by Ed Ahern (July 2025)
Impolite Fictions
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Hypocrisy is a failing art form.
The need to hide behind platitudes
in order to steal from public trust
has given way to blatant untruths
known to be false on their utterance
and received with fatalistic resignation
that the very bad must be accepted
to avoid crudely demonized worse.
We have lost the distinction between
seduction and rape.
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Forward Speaking
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The only way to talk forward a millennium
is to figure out how we’d have been understood
to those who lived a thousand years ago.
The letters of the alphabet unreadable,
the speaking Anglo-Saxon and French,
most of the vocabularies unknown,
a shorter folk in height and life and temper.
–
These problems will persist with future speak,
our English morphed perhaps into Chinese
or Russian or an unintelligible Spanglish dialect,
frames of reference and word meanings unknown,
customs and mores as distant as Alpha Centauri.
Hardest perhaps, the psychic and ethical distain
that views us as a broken rung in social history.
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In My Image
=
There are perhaps a dozen men
with whom I share unspoken bond,
our foibles snugging up so tight
that we can laugh in unison
at one another’s feeble try
at status seeking posturing
and smile together when we fail
to gild an image thick with rust.
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Table of Contents
Ed Ahern resumed writing after forty odd years in foreign intelligence and international sales. He’s had over 550 stories and poems published so far, and twelve books. Ed works the other side of writing at Bewildering Stories where he squats on the editorial board.
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