On my way to Ribello
Left my heart there long ago
Somewhere off the beaten road
Passed the white man’s honor code
Rebel snakes with bright red eyes
Wave me in with homespun lies
Fill my coonskin cap with grapes
Wrap my knife in bloodied crepes
Then send me back on my way:
“Best you not prolong your stay
For them Yankees haunt the night
Hessians aching for a fight
And they’ll sniff you in the air
Your desert soul much too fair”
So on I walk passed the bend
Where the white sun knows no end
And find myself a dead squaw
Injun girl I name McGraw
Share my blanket with her there
Tell her tales beneath the glare
She never talks all that much
And is too cold to my touch
Could use a bath truth be told
Like a slave that’s just been sold
So on I go with no fear
My hard steps to yesteryear
Find a man hung from a tree
Old Tippecanoe, I see
Thought he had died from the cold
Or hard cider I was told
Seems he died from crooked neck
As “Tyler Too” held the check
His corpse riddled with arrows
His wounds nests for old sparrows
So on I go toward the start
Meet a Puritan named Hart
And his Goody two shoes wife
Her hymen cut with a knife
They are a most blessed pair
On God alone do they stare
So holy they will not mix
But point me toward River Styx:
“Cross that stream and you will see
What’s left of Eden for free
No Christ is needed out there
Your sins balanced by your care”
On I go with quickened gait
Lest I get there much too late
But no River do I find
Just more sand dunes in my mind
The quest a foolish man’s fate
Demons wrested from my hate
Hell’s next stop is Ribello
A town crafted from my woe
If only I could get there
Sleep awhile with my despair
But Hell’s white sun never sets
When the Devil makes his bets
And so on and on I go
Searching for my Ribello
With my knife blade in my hand
My mad howls a marching band
All times captured in my pain
There is nothing left to gain
But at least I am a god
To myself I sing my laud
My song likened to a crow
While I press to Ribello
Michael Sean Erickson 
I received a comment on social media from a person who enjoyed this poem overall, but found it a little difficult to follow on account of her lack of familiarity with American history. I wrote back to her as follows:
Admittedly, the poem plays on events in American history. The most important theme, though, I think is universal: The man wants to find “Ribello,” a place where salvation may be had without purgation from sin (“No Christ is needed out there. Your sins balanced by your care.”). It is a kind of false Pelagian fantasy.
No matter how far he walks he cannot get passed the death that is intrinsic to him and to his land (the Rebel Snakes and the Yankees referring to the American Civil War, the dead squaw and the hung “Tippecanoe,” General (and later President) William Henry Harrison, referring to the American Indian Wars, and the Puritan man and wife referring to the colonization period before the American Revolution). No matter how much he romanticizes his warlike nature (his knife wrapped in “bloodied crepes,” in other words softened by a dainty French pancake) he will be driven mad by it (the knife once wrapped by French crepes is later wrapped by his own hands).
Without purgation he cannot find any rest out there in that endless desert. “Ribello” is a false hope, like the lost city of gold the conquistadores hoped to find in the North American continent. The only real hope for our hero is Christ, but he rejects that out of hand.
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