KEVIN RIDGEWAY

THINGS I ENVY ABOUT MY FATHER

My father may be serving
a life sentence in prison,
but quite unlike me,
he’s blessed with tall, dark
leading man good looks.
His taste in music and fashion
has always far exceeded mine,
because he grew up in Hollywood,
and I was a child of dull suburbia.
His stories, delivered to me
behind the wheel of an El Camino
on the way to parole offices
or to the land of big dreamers
he grew up in, are better than mine,
several freeway interchanges
from the bland Nixonian blah
my mother held me captive in.
I envy his charisma, he oozes it
with a smiling charm that always
made me look like a moping,
spoiled little weenie. People
saw his tan complexion paired
with my pale Scandinavian flesh,
were never convinced I was his son.
Heroin robbed the free world
of a troubled light,
his gifts beyond criminal,
because they’re wasted on me
in short phone calls,
weekly radio serials of the ongoing
misadventures of a fallen hero,
who wore a thousand handsome faces
& would ruin the end of this poem
with a dirty joke to make me mad.

Kevin Ridgeway is the author of Too Young to Know (Stubborn Mule Press), Invasion of the Shadow People (Luchador Press) and The Ghost of Cal Worthington (Beach Chair Press). Recent work has appeared in Hiram Poetry Review, New York Quarterly, Slipstream, Chiron Review, Nerve Cowboy, and Gargoyle Magazine, among others. He lives and writes in Long Beach, CA.