What The Freudians Need More Than Anything Else Is To Acquire One Or Two Poet

What The Freudians Need More Than Anything Else Is To Acquire One Or Two Poet-Minded Interpreters

By Karen Ashburner

_____________________

I wrote this poem in a surly fashion,

though not while drinking black coffee,

and not while sitting in a diner,

nor while conspiring with a handsome man

as to who among us might want to knife-fight

someone over the sullied honor of someone's sister.

There was one paper cut, three misspelled words,

and two regrets: that no handsome man has ever offered

to knife-fight someone over my sullied honor,

and that I have never used an exclamation point in a poem.

In the middle I received a call from an old lover,

and was thusly distracted for a good hour:

thirty minutes spent devoted to the talk, thirty minutes

then devoted to something private that shall henceforth

be referred to as "none of your business."

Also there were four or five pages that found themselves

crumpled into a ball and thrown to the floor,

mainly because a word found itself in the wrong place,

at the wrong time, but was then rearranged and put rightly.

These pages I shall call "practice."

Toward the end, my room began to get hot

and the dog who lives across the street started

barking and I lost my concentration so I lifted

the words "digestive apparatus" and "ductless glands"

from a medical dictionary and threw them in for good measure

because I thought they sounded neat.

After it was over I began to daydream about things

that had nothing whatever to do with this poem,

like diners, and black coffee, and the company

of a handsome man. Though I considered that maybe

a knife-fight was not the best diversionary scenario,

and might, in the end, do my handsome man harm.

So I changed the daydream to an emergency situation

in which my ankle or something was twisted

and my handsome man was a charismatic paramedic

who could recite passages from Emily Dickinson.

Later we ate ice cream from a plastic bowl

as we sat on a bench by the river and watched the

cargo ships pass by in a light summer fog,

and talked about the fact that "Dikinson"

was one of the words I had misspelled

just a few moments before.

____________________

Upon hearing that her poem held the record for Defenestration’s “Longest Title Of Anything On The Entire Planet,” Karen Ashburner was heard to exclaim, “Fabulous. I love being a record holder. Now where’s my prize money?”