Abyssinia

Poems

Rick Ahrens

Now, I louse up myself as much as possible.

Going to Seed
Forgive the heat-crisped petals
on the rug- I anticipated guests.
Look! The fowers spread their seed
in pornographic heaps!
A testament of love?
Ive held onto them, the fowers
that you pulled for me.
Water? Well, I tried, but left
to nature fnishing what it began,
withdrawing with suggestive coughs.
An unintended consequence:
Their hue, though dead, is uniform
and is, therefore, appealing, right?
I never took to horticulture,
so the message might escape.
Please, forget the petals
and admire the enduring husks,
the frothing seeds now prowling!
I take no credit for the petals artful fall:
I left them where the open
window willed them, anticipating guests.

A Moment of Your Time

Winter holds the coat
pocketed with summers
you fing aside like loves
formalities. Warmth
and salty air heavy
with pungent life
returns me to the shore
my mind forgot but
body clasped like
an old friend or frigid
doorknob. A nonexistant
moon pearls the soft
contractions of the water
unfamiliar. Seaside odors
pass with knowing winks
as indolence and timelessness
muscle them along
with amnesiac throats.
Emerging from reverie
and noticing the lack
of snow, I swallow a notion
of foolish permanence.

New Poems
New poems,
inimical to life, survive
by chance alone.
Evolutionary cheats,
they conquer life,
unnoticed in damp
unwatched recesses,
thought dead eradicated! long ago.
Theyre now immune
to our hearts poisonthe universal solvent,
once our only hope.

Sonnet
I see in our fatigued suppressions seeds
of future love and fghting words suffused
with passion set alight by lips refused,
Recognizing you among my needs.
Our words obscured themselves with tenuous,
igniting smiles so electrifed
the fowring hairs along our arms belied
our indecision; this cant be good for us.
No god will intervene with holy shoves
to push along a kiss thats meant to be.
The universe, disinterested in me,
wont help us any more than one who loves
in silence, counting on the lie of fate:
that love is preordained and never late.

Acquitted
If after the frst death
there is no other,
death cracks, slashes young
skin at the nexus
of hazard and circumstance.
There is no other but
the eternal lash dancing
tutored steps- a
dance repeated, faming
the hurried author.

Love Song
the dromedary skin hangs slack,
sloshing survival in an unpretentious bag:
embarrassed heavy-stock summaries of life,
three-dollars-forty-seven newly printed.
I wait on the elevators slow abuse,
the chiming foor alerts unearthing
with Pavlovian brutality
Did the handshake shut me out?
The crooked grin anticipate a failing eye?
I dont even have a briefcase, but why
bring a threadbare high school bag?
this camel coat, a hand-me-down;
did they see the creeping sleeves?
I would commit a heinous act
for just a cup of reengaging coffee
but the cafe workers furloughed disappoint.
Courthouse security
waves me through, an interruption,
the depleted battleground of gravity
and sleeping polished foors.

Deco in the Rearview

the other buildings mirrored voids
only the obsolete
could maintain the chill
of pious light directed
at Autumn skies that beg for sleep
and when they sleep, then we will talk
in spacial negatives
the space between the lines
of the icebound deco pillars
and return to handsome suburbs fed

A Sapphic Ode
A corpus burnt, heretical or obscene
tracts, the gentle glow of fashfre parchment
as seen from Lesbos rose-fngered sunset
blessed us, a great religious work
among few? Time culled the monodies,
the hypersaccharine marriage doggerels,
the nave embarrassments of unrequited sweat,
to their constituent struggling gasps.
Millennial debridements beneft
the published, the truly purged.

Sun Salutation
In the sun
where else but in the end of august sun irrelevant
save to books tricking eyes
with feshtone pages to pupils
that lets face it were doing little for the cause
anyway irrelevant I need my suit jacket
In the sun
Im told Im holding the Holy Koran
by a man whose teeth jumped ship in fstfuls
those determined to sink sharp white tailored
suggest deliberate fraud so I believe him
and chant drowning
In the sun
in the sedated throats and yawns digging
aural sewage ditches
for offce heydyouhears and voting tips
the heads along the Ellicott Square Building
ramparts murmur evil omens
In the late august sun

Strange Weather
lets talk about the weather
strange isnt it rolling
indecisively the lakes to blame as always
heavy cumulocountenances commute
across it burning cherries prematurely ripe
taunting mosquito proboscises plunging dry
into grafted leather insteps as experts
youd think they would realize the anxious
caffeine pantomime arterial loves trespasses
against us dead elevators desiccate the absent grain
and I missed lilac season again apparently
Lackawanna wind mopes in a storms footnotes
listless turbines and traffc picks up early a
stalwart friends repeated consolation
oh I missed tiger lily season too what can you do
about that traffcs jammed along Washington
so I doubt well get out alive which makes missing
the tiger lilies that much more tragic

Abyssinia
Take Abyssinian escapesthe unceremonious end of youth.
Youth, an isolated pool or marsh
erosion hasnt licked
with maddening drops
of glacial pragmatism. Life!
Precociousness!
Endless Masturbation!
When we fnd heroes dying
in the suburbs, bury
them in the suburbs! The noble
rot of bletting ink reeks
best in glossy cafe teeth.
Bury him in the suburbs!
In Abyssinia! Weve dug
apocryphal tombs- torn
caskets! Smashed headstones!
Wrote peer-reviewed literature!
Weve claimed youth- like Abyssinia,
like shipping ledgers
itemizing pendulous
freighter bellies.
(Also art! Like Kafkas memos!)

Weve claimed suburban mud,

concealed its amputations,
bricks, in fawning effuent;
Voided infuences strand
fashion in unmoving bowels.

