The Calm Before
It’s been another long and perilous week
but we’ve finally come around
to the relative calm of another Sunday afternoon.
And the sun has just now slipped away
behind a slate-grey bank of clouds
and the wind is still rolling around
in its dream-soaked sleep
over in the vacant, weed-clotted lot
across the street.
But the traffic ‘round town
churns and lurches
and then suddenly stalls,
lurches and stalls,
lurches and stalls
all with the passive-aggressive demeanor
of massive schools of tropical fish.
And so far,
it’s been another one of those
barren, bombed-out type of Sundays
wherein nothing really happens
and the weather and the time
fight a cold civil war of attrition
for a mere toehold on the day,
one of those days
when you just can’t seem
to get your bearings
or screw your head on straight
or locate your proper place
in a world full of places
where you don’t want to be,
people you don’t want to meet
and useless things you don’t need.
And all your meager thoughts
and sentences are randomly sprouting wings
(the very second they come into being, it seems)
and, somehow, the very likely likelihood
of (what in all likelihood would be)
some seriously white-hot sex is... no big thing,
and even Miles and Mingus and Monk
have, unprecedentedly,
misplaced their swing (surely
the problem couldn’t be
with you or me?).
Hell, it could only mean one thing:
the clouds,
the wind,
the traffic racing aimlessly around town,
the slow stalagmitization of seconds
into minutes into hours,
otherwise known as our Indentured Servitude
to Time (otherwise known as this Post-
Post-Modern Life of Ours),
they’re all larger parts of the sum
of the numb, melancholy calm
swelling before the storm
of Monday morning
comes rudely blundering in:
that vaguely ominous,
imminent negative
like an approaching tunnel
out of which
will eventually,
inevitably,
inescapably roar
a runaway freight train
haulin’ in nothin’
for you, baby,
but bills,
bad attitude
and diminished expectations
of everything.
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 Fence Post Blues (River Dog Press, 2023). 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.
Image Credit: Chase Dimock “New Mexico Intersection” (2021)
As It Ought To Be 