Jaws Of Life By Jason Ryberg

You know,

maybe we should

only do unto others

as we would have them

do unto us and maybe

he who has the gold

does indeed make the rules

for the rest of us and I suppose

some of us should probably

try a little bit harder not to

stare at beautiful body parts

(no matter how sweet-weeping-

Jesus-on-the-cross-ly beautiful

they are) and maybe we should,

for the most part, keep our hands

to ourselves and wash them

regularly as well as brushing and

flossing our teeth daily

and not sayin’ nothin’

if we got nothin’ nice to say

and there’s really nothin’ much

you can say against the ideas

of counting your blessings

and saving your pennies

and cutting your losses

and callin’ it even

and even that one about

running with scissors

is a pretty good one.

And especially that one

about not killing, but instead,

loving thy neighbor (as best as

thou possibly can without getting

thy-self steeped too deeply

in thy neighbor’s business)

and not coveting or begrudging him

all his expensive stuff and / or

his hot-ass-pie of a girlfriend

or wife (not her exactly,

but one almost like her, right?)

Maybe even that one

at the bar the other night,

the one that kept catching you,

all stupid-drunk and stoned,

staring at her tits because

you couldn’t bear

to look her in the eye,

couldn’t stand to have her

look right through you

in that way they do

that pretty much says

they don’t even see you).

Probably safe to assume,

in the end, the only one truth

that really adds up to a good goddamn

is the hard brick wall of a fact

that every morning we must rise

Lazarus-like from the beds

that we make each night,

put on our boots and our hats,

get a good running start

out the front door and dive

into the great,

wide-open jaws

of life.

About Jason Ryberg: 

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 Zeus-X-Mechanica (Spartan Press, 2017) 

and A Secret History of the Nighttime World (39 West Press, 2017). 

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.