Away on Business
Speeding Across the State of Kansas
Better listen up,
Winter, with your feet of snow,
your sheets of ice and
your cold, wet over-
cast army blanket of a
sky, always causing
us some sort of bad
Seasonal Affectation
Disorder or bleak
holiday / new year
postpartum depression down
here in the Gen-Pop
of the super-max
detention facility
that the Great State of
Kansas can become
so easily (during the
months of November
through March), and always,
otherwise, mucking things up
for everyone by
making everything
slower, sludgier, and all-
around harder than
they need to be. But
I keep hearing that the sun
has been seen around
here, lately, that he’s
been away on business,
for far too long but
now he’s back and he’s
pissed as hell ‘cause he doesn’t
like what you’ve done with
the place, and a few
changes definitely need
to be made, ASAP.
Speeding Across the State of Kansas
There are few things as
fine as speeding across the
state of Kansas on
a crisp and sunny
day in mid-February,
jacked-up on just a
little whiskey, weed
and espresso, with the Stones’
Exiles on Main Street
cranked up to that sweet
maximum density spot
where the music and
the sheer volume and
aforementioned chemical
array somehow seems
to almost fuse it
all together into one
groovy beat machine
moving down the high-
way as if propelled by the
combined energies
of Charlie Watts, Bill
Wyman and Mick Taylor, them-
selves, leaving the rest
of us to holler,
hoot and harmonize along
as best as we can.
Jason Ryberg is the author of fourteen 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 Are You Sure Kerouac Done It This Way!? (co-authored with John Dorsey, and Victor Clevenger, OAC Books, 2021). 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.
