She Took Away My Guns

by Kevin Ridgeway

cap guns a-popping

in the backyard
robots that transformed
into rifles
shooting plastic balls

that was my arsenal

one day I looked

at her
dead in the eye
and said

“That’s it for me!”

and shot off a cap

toward my temple

the grain of fuzz

in the 1980s camcorder
video is distorted
as the camera was
switched off
abruptly


gone were the guns,
the water pistols,
even
and anything
else that exploded

there was no where

to turn--I had surrendered
to her and the end of
my wild childhood

I had only

the television
left with its
drunken hiss
that sung
its lullabies
to me at night

with a mighty bang

Explosions in the Street

by Kevin Ridgeway

the smoke has no time

to clear before another flash
screams into the night
blinding everyone in its
deafening path

it’s Independence Day

here in Southern California
and the smell of barbecued
meat has given way
to the smell of gun powder

things that disturbed me

when I was younger,
things I questioned
as jingoistic, stupid
and repellent

are engulfed in fire

as I light my cigar
and use it to ignite
a small display of
bombs bursting
in the gutter

I realize I have softened

I love blowing things up
I like gnawing on ribs
to form a greasy
mustache over
my lips

here in mini-Baghdad,

where the big pops
grow enormous
as the night
becomes older--

I’d like to see the looks

on my quieter neighbors’
faces as I chew simultaneously
on said rib and smoke said cigar
and light the fuse of
a flattened Christmas
package that turns
into a nightmare of
flashes, twirls and fury

preparing for the

apocalypse is the
American Way

and it should be done

in garish style

The Night Players

by Kevin Ridgeway

darkness descends early
on autumn streets,
dim lights echo
from window to window
the players on the stage are
met to the wind’s fanfare,
dead leaves dancing in front of their
eyes marking their outdoor disguises
as they gather aluminum and glass
from the trash, Waiting for Godot
purgatory transcribed into one sentence
obscenities whispered breathlessly
across flannel chests chins drooped
inward looking down for fortune
that is hidden and scattered
across the bedroom neighborhood
and no where beneath the
spotlights of the street lamps
the daylight comes and the
shadow plays end for another
twelve hours until more
sequels are born.

Celestial Discharge

by Kevin Ridgeway

the angry sun
beats against parking lot tire streaks
that lead to the
linoleum, fluorescent hell
of a suburban emergency room
one person after another
wheeled back
into curtained rooms
bleeding,
unconscious,
conscious,
semi conscious
the ripple effect
of injury and disease
rolling into
the fuming theater
of medical science
a man screams
as injections
are plunged
into every orifice
of his defecating
ruptured body
another man had
the post-holiday blues,
and leaped
from a freeway off ramp
dressed in his
Christmas presents
his skull caved in
and unthinking
overhearing
the hawk nosed doctors,
the male nurses
admonishing doomed drunks
the flying man made his exit
from the world
"celestial discharge"
one doctor muttered
scribbling notes

the doomed man's
family will buy him
a new gift
a neatly wrapped
plot in the earth
or a stocking stuffer
cremation urn,
dust and teeth
rattling against tin

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

Airplane Bottles

by Kevin Ridgeway

six months dry and a sip
of bottom shelf Kentucky bourbon
out of an airplane bottle

gag reflexes dance across the seething nodules of my throat,
sour world worms wiggle along the linings of my intestines
which writhe into arms that want to crawl out of my ass
and produce a sharp blade in one arm
slicing the main line of this head
with an aluminum bat in the other arm to shatter the skull

removing the brain delicately like a newborn
and spoon feed hunks of gray matter
past my bitter lips down
the slide of fire and out of my ass again
to shake hands with this doomed clown
plastic bottles on each finger dancing a horrific
deluded dance with the Devil.

High Gravity

by Kevin Ridgeway

escaping into the wilderness of the night
passed stagnant pools from flooding lawns
hiding from the streetlamps and a mad dash
around the corner with wack-a-mole playing
dog gnawing at the air between my head and
his blood-parched fangs

barreling across the three-lanes to the
center divider gliding across seas of pebbles
passed a deserted midnight lunch wagon
being utilized as an iron pillow by rattled
tweak bogeymen finally in the neon glow
of the Five-Star Liquor Store with its sing-song
welcome jingle to signal my victory
over trickster gutters

there in the coolerator gallery stand rows
upon rows of dusty silver tall cans pressurizing
the toxic spirits within pawing my lint trap pockets
for the coins I meticulously counted and counted
again affording me three of these beautiful beasts
no chit-chat with the glum faded clerk but
polite enough to count out the exact amount
due plus my pagan's tax

and backwards through the obstacle course
beyond children's voices behind screen doors
the wafts of suppers permeating the air
as I scream through to the garage and violate
the first aluminum saint into the dawn of my
blessed anesthesia, and a few more victorious
pulls and the country music anthologies
come rolling out of the stereo in my broken
winner's circle of squalor.