Poetry by Kevin Ridgeway

              VasenkaPhotography CC


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POEM WRITTEN IN A VACANT LOT
 
Crumbled bricks and copper wire
and empty dime bags surround me
in a fortress made of detritus.
A man's head pops out in a
sleazy game of whack a mole
after I woke him up and he told me
if i wasn't doing drugs buying drugs
selling drugs stealing drugs
or giving up and falling apart 
to go away while the country 
loses everything in the dark winds 
of a dawn that blows me away 
from all of those wasted,
hidden and lost people
with my own desperation 
to fill my own inner vacancy 
in my obsessive hunt for sanity, 
But false prosperity rules the day
when this vacant lot becomes 
a 7 eleven built over a filthy 
burial ground of stray, broken 
people who gave up as 
the great mother of invention 
left them all in a fog where
they forgot who they were
when I begin to finally
introduce myself to myself
in my effort to get moving
in a mangled and desperate
march down the side of 
a mean old highway full 
of indifferent strangers
who all speed passed me 
in desperate search of 
a shortcut to nirvana. 





AT THE END OF A LONG LINE AT DOLLAR TREE

They are all in my way
I need this stuffed bear 
with a human baby face 
and new masks to keep from
going viral, my sniveling complaints
worsening as they climbed out 
from my every rotten breath, 
and that’s when homie asked me 
to show respect to his baby mama
or else he was going to dump 
his Diet Shasta all over me 
when I hissed 
I AM ABOVE THE LAW! 
at him and failed to escape 
when I got entangled In a batch 
of helium filled birthday balloons 
that contributed to the wasted time 
I insisted they owed me 
as my voice got higher in pitch 
after my EBT card was declined.
I stood there trapped 
and ready to scream 
myself blind with 
all the other angry, 
broken day dreamers 
who hustled each other 
inside of a discount nation.  

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​Kevin Ridgeway is the author of Too Young to Know (Stubborn Mule Press) and nine chapbooks of poetry including Grandma Goes to Rehab (Analog Submission Press, UK). His work can recently be found in Slipstream, Chiron Review, Nerve Cowboy, Plainsongs, San Pedro River Review, The Cape Rock, Trailer Park Quarterly, Main Street Rag, Cultural Weekly and The American Journal of Poetry, among others. He lives and writes in Long Beach, CA.