CENTERING YOUR CHAKRA

Nothing especially tragi-glamorous
or hardcore blue collar neo-beat
about cracking a beer at 10:30
on a Tuesday morning while
watching the 700 Club,

nothing world-wearily decadent
or anti-romantically nu-kowskian
about not having filed a tax return
for who knows how many years, now,

nothing in there that’s gonna net you
an honorable mention (or even
a minor addendum) in anybody’s rolls,
records or register of highly conspicuous
anti-socials (except maybe
your own, of course).

And it looks like it’s
a Schlitz Malt Liquor Bull, this time,
and maybe a pull off the Old Overholt Rye
(what some of us around these parts like to call
“Old Reach-Around”),

maybe even one or two more (of each)
to facilitate the (Lordy, Lord, I must say)
much-needed shit, shower and shave routine

and all before I’ve even had my coffee
and/or some semblance of breakfast
(really, Mr. Ryberg, what can you be thinking?).

And, whereas I can fully understand
how and why my mother might not quite
be able to wrap her brain around this
(only occasional and, I suspect, primarily
male) ritual and might even recoil in
low-to-mid-level horror and disgust
and maybe even cry a little later
when she thinks about what’s
befallen her once beautiful baby boy
(or, more likely, what he be fallen into),

surely the Old Man wouldn’t begrudge me
this momentary indulgence or judge, too harshly,
me and the lifestyle that I swear I somehow
just seem to have woken up inside of, one day.

Surely he must have had a few days
like this special-delivered from the wrong
side of nowhere to the ground-zero/crosshairs
of his world, back in the day when he
was a free-wheeling bachelor about town
(despite our fairly divergent paths,
worldviews and ways

and maybe also the fact that he was a charming,
good looking jet-fighter pilot with the classic
little black book of numbers and names,
a Corvette Stingray and a Jack Kennedy
haircut you could set your watch by).

Surely he wouldn’t overly depreciate the idea,
despite the differences in our lives,
that it’s just something you have to do,
every now and then, to locate your zen,
“center your chakra” and/or
get your head right again
before paratrooping back out
into the not my job/not my problem,
I got mine/you get yours,
what have you done for me lately?,
corporate, confederate, theoligarchy
of these Distended States
of AmurKKKa, Inc.

p.s. They say the Lord is coming.

Better look busy.


-Jason Ryberg, 2012