Kevin Ridgeway

This Is Going To Take
A Thousand Years

My friend says
as she warms
a hot melt glue gun
to make strands of flowers
for a display she’s building
for her grandmother’s birthday bash,
and it makes me think
of the scripted lines
I once repeated over and over again
when I was a child actor cast
in a Stanley Tools
Christmas television ad,
seated on Santa’s lap,
asking for a socket set
and a hot melt glue gun,
and while the money I made
paid for the college
where I met my friend,
it didn’t teach me
how to use
a hot melt glue gun,
making me useless to her
while she cusses and tries
to get the party decor just right,
and I stare off into space,
stuck inside of memories
while she tries to make them. 

 

Liberation Music

I sang
the most
stuttering,
off-key,
deliberately
embarrassing
& obnoxious rendition
of “Happy Birthday”
to my ailing father
through the wires
of a prison
collect call,
possibly his last—
no more grievous tears,
save them for the day
a light shines on him
for his
eternal freedom,
& for now
let’s laugh at
the fool I’ve
made out of myself
on my long journey
to forgiveness

 

Kevin Ridgeway is the author of Invasion of the Shadow People (Luchador Press) and The Sacred Millennial Burial Ground (w/John Dorsey, Dark Heart Press).  Recent work has appeared in Hiram Poetry Review, New York Quarterly, Gargoyle, Slipstream, Chiron Review and Nerve Cowboy, among others.  He lives and writes in Long Beach, CA.