By: Ron Riekki

Poem about the PTSD counselor yelling at me to relax, to just relax,

and yelling doesn’t help. And that’s it. That’s the whole poem. About how yelling doesn’t help. You’d think a PTSD counselor would know this, but I can imagine him doing a couple’s therapy session later the same day and it not going well and then going home and getting into an argument with his wife. It’s like the cop who gets pulled over for drunk driving. Heart surgeons’ hearts fail too. Bakers bake.

When I was in Finland, the place where I was staying didn’t have any Finns in it, and so they’d complain a lot about Finland

and I went to Finland to experience Finland and not to experience people who weren’t Finnish complaining about Finland, but they were artists and when I asked why they came to Finland they said to build up their resume and I asked them if they were going to go explore Finland and they said they were too busy with their paintings of pains or sculptures of cultures or naps with schnapps and they must have gone back to their countries and thought to themselves, “I wonder what Finland’s like?”

The doctor at the V.A. tells me my cough is either from exposure to asbestos or simply just a cold or

exposure to the burn bins or else just allergies or from going hoarse from screaming myself awake during my nightmares or else it’s just asthma.

I don’t have any kids and I don’t have a literary agent, so I sometimes get suicidal ideation, but then

I have this dream where I get a literary agent pregnant and it feels like it’s real and then I wake up and wonder if it’s a premonition, so I don’t kill myself and instead I go bowling with Alex.

Sometimes I believe in God and sometimes I don’t

I think that probably pisses God off, but God has better things to do. It’s like if someone says how angry they are that Taylor Swift could have an album called The Tortured Poets Department when she’s never been tortured and she’s never been a poet and she’s never been a department. She doesn’t care. She’s worth two billion dollars. She owns a pet human. She invented an eighth day of the week. She doesn’t care if you don’t believe in her.

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Ron Riekki received a Pushcart Prize in 2022.  Right now, he’s listening to Cliff Martinez’s “Sail to Europe” from The Knick score.