VARIOUS POEMS

painting in dark browns



the daily extinctions
cut into my gut

cringe at my cowardice
despise myself & about everyone else
for doing next to nothing
as the innocent die lonely
calling softly for another of their kind

heard a psychologist saying children
will one day want nothing to do with nature
they will avoid the dying as a downer
& innocently hasten
the concrete greying of the forests
lose their knowledge of the joy of a wilderness
unscathed by we the virus
never know an animal not imprisioned
enslaved or imposed upon

we distance ourselves from
ourselves as denizens of this realm
hole up in compartments
connected to video wonderlands
afraid to get too close to the dying

afraid to care

& so humans will change
turn
more
mechanical
less enheartened
less prone toward wanting to emotionally connect
more sociopathic
agoriaphobia normal
obesity eroticized
stone cold killers watching another channel
while their bodies pile up





THE DEVIL'S CARRESS


the wickedness costs me the love of a brother
who chooses to deny and keep peace
rather than burn down the house

my torch offends him
he thinks I am all crazy for wanting to get even

the offender offends again & again & again
stays ensconced in the family
while they leave me to twist in the wind
alone with my messiness

a cliche from a psych book came true
& I still can't believe that I am the scapegoat
in such a banal drama

expected better of everyone
cool & reasoned mechanical responses to data
& they just acted all human
crazed & afraid
trying to save some face

they grew too content in their quiet lies
to want to ever leave the lazy boy chairs
that they fought so damn hard for

I swear on all that was and will be holy
me & that childhood killer
have some unfinished business . . .



agent provcateur



The pain of not being able to pay the bills
the self loathing in envelopes marked urgent
We ALMOST deserve this mess

worlds' got me trained like a circus monkey
bell rings & I jump & cry & RENDER ONTO CEASER
even when we can't afford food

the rich decadent Ceasers all fat and horny
will take away my lights
my internet
my pets
my car
unless I agree to their play money
& pay from birth to death

ain't fair to the losers
ain't fair to anyone

that 2% at the top
needs to be dragged down
and beaten to death
their wealth sent to the starving children

superman would lead the revolution
if he wasn't too busy
doing coke at the playboy mansion
with all the other alpha males



for sale signs




the market that god so mindless and cool

i'll write porn for kids
to read about each other

tales for a crazy cat lady
to rationalize the stench of her diseases

let me tell ya about presidents
the green house effect
the whores in Bombay
and the little boys in Thailand


any damn words that you please
i have a high tolerance for sleaze

tell ya whatever
they want me to tell

prop up your crosses and bosses
challange evolution itself

i'll praise fetuses
and damn abortionists criminal

write out how to hate minorities
and immigrants

don't matter what i think or feel
the market is the only thing that is real


i'll tell the kids to smoke
the aids soaked to poke


tell everyone you are a saint unsainted
a star fell from the sky

got your dummie books and cliff notes
your self help drivel

sure i'll tell ya how to live for awhile
if it makes your money smile

I'll be
the
death
of
us
all



the killer aims into the side of the deer
the round sight of his scope fills with soft brown hairs
he squeezes the trigger
a puff of bright red blood appears in the cross hatch

cheering the killer pulls out his knife

the creature falls
gasping
kicking
coughing up its life
gagging
fighting the dying


the video game screams at us
"Can your killer extinct come out to play?"

The world resounding 'yes'
reverberates through my skull

we kill our way through another game
unconcerned with the shape of our mind

how we create ourselves & our world
comes from our capacity to feel right and wrong
from deep inside of ourselves
in the place where our self respect is born

violence as the horror of last resort
isn't to the market's delight
so we just simply forget the wiser words of our gods
the sense of the Ceaser Chavez's
the hopes of our mothers
& hunt down the deer population
hoard guns in gleaming wooden racks
talk about instincts
create more killers
for histories endless parade of soldiers



the blame game


man's worth is judged by the mindless market
in a population explosion
that cheapens most all of us

just not never no that top few
not the deluded fools
who will whore out the world

that 2% at the top who prefers a bejeweled pool
over a thousand starving children

the ones killing our earth

wish my fucking tv
would quit pretending they're innocent

Play your fiddle !
Watch the burn!




