Writing a Poem About Smoking a Pork Butt
in the Rain All Day While Smoking a Pork Butt
in the Rain All Day and Writing a Poem
About…

for Will Leathem

Decided to write a poem
about smoking a pork butt
in the rain all day (yes, while
smoking a pork butt in the
rain all day) and sitting just
inside the open garage, in a
rusty, rickety folding chair,
drinking a beer, listening
to the KU game on an ancient
transistor radio that family lore
holds was handed-down from
old Guglielmo Marconi, himself
to my great, great grandfather
to my grandfather, to my father
and then to me, and so, here I am,
smoking a pork butt in the rain,
listening to a basketball game
and watching a few birds
joyously splashing around
in a puddle that has formed
in the giant pothole in the drive,
having the time of their little avian lives,
and I’m thinking that at some point
I should probably find a pen
and scrap of paper and get
a few lines down on this slippery
little moment since it too has been
handed to me by whatever grand
(but otherwise indifferent) universal
forces, and so, as I was saying,
here I am, writing a poem about
smoking a pork butt in the rain
all day while smoking a pork butt
in the rain all day and writing
a poem about smoking a pork butt
in the rain all day while smoking
a pork butt in the rain all day and
writing a poem about smoking a
pork butt in the rain all day when
I suddenly realize I’ve been trapped
in some kind of random,
anomalous temporal loop
like you read about sometimes
in science fiction novels,
and no way to free myself, it seems,
and then, just as I’m about to really
start panicking, from somewhere,
someone hollers that thing
done yet!? and the only thing
that bubbles up (from what surely
must be the most unfathomably
deepest depths of me) to the
deceptively placid surface
of the scene
is huh?

Jason Ryberg is the author of twelve 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 collections of poems are A Secret History of the Nighttime World (39 West, 2018) and Lone Wolves, Black Sheep and Red-Headed Stepchildren (Kung Fu Treachery Press, 2018). He lives part-time in Kansas City 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.