As one of about ninety (that’s nine-zero) people in the world today with the name Ryan Briggs, I humbly feel I’m the best.

With so many of us, how does one compete with the Ryan Briggses that are professors, college football players, or professional surfers?  By showing off one’s ability to do that which has always been considered the absolute pinnacle of absolute manliness throughout the ages – that’s right, poetry! – the ability to twist words with surgeon-like precision into something totally depressing.

For some reason I have the strange habit of constantly twisting words and syllables around in my head.  When I drive past streets like “North Fifth”, my brain twists them to see if it can make something interesting.  You gotta admit, “Norfth Fith” is pretty difficult to say!

As a professional engineer I have developed the ability to use precise language to explain to contractors how to fix problems on job sites (4-letter words can be very precise).  This has helped me develop an innate sense of the placement of words, or an innate sense of word placement, or I sometimes know where words should go.  I’m also pretty good at spellign.

And despite my love of laughter, I sometimes find myself in a pensive mood with my mind stuck spinning in circular patterns.  I’ve found that such rumination can actually lend itself to coming up with rhymes.  It is perhaps an ironic twist of life that you may actually NEED to go through some painful pruning in life to have the dead wood necessary to fire your best work.  Man, this paragraph is far too serious.  I’m pretty sure someone just fell asleep.  I need to lighten it up. Meh, I’ll keep it.

My poetry is a bit like me, sometimes serious, or even a bit dark (yet hopeful) – but mostly something to be laughed at.

And as an amateur artist, I like to add illustrations to my work, to give it some flare (or to make it so that people on social media don’t get scared by a block of text, and instead click on the shiny image).  I hope you enjoy my “poetrawings”… “illustoetry”?… man I gotta come up with a good word for that!