EXPLODING STARS


when the rich and famous
let their hands grow traitorous
they begin to shine like beacons
spewing blackness into the light of day


Hemingway sat in bars
picked fights to feel something real and pure again
through the fog of his drunken mania

Hunter wandered around in the snow
in his bathrobe
firing his shotgun off
into the snowy hills over Denver

maybe they expected everyone
to learn the lessons of their novels
and act accordingly?
come around
wake up
become
all those writer's dreamt of humans ?


Suppose they felt like nothing much matters in the end?

Though the ones left crying at their funerals
stranded here to do the hard work of living
would surely disagree


I wonder if they would like being literary examples
of expecting too much from this silly life?

Ah, but who they were once . . .





the great sleep

Do you pretend quieting the voices in your mind
is the only war you have time to fight?
Is that how you sleep at night?

Do you pretend love is going to step in
and make you feel alright no matter what the fuck?
Is that how you sleep at night?

Do you pretend you have turned to stone,
become a drugged out manniquen,
chic and gorgeous and immobile forever and ever?
Is that how you sleep at night?

Do you pretend the biblical babbling is true?
Dream of heavens worthy of your struggle?
Is that how you sleep at night?

Do you pretend until you forget you are pretending?
Talk the talk until you can walk the walk?
Is that how you sleep at night?

Do you pretend until the world just can't stack up
to the eutopian visions you pretend into?
Make yourself believe you are going to a better place
while you crawl on a bus with a bomb and blow up?
Is that how you sleep at night?


Do you pretend there just ain't nothing you can do?
Is that how you sleep at night?











THOU SHALT NOT STEAL THE WRITINGS OF JOHN SCOTT RIDGWAY... YOU CAN EASILY GET PERMISSION FOR A NON COMMERCIAL REPRINT BY CONTACTING MY EMAIL.

SMILING PSYCHOS

the dungeon of his youth spawned
him drunk and angry


beatings turn him into stone
he feels none of her pain
as he slits her throat


the pervert who played with his dick
when he was a kid
opened his mind to devilish options


They drew first blood
He moves among them acting
like what they want him to be
until he can be the one he is
the one who would drive them away
if they were left alive

he wished life was fair
when he was the little boy lost
now that justice would strike him down
he's glad it isn't real
as he taps on your shoulder
and smiles pleasent



THOU SHALT NOT STEAL THE WRITINGS OF JOHN SCOTT RIDGWAY... YOU CAN EASILY GET PERMISSION FOR A NON COMMERCIAL REPRINT BY CONTACTING MY EMAIL.

WIKKAPEEHEADIA

the free encyclopedia is a joke, I know, but still someone was nice enough to put me in this thing. I now see that they are debating whether I am of any worth. None of them bother to read my work before giving opinions... Wimpodorkians!! I suppose I could care less about this, but there are a lot of shitty comments about me on there, and it would be nice if one fucking nice comment wasn't from me!!!


Why don't you do a google search on my name, john scott ridgway, go to the not so big debate and let these herpes lickers know that not everyone thinks I am 'worthless' ? Because you are a stoned sloth whose fingers are too greasy from donuts to type? Or is that KY jelly? Don't answer- I really don't want to know.


Know what? I am done wasting my career writing in here. . . I have to devote myself to the task of writing something the dorks like so I can be in Worthlesspeeheadia, A COMING OF AGE NOVEL, PERHAPS? hAS TO BE IN AN ACCEPTED GENRE THAT IS EASY TO PUBLISH, MAYBE HORROR, OR ROMANCE?



