I walk into a morning bathed
in the flicker of street lights
prior to the false hope
of a new dawn. I’m among
drug addicts, drug dealers
and prostitutes, never to give
them my money again,
money I intend to spend at 7-11
on coffee and an overpriced pack
of Chesterfields, two things
I enjoy while sitting
on a curb and writing
poems in the gutter,
where everything
has gotten to be too real
for me as I watch the world
slowly tumble apart
all around me. I had
begun to discover myself
for the first time, like
a talent agent who was going
to make himself the biggest star
in the world. A homeless
woman sits down next to me
on a bus stop bench and asks me
if I have any shit she can smoke.
I tell her never again would
I be lost in the fog
of a paranoid howl
in the alleyways she still
ran up and down
as we become illuminated
by the sun in order to see
the dirty truth all around us
so I can rub it into a weary
and forgotten prayer.
Kevin Ridgeway is the author of Too Young to Know (Stubborn Mule Press). Recent work has appeared in Slipstream, Chiron Review, Nerve Cowboy, Main Street Rag, Cultural Weekly, Gasconade Review,The American Journal of Poetry, San Pedro River Review, The Cape Rock and So it Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library, among others. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, he lives and writes in Long Beach, CA.