beauty-parlor patter is richly infused with important information regarding escape artistry, living in the desert, the number “0” AND, stealing household appliances (specifically, toaster-ovens, it seems) and, most importantly, that a strangely warm winter-breeze witnessed stirring a light bulb hanging on the end of a string will eventually result in a brilliant idea unfolding like a passionflower or Chinese puzzle box of infinite digression somewhere down the integer line of an, as yet, undetermined causal chain.
About the Author: 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 The Great American Pyramid Scheme (co-authored with W.E. Leathem, Tim Tarkelly and Mack Thorn, OAC Books, 2022). 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.
Image Credit: The American flora. v.1 New York :Hull & Spencer,1855. Image courtesy of the Biodiversity Heritage Library
As It Ought To Be 