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There Comes a Time
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the adulthood I dreamed of as a child
is quite a blur of attained pleasures
until I passed out and woke up late for work
at a time when I began to develop a sense of self
for the first time in my life.
The loss of my wisest and most beloved elders
and the overpriced humanity in a cruel dementia.
I’m now one of the junior elders
I preserved every reminder or totem
inherited from grandparents
my nephew will never know
and only hear about in big fish stories.
My family taught me how
to master the art of dishonesty,
in bloom since a newer generation
sold out to MTV and who tried
to chemically enhance
their performance
in the middle of a pink cloud daze.
I’m an isolatory beast ravaged
by a dull, slow malaise
that built itself up while
we continued to debate
the meaning of life. We are
the anti-heroes who fell in love
with our own delusions of grandeur,
and we failed to save the world
from people like ourselves.
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Kevin Ridgeway lives and writes in Long Beach, CA. He is the author of the poetry collection Too Young to Know (Stubborn Mule Press). His work has appeared or is forthcoming inSlipstream, Chiron Review, Nerve Cowboy, San Pedro River Review, Main Street Rag, The Cape Rock, Plainsongs, Spillway, Up the River, Into the Void, Ghost City Review, KYSO Flash, Gasconade Review, Cultural Weekly, Big Hammer, Misfit Magazine, The American Journal of Poetry and So it Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library.
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North of Oxford 