Swampland
I guess I just always thought that everybody
had, at least, one Gordian knot of angst
and near-crippling regret somewhere close
to the center of the haunted wonderland /
funhouse maze of themselves—
that tightly wound and bound up little package
safely tucked away from the day to day intrusions
of the outside world, containing the restless ghost
of that mutant offspring born of the unholy union
of the mother of all misunderstandings and the
pater familias of all bad decisions—
that x/y foci of coordinates for the origin of that
which begat that which begat that which begat that
and now here you are, marooned in your own private
and seemingly endless swampland of the psyche.
So now what, smart guy?
-In physics, the term “swampland” refers to effective low-energy physical theories which are not compatible with string theory. Physical theories which are compatible are called “landscape”. Recent developments in string theory suggest that the string theory landscape of false vacua is vast. This has very little to do with the poem.
©2023 Jason Ryberg All rights reserved.
Jason Ryberg is the author of eighteen 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 Kicking Up the Dust, Calling Down the Lightning (Grindstone Press, 2023). He lives part-time in Kansas City, MO with a rooster named Little Red and a Billy-goat named Giuseppe and part-time somewhere in the Ozarks, near the Gasconade River, where there are also many strange and wonderful woodland critters.