Kevin Ridgeway

 Asleep On The Floor

I woke up with third-degree
rug burns across my plump,
cherubic face after a night
sprawled in front of our Zenith,
lost inside Jackie Gleason’s
black and white sitcom world. 
Television was my sleeping pill,
raised never to dream without
regularly scheduled programs
singing me to sleep with jokes
and the cosmetic plasticity of
lives I hoped to one day claim
ownership of.  My eagerness
and impatience led me
to nights of sleepwalking
in search of the remote control,
it’s buttons ready for me to
have my own way with reality,
which teased me every morning
with a long, red rug burn beard.
And my mother was so unhappy
when I pissed in her hamper
when I was sleepwalking,
dick in one hand, remote
in the other, desperate for
all my dreams to come true,
that she had to start locking
her bedroom door at night.

 

We Knew What We Could Not Say

We’d locked ourselves
out of the house again,
her long legs hung out of the bathroom window
while she cussed, her wallet stolen at the mall
during a Christmas shopping spree,
the holiday in question,
phone out of reach
to cancel her credit cards
and boy did she cuss, told me to push her
until I could hear a thud against the porcelain
of our bathtub, neighbors watching us
long enough to know not to call the police,
the lights of the tree blinking long enough
for her to climb out of another emergency,
electricity bill paid on time,
the Super Nintendo she promised me
didn’t have to be returned
and the Beatles played on our new stereo,
songs of working-class struggle
ugliness and beauty met in pop melodies–
the warm sound of cold seasons when
I now climb through windows without her.

 

Kevin Ridgeway's latest books are Invasion of the Shadow People (Luchador Press) and A Ludicrous Split 2 (with Gabriel Ricard, Back of the Class Press).  His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Hiram Poetry Review, New York Quarterly, Gargoyle Magazine, Paterson Literary Review, Slipstream, Chiron Review, Nerve Cowboy, Main Street Rag, Heavy Feather Review, Sho Poetry Journal, Trailer Park Quarterly and Beat Not Beat:  California Poets Screwing on the Beat Tradition (Moon Tide Press), among others.  He lives and writes in Long Beach, CA.