Arlene Ang

I Do Not Love You, Dr. Freud

Your complaint that you cannot grasp your homosexuality implies that you are not yet aware of your phantasy of making me a rich man.
                                                Sigmund Freud

For months I labored to eliminate this attraction
from my subconscious as one would squeeze lemon juice
down the length of a leech. So you had me tongue
the bodies of rich women until my mouth grew numb.
My womb, my inability to find pleasure in the sexual act
was your private eel experiment. You said,
in dying early, my father had stripped me of male genitals—
hence my being a woman. So when the Inheritrix of Stanford
left me the family jewels in exchange for services,
I thought it odd that you showed extreme
interest in possessing them. Perhaps there was a reason
you refused to talk about your own childhood
or gave injections that heightened
your patients’ awareness of rape. Please be advised
that when I broke your jaw against the safe,
it was only to spare you the pain of castration.
I couldn’t leave without retrieving part of the manhood
you swindled from me. I have found my peace
in the Antipodes and pray that you find
yours as you sip your supper through a straw.
You have used people badly long enough.

Freud is the calm—

Freud is the hypnotic shuffle of feet
across the shopping mall. He walks towards a mannequin
he calls Anna. He wants to offer help, but desires
her clothes more. Freud is the repressed
hunger. This abandoned female breast, turning cold
on the floor, has to be eaten. He soils himself
even as he feeds. Freud is an ensemble
of shredded limbs held together by blue electrical tape.
Freud is what the lightning struck
out of the grave. 1856 - 1939. And he has six clothespins
sticking out of his pants. Freud’s fear of dying
has rotted off along with his phallus,
his tongue, all the soft tissues that were so useful
in the assimilation of cocaine.
Freud is the silent movie where Freud is
blown to pieces. There is l’amour in silence,
but more in a stick of dynamite.
The point of entry is always a bullet hole
in the chest. And now Freud is just another faceless
undead. One dismembered hand
on the mannequin’s shoe, stroking incestuously.

Arlene Ang serves as a poetry editor for The Pedestal Magazine and Press 1. Her third full-length collection, Seeing Birds in Church is a Kind of Adieu, was published by Cinnamon Press in 2010. She lives in Spinea, Italy. Website: www.leafscape.org.