Skip to main content

Kevin Ridgeway

Image
By

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.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ed Dorn's # 22 From Twenty-four Love Poems

By Rusty Barnes
                                               from Jacket The strengthy message here in #22 of 24 Love Songs can be summed up in two lines: ['There is/no sense to beauty. . .' and '. . .How/ the world is shit/ and I mean all of it] What I also like about this brief poem is the interplay between the title of the book and the subject of the poems (love/anti-love (which is not hate)): it's all a mass of contradictions, like love. And I have to say that the shorter poems of the Love Songs and the last book he wrote before dying (Chemo Sábe) seem to me much better and more memorable than the Slinger/Gunslinger poems. These (generally) later poems probably attempt less stylistically, but are more sure-handed, hacked from a soap bar, maybe. Easy to use, but disappear after use. In any case, Dorn is well worth the reading and re-reading, for me, though he'll never become one of my favorites. And doesn't every poet want that, dead or alive? ;-) #22 The agony
1 comment
Read more

Corey Mesler

By Rusty Barnes
  I think of you tonight, my Beats I think of you tonight, my Beats, and I am grateful.  I walked the narrow lanes of Academia and never felt at home. There were men and women in the flowerbeds, their heads full of theorems and poems. There were teachers who could lift their own weight in prose.  I was lonely. I was too loose.  I was a lad from the faraway country of Smarting. But I had you as so many before me. I had you and I knew secret things. I could count on you like a percussion. And now I want to say: I love you.  If not for you, what? I want to say. If Allen Ginsberg did not exist it would be necessary to invent him.  COREY MESLER has been published in numerous anthologies and journals including Poetry, Gargoyle, Five Points, Good Poems American Places, and New Stories from the South . He has published over 25 books of fiction and poetry. His newest novel, The Diminishment of Charlie Cain , is from Livingston Press. He also wrote the screenplay for We Go On , which won The Me
Post a Comment
Read more

David Oliver Cranmer

By
Not Just Another Playlist Often, I sit in my swivel chair looking out the window, while jazz, country, or rock music plays. This pleasure goes on for many hours a mystic trance of sorts streaming—the glue maintaining my soul. I turn the best songs into playlists (once we called them mix tapes) puzzling over the perfect order. Does Satchmo’s “What a Wonderful World” kick off my latest list or make it the big soulful closer? And does “Mack the Knife” go higher in the set than “Summertime?” That’s an Ella Fitzgerald duet! “Foolishness? No, it’s not” whether you are climbing a tree to count all the leaves or tapping to beats. These are the joys that bring inner peace and balance (to a cold universe) lifting spirits skyward. David Oliver Cranmer ’s poems, short stories, articles, and essays have appeared in publications such as Punk Noir Magazine , The Five-Two: Crime Poetry Weekly , Needle: A Magazine of Noir , LitReactor , Macmillan’s Criminal Element , and
Post a Comment
Read more