THOU SHALT NOT STEAL THE WRITINGS OF JOHN SCOTT RIDGWAY... YOU CAN EASILY GET PERMISSION FOR A NON COMMERCIAL REPRINT BY CONTACTING MY EMAIL.

word whores

the market that god so mindless and cool


I'll tell the kids to smoke
the aids soaked to poke


give me a big old bag of weed
and I'll write you up a creed

tell everyone you are a saint unsainted
a star fell from the sky

got your dummie books and cliff notes
your self help drivel

tell ya how to live for awhile
if it makes your money smile

i'll write porn for kids
to read about each other

tales for a crazy cat lady
to rationalize the stench of her diseases

let me tell ya about presidents
the green house effect
the whores in Bombay
and the little boys in thailand


any damn words that you please
I have a high tolerance for sleaze

tell ya whatever
they want me to tell

prop up your crosses and bosses
challange evolution itself

I'll praise fetuses
and damn abortionists criminal

write out how to hate minorities
and immigrants

don't matter what i think or feel
the market is the only thing that is real



the
death
of
us
all




THOU SHALT NOT STEAL THE WRITINGS OF JOHN SCOTT RIDGWAY... YOU CAN EASILY GET PERMISSION FOR A NON COMMERCIAL REPRINT BY CONTACTING MY EMAIL.

judeao-corporate lifestyling

child
they will capture you with sweet words of seduction
whisper honey and cream into your ears
promise twenty acres and a mule
sign a contract with your nation
anything to get behind you
to plunge the knife deep into your back
so they can sell your meat
to your children

nothing can stop
the mental slave traders
the judeo-corporate marauders
sailing the seas of our collective consciousness

sit here a few stories above the busy street
watch the cars dash by as they burn out the sky

this whore of a world is all played out
watch it die


so sick of the fucking corporate
excuses for killing me


BANG BANG BANG goes the gun in my head





THOU SHALT NOT STEAL THE WRITINGS OF JOHN SCOTT RIDGWAY... YOU CAN EASILY GET PERMISSION FOR A NON COMMERCIAL REPRINT BY CONTACTING MY EMAIL.

cogs

I could have been you
you could have been me
it's a twist of the mind
a trick of the genes
that dark god of chaos
scrawls the lines in between
the inter-changable parts
in this crippled machine.



THOU SHALT NOT STEAL THE WRITINGS OF JOHN SCOTT RIDGWAY... YOU CAN EASILY GET PERMISSION FOR A NON COMMERCIAL REPRINT BY CONTACTING MY EMAIL.

revelations of the bloody clown

Hi. I'm dead. My name, where I lived, who I loved and hated is not important to me. Shouldn't be to you.

There is an infinity of surprises involved in dying. I was surprised about going to hell . . . I didn't believe in any of this shit when I had flesh. Then I was surprised all the more when I found out we prefer Satan's domain by such a huge, bloody serious degree.

Why is the life god sentenced us to so painful? Because the god wanted it to be horror filled... in a cosmos with a god, how could it be other? Heaven is the same way, a horror house of blood and gore.

The whole thing with god being good and the devil being bad is all just more of the usual bullshit that the living use to brainwash themselves into plodding through another tricky day.

The one we worshiped as god was really our tormentor, and Satan, the rebel, had been fighting for us. . . makes perfect sense, once you think of it, but the god wouldn't allow enough humans to think this for the thought to grow legs among the living.



The devil, satan, the fallen angel -- he was actually entreating god to end human suffering, telling god that just because he had a need to feel like the humans 'were good enough to worship him,' that this need alone did not make what god was doing right.


God had never been questioned before in any manner that god understood as questioned, and ignored satan's pleas to spare the living beasts of their horror of short, brutal lives.

Satan loved and revered god his father, praised him for every leaf of glorious grass. . . still he couldn't just ignore the screams of the humans. Satan heard from other Angels who shared his torment, and together their disquiet grew...

When he could no longer bear feeling the humans pain, the Dark One rebelled . . . fought for what he knew would be a losing cause. What was our pain to a god? Nothing.

God the mindless child sentenced Satan to remain in the center of the earth, trapped, forever hearing the torment of the dying life forms on the surface.

The Dark Prince cries our tears while the laughter of Christ echoes on high...

