Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
Ryan P Kinney Feb 2019
I see you
Hiding there in the back
Pretending that you don’t exist
Shrinking into the shadows
Trying to get a voyeuristic view
Of what life looks like
Through Coke bottle rims
I see you
You exist
Come up to the front
Into the light
Come let us all see you
At least, your ‘ll see me better
Up here
Ryan P Kinney Feb 2019
Inspired by Vicki Acquah (Mama Oladeji)

God Save the Queen
Long live the King
Hail to the Chief
The Lord of all Lies

I dredged the swamp
For the bombs bursting in air
Oh, say can you see
That justice is blind
That we are all color blind
When all you can see is
The White Hot dawns early light
That might means right
Always fight with the Son at your back
And the darkness in your soul
But don’t be black?
That’s worth the bullets whizzing past
A soldier’s job is never done
Never won
A draft dodger’s never run
Never One
With the multiplicity of our multi-ethnicity
Of a nation of fools
That elects a derelict jester
Who taunts our puppet strings
Strikes the chords of the lamentations of our hearts
Heartless *******!
We are no longer whole
Just a sinking hole
A pit of despair
That stares back at us
Look up
Look down
Stay down
Lock down
Look out!
Here it comes
As above, so below
The devil’s in the details
That are reduced to black and whites
We are weapons of mass confusion
Taking aim
Hiding behind His Wall
To build a nation of prisoners
Too afraid to yell out our battle calls
To seek retribution for our disillusion
To clear up the noise pollution
And fall on our knees
To take a knee
Because we NEED
We are a world of truth benders
Rule breakers
Criminal instigators
Unforeseen fornicators
Ego MasterBaiters
Serial verbal defecators

We are nothing
No One
No where
Just present
At this moment in history
When we realized we ****** up
Hindsight was blind sided
Blinded by the light
Speckled with red, white, and bruises
Masks of shame
That we were complicit in our own downfall
The Fall of Man
The blood is on our hands
Be cause we did not stop
When we knew we could
Because we thought No, meant yes
And that she didn’t really mean it
And Boys will be boys
With their unruly lethal toys
That cuts through what was Right
And Left US divided
Ryan P Kinney Jul 2018
by Ryan P. Kinney

We are inter-generationally depressed
An entire army of kids sandwiched between being forced to grow up too soon and swimming in an ocean of adolescent nostalgia, Saturday morning cartoons, Toys R Us kids, music television and other things that don’t exist anymore

We spill out our depression into words, on pages, put it to music and lament and ***** and get it all out before we are swallowed by the same mouth that belts out our personal horrors.

Our guidance counselors and after school specials
(and other things that don’t exist anymore)
Always asked us, “You want to talk about it?”
Then we “grow” up and find out no one really wanted to know. The question was rhetorical.

We worry that we don’t exist anymore.
Are not important enough to exist

So, we talk to ourselves
And repeat it to incarcerated audiences already crying out
While we bleed on the mic
Ryan P Kinney Jul 2018
by Ryan P. Kinney

Door swings open.
A familiar red, white, and blue figure glides through.
No one looks up from their drink.

Nods at the bartender and sits down.”

“Leave the bottle.”
“It won’t do any good anyways.”

“You know the part they never tell anyone about this job- The piles of dead kids…”
“Adults, you can usually excuse as having put themselves into some sort of dangerous situation. That if they really thought about what they were doing or where they were going they probably could have avoided this whole mess”

Chugs the bottles. Nods for another

“The fastest man alive and I still can’t be two places at once.”
“Remember that magic guy who turned everyone into kids for a day awhile back.
You know how many kids died just from lack of supervision”

“Truth?
Justice?
Those are pretty abstract concepts when you’re handing someone’s charred toddler back to them.
It doesn’t matter that you saved 20 more.
This one hurt the most.”

Stars blankly at his full bottle

“What kind of world would I bring my kid into?”
Ryan P Kinney Jul 2018
by Ryan P. Kinney

“Daddy, Why is your porch stuff gone?”
Because the people who own this building don’t have any soul
“My Sunday school says everyone has a soul.”
Son, there’s a difference between having a soul and having soul.
-Same word-Different meaning
Having soul means being able to see beauty
And some people just can’t see
Ryan P Kinney Jul 2018
by Ryan P. Kinney
Assembled from works by J.M. Romig and Chuck Joy

I glance out of my driver’s side window
and see a boy
trudging miserably down an expanse of windswept prairie
big sky, maybe one persistent contrail up there
establishing the general era, airplanes fly
People, still, do not

a road crosses this windswept prairie
a dirt path really with twin ruts
a boy came walking up that road many years ago
homesick from summer camp
he couldn’t be without his mother

If time is fluid, like the oceans
then maybe I’m glancing over as a wave breaks
I couldn’t tell you how many times
I made that journey on foot
my heels throbbing, my legs begging to be broken
my hitchhiker’s thumb, had given up all hope at that point

Later a teenager passed in the other direction
his essence radiating awkwardness
this long haired kid,
just turned thirteen
wore hand me down boots that are too big for his feet,
ripped jeans, and a bookbag slung across his shoulder
in the dying days of July
whispering under his breath
maybe reciting poetry
or telling himself a story
running fast, he couldn’t wait for his bright future

I think about giving him a ride
to wherever I may be going
where more drive than ride
some have stopped driving, for various reasons
some lose the ability to drive before they pass

but then I remember all the lessons I’ve learned
from time-travel movies
the one universal rule being not to meddle with the past
something about a butterfly’s wings flapping in Beijing
and a tsunami in New Orleans
so, instead I honk my horn
and the traffic light turns green

I watch the boy,
who might have been in some distant past,
look on with curious anger as the car passes
for a moment
then returns to the story already in progress

not much traffic on this path anymore
but yesterday a guy came by riding a Segway
said he was on the way to visit his mother’s grave
said she died a pioneer to this lonely country

he grows tinier and tinier
in my rear view mirror
no longer even special
here in the middle of nowhere
until he is yesterday again
Ryan P Kinney Jul 2018
Assembled and Edited by Ryan P. Kinney
From works by JM Romig and Lennart Lundh

The photographs
They lie
in a folder in a drawer
in a second-hand store.
They are a collage of poorly taken polaroids
All assembled before the Manor Woods formal,
Disheveled,
but for her hand on his arm
and her sister's slight separation
from man and wife.

She is the stranger in the waiting room
with fingers knotted in prayer
or tedium -
held together by masking tape and pushpins
on a well-loved corkboard

The husband
He is a fragile scarecrow
filled with crumpled up first drafts
of love notes
kicked through cobwebs that linger
in the long forgotten corners
of old classrooms.

He abuses his wife in the marriage bed,
her willing sister in the woods,
needing one for the power she gives,
wanting the other for what he takes,
longing to be set on fire.

The wife
She needs her husband to feed
the sense of self he's changed in her.
Ignorant, she wants her sister
for comfort when crying's done,

She is an island of kindling -
bits and pieces
of broken bottles, crumpled-up newspaper
and other things tossed out
into the ocean
forced to swim, wet
and freezing, forever gathering,
to form a huddled mass of leftovers

The sister
She is a tightly sealed mason jar
full of captive fireflies,
pillbugs, caterpillars and moss
and not enough air holes in the lid.

Without, she thinks, need,
she only wants her lover
and sister to be gone,
the family, hers alone.

The questions

I fear these things will die inside of me

and the child,
too, is a mason jar
Full of brightly colored
off-brand jellybeans
with a thick black question mark
painted on its face.

When all are found objects
to be used for reasons we hold alone,
what are the forms of ******,
and who is killing whom?
Next page