Jason Ryberg

Don’t Bother Waiting Up

I have no real plans for this one,
no idea of what it might be thinking
as it looks back at me, becoming
more sentient by the minute,
self-aware, even, with each pen stroke,
letter, word, sentence, as we jointly
stitch its self together with the matter generator
of the pen, finally growing to that point
where it sits up and puts on some of
my clothes, my boots, my hat, and
walks out the back door, into the night,
with a look on its face (if we can even call it
a face) that somehow says, don’t bother
waiting up, I’ll be back in time for breakfast.

Jason Ryberg is the author of fifteen 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.