True fucking story, man.

THOU SHALT NOT STEAL THE WRITINGS OF JOHN SCOTT RIDGWAY... YOU CAN EASILY GET PERMISSION FOR A NON COMMERCIAL REPRINT BY CONTACTING MY EMAIL.

LAMENTING THE LEMMINGS

I would not have spent
all those lonely years
trekking out here
if I did not think
I could draw blood
explode a few bombs
in the infinite realm of techno words

tell myself that I am going to try to sway
the great grey pulsing brain of us all
play the town crier
be an alarm

a paul revere whimpers a few hesitant words
in this obscure rag where I wipe my wad
harp on about an anthropologist declaring
we need to kill off 90% of ourself
for this little planet to feed us

soon the people will start doubling every year,
then every month,
then every week,
every day....
this whore of a world is all played out
the math just works that way
sorry to send out
another obvious truth to dim your day


So many words wasted
on fucking and robbing banks
time spent in an illusion far from the corporate truth
far from the fields
filled with angry young men
carrying guns
and asking WHY?




THOU SHALT NOT STEAL THE WRITINGS OF JOHN SCOTT RIDGWAY... YOU CAN EASILY GET PERMISSION FOR A NON COMMERCIAL REPRINT BY CONTACTING MY EMAIL.

revelations of the bloody clown

Hi. I'm dead. My name, where I lived, who I loved and hated is not important to me. Shouldn't be to you.

There is an infinity of surprises involved in dying. I was surprised about going to hell . . . I didn't believe in any of this shit when I had flesh. Then I was surprised all more when I found out we prefer Satan's domain by such a huge, bloody serious degree.

Why is the life god sentenced us to so painful? Because the god wanted it to be horror filled... in a cosmos with a god, how could it be other?

The whole thing with god being good and the devil being bad is all just more of the usual bullshit that the living use to brainwash themselves into plodding through another tricky day.

The one we worshiped as god was really our tormentor, and Satan, the rebel, had been fighting for us. . . makes perfect sense, once you think of it, but the god wouldn't allow enough humans to think this for the thought to grow legs among the living.



The devil, satan, the fallen angel -- he was actually entreating god to end human suffering, telling god that just because he had a need to feel like the humans 'were good enough to worship him,' that this need alone did not make what god was doing right.


God had never been questioned before in any manner that god understood as questioned, and ignored satan's pleas to spare the living beasts of their horror of short, brutal lives.

Satan loved and revered god his father, praised him for every leaf of glorious grass. . . still he couldn't just ignore the screams of the humans.. he heard from other Angels of their torment, and together their disquiet grew...

When he could no longer bear feeling the humans pain, the Dark One rebbelled; fought what he knew would be a losing cause . . What was our pain to a god? Nothing. God the mindless child then sentenced Satan to remain in the center of the earth, trapped, forever hearing the torment of the dying life forms on the surface.

The Dark Prince cried our tears while the laughter of Christ echoed on high...
.
True fucking story, man.



THOU SHALT NOT STEAL THE WRITINGS OF JOHN SCOTT RIDGWAY... YOU CAN EASILY GET PERMISSION FOR A NON COMMERCIAL REPRINT BY CONTACTING MY EMAIL.

MILLIONS OF YEARS IN THE FUTURE

EVERY ANIMAL IN A ZOO IS GOING TO EVOLVE INTO A BEAST ROUGHLY SHAPED LIKE A VERY LARGE CURDS OF COTTAGE CHEESE.


Why aren't people protesting this in the streets? Ask yourself that, why don't you? Bet ya can't cause it would like blow your mind into nezt tuesday.





THOU SHALT NOT STEAL THE WRITINGS OF JOHN SCOTT RIDGWAY... YOU CAN EASILY GET PERMISSION FOR A NON COMMERCIAL REPRINT BY CONTACTING MY EMAIL.

HEBLERS TALKING CAT

Dr. Helber came from a long line of slightly whacked out inventors; men and women who were geniuses in arcane manners altogether different than playing baseball or having spouses. Professors and hermit writers mostly, with the occasional sensational madmen and drunks.

As a child looking over one of his family gatherings, it had seemed to him that only the children were sane and at least nominally average in their socialization (he was always having thoughts like that, even as a child). Hank Helber had thought he would be different. In the first rebelllions of his youth, when the hypocrisy of the world was almost too much to bear, he had promised himself that he would never fall in love with the idea of something that only a few people on the earth would care about.... like his uncles who only really came alive when they were discussing their fields of study. The older they got the less they noticed things like wearing socks and brushing their teeth. A lot of the women were on anti depressents.

His family tree was full of people who climbed so high that only a couple other humans on the planet could follow them. He despised them until he was 20 and getting his masters degree, and realizing that there was no way he wanted to spend the rest of his life supporting himself dealing weed and living to surf. Economic realities forced him to leave hawaii, quit smoking weed and surfing, and start working at one of his uncles labs. His moving advance was more money than he had made in his entire life.

The huge salary stole his soul. Within six months he developed needs that he didn't even know existed when he was poor. A bidet that he could no more go without than deoderant, his shirts had to be perfectly fitted... pants had to be creased --he would have once rolled up the legs
and ignored whatever little kasnivel that was wrong with them purely to make his usual second hand purchase.

Now, here he was, finishing up twenty years of work in his own lab, after aprenticing for another ten with other top scientists in the fields related to his field of study -- inserting vocal capabilities into otherwise dumb animals, so that they could express their wills, and thus have more say in the affairs of the earth. Once long ago when the juices of youth were spurting out of his every pore he had believed that he could really help the world, save a few species from extinction.
He was pretty sure that he had.

In his biography, he wrote:

'As my lights up stairs dim and some go out entirely, I suppose that now is the time to tell the darker side of my experiments. That which is too embarrassing for me to allow to come out within 100 years of being alive. I drew up a contract based on the one Mark Twain used to keep his darker poet from effecting those he loved.

I want to tell the tale of Buk, most controversial of historic figures. As a revolutionary leader, his image has been mythologized so much that sometimes I barely recognize the cat that was, the real feline who lived. He didn't say a lot of course, but what he did has become something of the mantra of our critics,

After the surgeries and the nanotechs increasing his language abilities and the thousands of hours of being read to and lectured and all the other little surgical nuances that it took to insert the proper vocal cords in his furry throat, after giving us no indication that he could utter a sound for three months, Buk suddenly looked up at me and said, in a voice clear and modulated to perfection, "That you think you have done me a favor shows me that you are truly lost."'

He died then of course. Well, he might as well have. He wouldn't speak, eat. Withered away."

As he read over the first page of his biography, he thought, 'I kept doing the research, even after that. SO maybe this is when I lost my soul?'

For twenties years, his experiments never really got any better results. Thinking back over this, he realizes that he is kidding himself if he thinks he can take the mental pain of writing his biography... He had somehow thought he could find a little bit of redemption by offering a cautionary tale to others. The concept never really had a chance to get off the ground.


Later that afternoon, his car seemingly missed an exit off the Kennedy Expressway and slammed into a huge concrete post, tearing him into four distinct piles of flesh. His last thoughts took place in the pile where most of his brains were. He was aware of a fire waging around him and
had a feeling that there was a hell... and indeed, seconds later, from far off at first and then getting closer and closer, is a horrifying laugh that could only come from Satan.


THOU SHALT NOT STEAL THE WRITINGS OF JOHN SCOTT RIDGWAY... YOU CAN EASILY GET PERMISSION FOR A NON COMMERCIAL REPRINT BY CONTACTING MY EMAIL.

SEE NOW THEY VANISH

see now they vanish




When I was a child
I swore that I would not live a life
chained to the predicted work and buy cycles.


My resolve weakened.

-___---_

When I was a teenager
I swore I would rip the moments out of their ponderous histories and live them like my last.

My resolve weakened.