POETES MAUDITS OU MANQUES!

LEVEZ VOS CULS INUTILES!

Spider
Each summer brings anew
the silk-encapsulated masses
half-dissolved by spider spit
and punctured greedily
by scolding chelicerae.
Winter is complicit too;
the all-pervading human warmth
and odors insulated
by a wealth of crumpled summonses
draws them closer, setting thieving webs
between the window panes.
In every season, every month,
the bodies silky, dead amass,
stuck in algorithmic taunts:
a web thats swept away
will soon be reassembled
by its architect, or worseA new arrival seizing space
with a web disturbingly alike
in pattern. But, still small
and apt to freeze when under
observation, we tell ourselves
it will be different, will be
different, and dust aside
the cobwebs in our living rooms.

If You See William Butler Yeats on the Road, Kill Him

This time I mean it- hes gone too far! Hes
sent me to perdition, not to rise
except to rise in name.
This Place of Excrement
seems to suit me fne!
A trembling bowel, thenPerfection of the Life,
or of the Work?

How to Prepare an Avocado

Sorry to interrupt,
but I couldnt help but notice
your avocado.
Just some friendly advice
before you halve it:
Slice in two and plunge a knife
into the seed and twistno, a chopping motion.
.. Yes!
Admire the hollow left behind
before crosshatching the improbable fat
like an amateurish sketch
of a woman or a man
youd like to bed.
Scoop out the resulting chunks and eat
before it browns, and if it browns
Id gladly relieve you of your justifed disgust.
But assume for now its yours to keep;
Ill just sit back and watch.

Kiwi
Every crime I ever wrought
repeats itself
unerringly
when I bite a kiwifruit.
The frst bite never easyhirsute, galvanic skin,
a long-pig fumble
of hindbrain necessity.
The yielding fesh
bursts alive;
a lambent
core betrays a yearning
to be torn apart.
(I feel remiss
in my savage hesitation.)
My urbane lashes grant
the verdant silkiness
a passing dignity
as I form half-moon illusions
of the ideal
once-bitten fruit.
They open to a gnarled
thing. Again
the satiation feigned, again
the yawning garbage can.

The kiwi argues

for the second bite,
but it forgets itselfits just a fruit,
and the garbage can agrees.

5 O'Clock Pastorale
I blush dyed wool,
hot walking home
and, frankly, out
of place. Ive joined
the ineffectual ( though
a love of poetry
anticipated Auden
stoking Shelleys pyre).
Ive neither stepped ahead
nor fallen behind despite
my body, prepared to yield
its feece; merely
stepped aside, allowing
less meandering steps
a chance to pass without
enlightening shoulder bumps.
To join, to march- I dreamt
in youth of private hells
approaching ennui like this
and swore a vigorous defense,
a sovereigns death if so required.
In a way the two have come to pass,
and this the end result: atonement
on the purgatoric street of begging hands.

A Song for September

Im in an airport bathroom
hammering twitches
with washed-collar fsts,
pretending Im in crisis.
But there are no crises
in September. Only
spasmic summer lethargies
and resplendent
heart attack bed sheets,
cold until noon.
In September every kiss
is crisp and tight
without meaning
and sleep is sultry
with perfunctory arms.
In September we kick
pools of blood and fesh
without thinking
like minefeld child soldiers
and talk about Bahrain.
Saline-drip September,
wash my lips and tongue!
My words are crunching
underfoot and pressed
fat by lifeless books.
These exhalations
arent songs,
just roulette excuses,
and Ive heard them all

before. Two hours

until New York exorcises
fresh Septembers
from my backstage knuckles
and shoves me to the audience.

Annihilation
Night carried
the fnal sungasps
toward the guzzling
curb drain.
A orphan set
of keys eroded
in the surge
and dreamed
of heaps
of conquered doors
and ineffectual
hinges somewhere.
A two-toned house
cat stalking
with bourgeois
aimlessness
stopped to drink
and hissed.

On Commuting
Eyes primitive with seductive rest,
I see only gradients,
vague suggestions of direction
and maxima that, preceding me,
are nothing if not local.
And fatigue withdraws to be replaced
by another morning snow
and the windshield wipers groan,
another scrape across the barren glass,
a practiced semicircle.

Shelley Dead
o heart
they mistook you for a spleen
or duodenum all same
the carbonized remains
they mistook you fed
with a molten fstful
o those romantics were never much
for anatomy
and the brain o heart
reduced by fre thick
to its angers appeals to
the anthologizing surf
o mourners look away
until the fnal split
censored by the moist objections
of the festive pyre
once cool give a bit of fesh
to the missus;
the edits start tomorrow!

The Talk
Lets talk about the birds
and the toads.
Youre young; the beasts gestation, though,
is fast - no match for humans - quick
to haunt our souls commodes
and our words.
All music, birds- all glow
to a wick,
the point of concentrated doom.
Alluring song, compulsive jerks
of bone- a useful trick,
but you know
The music warms a tomb,
and it works
until the choking damp wrings song
to croak. The toad, unmoving weight,
a bitter hunger, lurks
in false bloom.
A shackle-rattle long,
too sedate,
an idle croak in portent girds
all thoughtless birdsongs, soon corrodes
the words of youth- the fate
of the throng.

In the Synapse
warm neural haven please
weve had our disagreements
terrible disagreements but
though your axons point
fngers splayed
in indecision
you seem intent on my departure
I wont protest
you raised me far too well
your benevolence
accepts all even the weakest
but I wont protest
Ive fermented neuroplasmic
all potential in a way
but at your urging now
the oily corridor awaits
the gap
between you and full absorption
and dissolving brethren
makes the unthought
appear a noble end

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