Scratching on Freud
I haven't been reading much Kerouac this week. Or doing any new writing. Spent most of my time playing addictive word games on a Kindle. Been thinking a lot about Annie Leibovitz, too, and the Pilgrimage exhibit that inspired me so. Here, I tried to recreate one of my favorite of her photos, tossing a carpet I picked up in Turkey back in 1990 onto our old, worn, leather couch. Just a hint, an idea of it, to go with the poem I wrote. Oh, to have been a patient on that thing back in the day...
Sigmund’s Couch
The one in Britain
after he fled Austria
and set up shop
hung his shingle
opened his practice among
the hardscrabble rabble
of working class London
That couch
covered with a huge wool
Turkish carpet draped
so it flows like a river
into the ocean of other
different carpets
a hodgepodge of patterns
that overlap like countercurrents
push and ebb and flow
I can’t help but
do my own analysis
of his decorative choices
As I lie down and feel
the scratchy wool beneath me
I know he doesn’t want
any of us to get
too comfortable
The session begins
and my skin crawls
I shift and squirm a lot
I look for one of those
99 cent backscratchers
you used to could find
at World Market
But there’s nothing
Nothing but an orderly
floor-to-ceiling bookshelf
and the Istanbul bazaar
the Bosphorus Straits
that is his floor
I feel my little raft drift
over the edge of the couch
down the antique wooly waterfall
a thousand scrawny Ottoman
sheep were sheared for
My dinghy capsizes
the rip tide of itch
drags me out and all he does
is sit there sit there sit there
until I say hey, hey
could you maybe scratch my back
to which he replies
Hmmmm...
