SOMETHING TO SAY

Consider a moment those dank, primeval basements
and mud-flooded sub-basements of the brain
where the fish and lizards
and monkeys of our formative years
still wriggle and skitter and scurry about.
If we peer deep enough inside ourselves
we can see them, there, still completeing
their respective lengths of circuitry,
still telegraphing up their two-cents worth,
from time to time, despite all our attempts
at processing and refining them away
down the spiral staircase of the spine
out into the Big Nowhere.
Look, for example, how the Gar
with their jagged, maniacal grins
are all lustfully eyeing the little pink toes
of our haplessly bobbing frontal lobe,
while the Catfish are fatly content
to sift and slither in the rich,
fertile muck of prehistoric memory.
And the skinks and Geckos and Chameleons,
all contoured and layered together
in their crevices, are dreaming of the days
when they ran the show.
And the Monkeys,
that coffee and smoke saturated
back-room gaggle of gag-men
and speech writers, all hunched and contorted
over their cranky, old Underwoods,
are up against a bitch of a deadline.
For the Alpha Male needs something to say,
something witty and charming,
yet, still somehow mysterious and aloof.
And he needs it yesterday.

-Jason Ryberg, 2009