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Kevin Ridgeway

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Losing the Human Race

everything has become so quiet,
illness has struck us at close to midnight 
and we've missed out on the happenings 
sweet medicine eludes us everyone 
is in everyone's fan club but mine
those who were are all dead now
and i can't even write poems about them yet
so i suffer in this little bubble of mine
a little bubble that I can't seem to pop
and make my body tickle all over on up
to my brain where all the useless information
is stored and where all the memories torture me
and where the future horrifies me and when 
my fantasies put me on beautiful journeys
that make this hardship of opinions, morals
and different tastes in music some of my least
favorite things as I pass by that cemetery off
the Long Island Railroad in Farmingdale where
Coltrane rests and where I traveled back to
Southern California after the Big Apple was
a mean, smug son of a bitch who hustled me
into wanting to run away and hide in the 
countryside where a drunkard's dream 
would send me even though I can't be 
alone for long periods of time but I still 
am alone for much longer period of times 
than that and that's a dangerous trip to 
weird out along the way and never figure out 
what it all means beyond disappointment, 
cold calculations, vice, money and pain.  
So the best I can do is make it all look 
like a league of clowns with a big pie 
fight at the end of the world to ensure 
that we were all so crazy on a grey day
of lust in the eyes of poisonous snakes
that has buried the jazz men too soon.

Kevin Ridgeway is the author of Too Young to Know (Stubborn Mule Press).  Recent work can be found in Slipstream, Chiron Review, Nerve Cowboy, Trailer Park Quarterly, Main Street Rag, Big Hammer and The American Journal of Poetry, among others.

He lives and writes in Long Beach, CA.
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