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Friday, May 02, 2025

TOXIC HYPERMADNESS

by Ron Riekki




“Hazing investigation into Mt. Ararat hockey team found pattern of ‘sexually inappropriate conduct’”

Portland Press Herald, April 29, 2025

 

“Onondaga DA to Westhill Lax Players Involved in Alleged Hazing: Turn Yourself In”

Finger Lakes Daily News, April 30, 2025

 

 

If you ask how long the effects of hazing lasts,

it’s till the end of poems.  No, longer.  As long

as the sleep of death.  It’s the length of a billion

leaves.  It’s the memory of dark in the middle

of your noon.  It’s fear ingrained in your home.

 

It’s moon in your chest.  It’s Macbeth debted

in the desks of my amygdala.  It’s absence of

absence when you just want peace.  It’s shaking

all night like an earthquake’s in your skin.  It’s

stronger.  Sin.  A hazmat at the door.  It’s a core

 

of pure Hell.  I know.  I was there, enlisted,

military, duct-taped mouths, ensuring futures

of gloom in your best days.  It’s essays I write

in the nightmares of night where I replay all

the replays of the fence and the ice in our eyes

 

when they gathered like witches, no, much

worse, more male, and more morbid, murmurs

of curse words and curses of teens carrying

canteens with jock-minds and abusive dads

recreating wrecks that had us calling suicide

 

hotlines for years with the gore of agoraphobia

from the memories of fence, but the problem

of your problem is forgetting our resilience,

all of those who have been hazed and are

battling the battles of the past—all the bullies

 

of the world can kiss my goddamn ass.  No!

On second thought, don’t touch us.  Just get

help, because you know what you did, and

who died—just one when I was in, one who

never got out; and I was more afraid of our

 

side than the enemy, but now that I’m free,

I turn to poets and poetry, which the bullies

don’t read.  But the resilient do.  And if you

were hazed, all poems are for you.  And this

world’s for you.  We inherit the earth by voice.



Ron Riekki co-edited Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice.