Poetry: Selections from Ron Riekki

(pour Aviva) I can’t afford heat, but I can afford cold, so it’s cold as

fuck in here right now,

a cold where I expect to go piss and find out my dick is now an icicle

and my gut

is snowman gut

and my butt

is snowman butt

and my rent

is fucking paid

but it’s not

and I’m worried about the extinction of eviction and how in the fuck

does anybody survive

in this heroined world

and a girl is coming over

so I’m baking a potato

because I have to eat

and

trust me

I know

it’s the one thing I can do that can turn this ice castle

into a temporary pseudo-home

where a 450-degree oven

will make you not

commit suicide twice tonight

and I do pushups

for warmth

but I can’t ask her

to do pushups for warmth

and then

yup

she’s knocking

and she’s early

and who the hell comes early?

except me in bed

and she looks goooooooooooooood

and I mean

goooooooooooooooooooooooooood

and she sits on the couch

like she’s a reptile

and she doesn’t understand

the embarrassment

of everything

and I apologize

and she says

I don’t have to apologize

for nothing

that she’s hood

and that

if I want to see

what cold is like

she can show me what cold is like

because there’s rent-cold

but then there’s homeless-cold

and I ask if she was ever homeless

and she says,

well, I’m home

less

and less

lately

because I work nonfuckinstop

and we talk

and chitchat

and drink bad wine

and we kiss

and it’s a hot kiss

and a good kiss

and a rum kiss

and a brilliant kiss

and a dharma kiss

and Jesus Christ

who ever invented this moment

should be crowned the King of Mankind

and I ask why she was interested in me

and she says

You never said any of that chocolate shit

and I ask what the hell that means

and she said

You should see the guys

they say shit like

“how you doing tonight my little mocha honey”

and

“I love that chocolate skin”

and I want to fucking knock out their white teeth

and I ask if she wants to knock out my white teeth

and she says

You’re a knockout already

and I say I want to marry her thoughts and her breath and her teeth

and she says if I say the word marriage again tonight she’s going to barf all over my neck

and so I don’t say the word marriage again

and we get in bed

and it’s too cold to fuck

but it’s the perfect temperature

to just lie there

and hold each other

like we’re choking the poverty

out of each other’s histories

and she’s a goddess

and I’m an elevator

and she’s a cryptologist

and I’m a vibrator

and she’s a thousand warm blankets in the Arctic

and Christ I want to say the word marriage to her over and over and over for thousands of years

I remember reading Kerouac and thinking, my God, I want that friendship, really,

 

it was the friendship I craved,

just to be idiotwriters

where you have salad in your beard—true story—the first time I met Allen Ginsberg in real life was at Naropa and he was talking to us with pieces of salad caught in his beard, but let’s back up decades and decades ago when they were young and lived in black-and-white

and sped around America in shitbeautiful cars

and Burroughs was shooting his wife in the head

and somehow getting away with that

and Ginsberg was a prom queen

and Kerouac was Kerouacing

like a world conquerer

and the seduction of that

the goddamn howling history of that

this vision

that you could be The Rolling Stones

but not know how to play an ounce of music

just write books

about doing heroin

and fucking sunflowers

and driving

that’s it

just driving

as if that’s enough

to be heroic

but no

fast-forward

to now

with my right elbow

all fucked up

and my lonely as a dump-truck teakettle apartment

in Detroit

of all places to end up

a city with trees

like mice

and the writers I know

are hermits

and don’t drive

can’t drive

because of their eyes

or their alternators gone

or they live in the depths of the igloos of Alaska

and have gone off the grid

because the grid sucks

and so it’s just me

as if

there is no generation

at all

no generations

ever

just the beat

part

being beat

up

where I was jumped

a dozen of them

and they shattered my collarbone

and I couldn’t sue

because I had no money

have no money

but I’m writing

pretending

that Burroughs is in my elbows

and Ginsberg is in my cock

and Kerouac is my skull

as if

I’m a generation

all

by myself

imagining

someone

stumbles

on

one of my poems

and thinks,

Well, that was fucking odd,

let’s read another,

and they do

and that

now

is as good

as impregnating half of Connecticut.

I was stationed on an island

 

in the military

where a guy

drank himself to death

in his barracks

during the war

and he wanted to die

I think

in the war

but he didn’t

just

instead

dying

during

the war

and I put in a chit

asking to go to the front lines

and they denied

it

saying

I was in a critical billet

and so I had to stay

on that goddamn island

where the B52s took off

and dropped a hundred thousand tons

of a hundred thousand bombs

killing a hundred thousand people

and now

it’s

me

midnight

on the top floor of the barracks

with the moonlight fucking the ocean nearby

and the barracks

across from mine

with the CAUTION TAPE

wrapping around the area

where they found his

dead body

and the tape

swaying

in the wind

like a swing set

like a ghost

was sitting

on a swing set

rocking back and forth

looking at me

shaking its ghost-head

because it realizes

I’m

wasting my life.

This is a poem filled with love and peace and it won’t have that guy from three decades ago

 

when I was working on the ambulance

and he got both of his feet chopped off

in a car wreck and I won’t tell you how

his feet got chopped off, but he was still

alive, and he was dragging himself across

the road and it was rural Florida, rural as

 

fuck, and the bulrush was shaking in

the wind behind him and the alligators

all over the state were drooling for his

feet and the pain of the world was like

a Mozart song in the back of God’s big

throat and I remember my partner who

 

was looking at the guy who kept pulling

his body towards us and my partner was

only nineteen and he looked like he just

now realized we’re all living in hell at

any second, that everything can change

faster than you can light a piano on fire.

We’re at a bar and my friend says his balls are driving him crazy

And this is what alcohol does,

opens you up

like a can opener

and you just spit

everything out

that you’re thinking

in that big cobwebby head of yours

and so he starts telling me about his balls

and it’s rat-a-tat-tat,

no stopping him now,

only way to stop him

would be to kill him,

so he tells me that he doesn’t know

if the madness

of the itch

is coming

from him fucking

a girl he met

on Tinder

or if it’s

because he shaved his balls

for the Tinder date

and I ask if he used a condom

and he says no

and he says he only put the tip in though,

just the tip,

and I don’t explore that,

but he asks me if I think he caught something

from her

or if

the insane amount of itching

is from him shaving

and I ask what the girl he fucked

does for a living

and he said, “kindergarten teacher”

so I said, Oh, if that’s the case,

you’re good to go.

They’re all clean.

All of ‘em.

There’s not one kindergarten teacher

in the world

that has syphilis

or the clap

or maybe the clap

is the same thing as syphilis,

but no matter,

kindergarten teachers

wash their hands

all the time,

so it’s impossible

to catch anything

from their vaginas,

and he says, “You’re no help”

and I say,

If you want a serious answer, well,

then,

is it the first time you shaved your balls?

and he says yes

and I say, if that’s the case,

then you’re not used to the itching.

Shaving your balls

can cause

an itching that’ll make

you want

to cut the fuckers off.

Trust me.

And he studies me

like Sherlock Holmes

looking at a prostitute

who was the only one

at the scene of the crime

in the alleys of London

and I say, But the thing is this:

the hair on your balls

is there for a reason.

It’s to protect you.

People who are hairy down there

are less likely to get gonorrhea

and shit like that,

because the gonorrhea

gets all caught up in the hair.

It’s like a barbed-wire fence.

Pubes are a barbed-wire fence.

So why would you want to chop down

your barbed-wire fence?

and he looks at me

and says, “You’re a weird fuck”

and I look at him and say,

You think that’s weird.

I’m gonna go home

and write a poem about this.

And you know what’s even weirder—

is if it gets published.

And what’s even weirder than that

is if some film director

stumbles upon the poem

and decides they want to make a short film of it,

adapt it for the silver screen

and there it is—

you,

up there,

some actor playing the part of you

talking about your balls.

That’s how fucking bizarre the world is.

And he drinks a whole shitload more

and we go out into the parking lot

later

and the moon is pregnant

and angry

and diseased

as it should be

and he collapses onto the concrete

and he’s all lit up by the streetlights

and that’s the end of the poem

and that’s the end of the movie

and that’s the end of the world.

Ron Riekki has been awarded a 2014 Michigan Notable Book, 2015 The Best Small Fictions, 2016 Shenandoah Fiction Prize, 2016 IPPY Award, 2019 Red Rock Film Fest Award, 2019 Best of the Net finalist, 2020 Dracula Film Festival Vladutz Trophy, 2019 Très Court International Film Festival Audience Award and Grand Prix, 2020 Rhysling Anthology inclusion, and 2022 Pushcart Prize.  Right now, Riekki's listening to Electric Light Orchestra's "10538 Overture."