Speed Balls

by Kevin Ridgeway

Pacific cool school jazz
provides the soundtrack
to the home movies of my elder men
wandering around the garbage strewn harbors
their souls and withered eyeballs
pecked by seagulls

None of them played jazz
or wrote or even sang
but they huffed and puffed
every drug under the sun
that shriveled them to
toasted premature skeletons
pumping speed balls
in the backseats of bruised Cadillac’s

Some of them are dead
some of them are jailed
unmarked graves filled
or waiting in the
overgrown grasses of
decayed ghetto burial grounds
strewn with dirt, glass, blood
shoes dangling on overhead power lines

Some of them roam free
but those are the guys who play the blues
and drink two fists to oblivion
buried in plastic desert huts
every so often they get blown toward the Pacific
and my side of town
asking for money
and a bed at a spin dry clinic.

I’ve participated in these mad Olympics
of slow burning death,
these days I prefer the spectator’s life
behind 3D glasses