The Universe is Expanding
The world is moving faster and faster toward optimum mindfulness and a kind of cyber focus that I fall out of line with, the games and the selfies and the applications that have transformed me into a 21st Century Luddite, cruising from the waves of the archives my elders left behind for me to lose myself as an Indiana Jones seeker of admiring girls, teaching college to the hip sexy kids while I chase down the ark of the covenant, in my case a poem that’s better than any woman I’ve ever fucked, superior to any chill down my spine at the end of a film I’ve never forgotten after all these years. I’m not afraid of girls anymore. They’re afraid of me.
Underneath a Bridge Waiting for the Bats to Appear
we stand among the twilight crowd
of sun-baked bystanders,
all of us waiting for the world’s
largest colony of bats to appear,
and we grow bored enough
to ogle the leggy young ladies
who keep waving their paranoid hands
in the air to ward off phantom bats.
After a long and tedious stretch
of time has been wasted, my friend
tells me this is the first time
the bats never soared above the crowd
and the bridge in a void of flickering wings.
I do not care because we are shocked
by the buzzing hum of the bright
electricity in every human smile.
They all slowly pack up their things
and disappear into the night
before the bats transform
into vampires with a
thirst for mesquite,
southwestern blood
as they sink their teeth
into my neck and I join them
underneath the bridge,
nose diving into the crowd
of skirts, Birkenstocks
and cowboy boots
who all join us for
a nightly happening
under the bridge
in the heated fever
of a midnight dream.
Wild Oats
She stopped fucking me,
told me I needed to fuck
more people than I’d fucked
in my lifetime. She did it,
everyone else did it.
So why the holdup on my end?
She decided to go and die on me,
leaving me with no choice
but to find somebody else to fuck
who will give me shit
for not fucking more people
until the human race
goes extinct from
my lack of fucking,
not a single baby
will be fucked
into existence–they’d be
lost causes just like me.
But she’s dead and so
is the majority of my family,
which means they can see me
down here, in a world
where even the dead
are getting laid, but not me.
Kevin Ridgeway is the author of “Too Young to Know” (Stubborn Mule Press). His poems have recently appeared in Slipstream, Chiron Review, Nerve Cowboy, Main Street Rag, San Pedro River Review, Into the Void, The American Journal of Poetry and So it Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Library. He lives and writes in Long Beach, CA.
–Art by Dom Crossley — Artist Profile