BETTER DAYS
My childhood best friend lives
in Colorado now, and I haven’t
seen him since we were both fourteen.
I haven’t seen any of the few friends
I had from the old seedy little
Southern California bedroom
community I grew up in and the sad,
paint chipped walls of its one story houses—
windows lined with bars and overgrown
lawns yellowed by the relentless sun.
Among scattered detritus in the gutters
were lemons and oranges reduced to pulp,
littering the street after we picked them
off of trees and chucked them
as our sporting, prepubescent sacrifice
at the asphalt altar of the 1990s wasteland
we roamed through, the concrete
hot enough to have us dance up
and down in our bare feet, away
from the domestic miseries we
all sought to one day escape.
Most of us were school yard rejects,
bullied by the worst of the worst—
but my friends and I enjoyed our own
moments of delinquency, like the time
we broke into what we had thought
was an abandoned haunted house
and the owner caught us—
when he asked us for our names
and our parents’ phone numbers,
in the age before cell phones,
intent on letting our parents know
what we thought we could get away with,
I was the first to lie, giving him a phoney
name and telephone number. My friends
all followed suit and we laughed about
that old fool for years. Until I stopped
seeing my friends, not just because
some of them moved away, but because
we no longer had anything in common.
I have no idea what happened to them
other than my best friend, Simon,
who I’m no longer close to but who
I matter enough to for him to have sent
the largest floral arrangement on display
at my mother’s funeral, the chapel
as quiet as what we once thought had
been a haunted house in our old suburb,
but was a life abandoned instead,
in a once promising world that had already
seen better days before we all got there.
*
Kevin Ridgeway’s books include Too Young to Know (Stubborn Mule Press), Invasion of the Shadow People (Luchador Press) and Death of the Coppertone Girl (Luchador Press). His work has been published in Hiram Poetry Review, New York Quarterly, Slipstream Magazine, Paterson Literary Review, Gargoyle, Nerve Cowboy, Chiron Review, Trailer Park Quarterly and Talking River Review, among others. He lives and writes in Long Beach, California.
Poignant poem.