-------____--_--


I was a man and I swore
that I would not let my enemies write my legacy.

My resolve weakened.



THOU SHALT NOT STEAL THE WRITINGS OF JOHN SCOTT RIDGWAY... YOU CAN EASILY GET PERMISSION FOR A NON COMMERCIAL REPRINT BY CONTACTING MY EMAIL.

KESSLER, KEEPER OF THE PIGS

Thirty nine million two hundred and forty six thousand years before our story takes place, plate teutonics wiped out the last vestiges of their off planet civilization. No one knew about a planet called earth, or the civilization that spawned their species and sent them on great ships out into cold, black space. They destroyed their original host planet, leaving their once green and blue eden black and brown, as dead as the sterile vaccum of space that replaced the sweet oxygen of the atmosphere.


Thessler, Keep of Pigs, was not aware of any of this, and indeed would have considered the tale just so much pig shit. .. history at that moment was not helping him one bit. He had responsibilities, had to keep the pigs in line, make sure that they turned over their offerings every year.
His job was to negoitiate with the upstart animals, of course; for all times from now until the then, pigs and horses and vegetables had been forced to give humans what they required to Sustain and Pursue The Happy, as had been written over a million years before, in the first recorded histories....

Humans knew that their ancestors had given the pigs and cows and goats and various vegetibles and fruits their ability to reason to increase their ability to survive in hostile climates... being able to speak and tell their owners where they hurt or how they could be happier had seemed like the humane thing to do, though this was of course an after thought of the practical consideration of keeping their food alive as their species migrated out into more often than not cold, dead space.

Kessler watched the newsies on a wall size holo. Pigs throwing bombs, mostly. Piglets throwing stones. Suicide Porks. There was rioting in no less than seven cities down the coast. He could pretty much forget his quartily bonus
buying him a new summer house.
The Cow's were going to be trouble again this year, he was just certain of that. The damn cows were
always tryed to gloam onto any contractual advantage that the pig's wheedled out of the humans -- and the pigs were willing to send their children out as to blow up just one human over even small points of protocal, like where the damned water glasses were set during a particular state dinner.

As Keeper of The Pigs, his head was about to roll over this one. The pigs had been content for over 390,000 years. They knew their history, how the humans made them. Some of them now thought that their 'Bacon Tax' had been paid already. They were even threatening to go off into space by themselves, though they had no feasible way of doing so, without taking vegetibles and humans along to feed on. The abscence of life was almost expected during all the years of expoloration, but discovering it was true, that their planet really was a special place... that their little splash of life was all; how could the series of accidents reapeat again? Not even in the infinite vastness.

Kessler also knew a bit about how poorly they were doing with the vegetibles this year. Every source of food developed on the planet into a thinking species. Now they had only each other to prey on, in an endless cycle.. the humans corpses went to feed the plants, which than supported man and the animals that he fed upon.

As Kessler silently raged about this, he was astounded to see, from his 345th floor apartment, a space ship, a gleaming silver behemoth, glide down from a blue sky and hover over the entire downtown area. He was no less surprised later that night, when the Newsies reported that the ships were manned by the descendents of an earth plant, the Strawberry. And when the lowly humans were marched onto ships to be the food supply for the strawberries, who it turns out were intergalactic pirates with no moral scruples about destroying anything that was not strawberry, he was surprised all the more. ... but, he sure was glad to be off the hook on the pig thing, and isn't that what it's all about at the end of the day, huh? This is how certainly howThessler, Keeper of Pigs, lived happily ever after . . well, that and the complete apathy of the strawberries toward killing humans -- which they found dsstasteful if not out right immoral, and left the humans to live out their natural lifespams relatively undisturbed, and no one really seemed to care too much, after a while, that they would be eaten after their long, comfortable lives.




THOU SHALT NOT STEAL THE WRITINGS OF JOHN SCOTT RIDGWAY... YOU CAN EASILY GET PERMISSION FOR A NON COMMERCIAL REPRINT BY CONTACTING MY EMAIL.