KEVIN RIDGEWAY

Tan Line Mystique

sand under my feet
from broken hour glasses
of long ago lives
people who used to swim
in the ocean in front of me
now swim outside of time,
when a cool May wind
chaps my bearded lips
and the sun’s rays steam
my skin a lobster tone
later peeled away
to leave me a shade darker,
in my meditative fantasy
a middle aged Jack Kennedy
on the shore of a new frontier
where old cultures collide
into new ones, rockets sent
beyond freedom towers
torches in bonfires burn
bright with idyllic hope
until the waves pull back
and the flame dies out
but the waves will crash in
with new life forms
as they stand upright
on the sand of my lost time
in a brand new era—
pale to the bone and
in need of sunscreen.

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 New York Quarterly, Hiram Poetry Review, 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.

All rights © Kevin Ridgeway