Twenty years of Death while your beard turns grey,
I think of you writing all those words with the Monster strapped to your head,
Or at night with the Monster removed and you without a face.
I think of you needing Him to smoke your cigars,
Cursing Him till the day Death finally gnaws through.
The Monster dry, or wet with saliva from your pleasure mouth,
Mouth that isn’t a mouth.
Where does your tongue live without a mouth?
Does it seek out familiar bottom jaw, not daring to confront the infinite cavity above?
The Son of Man hath not where to lay his head.
Death ate you alive, Sigmund. Death made you smell.
The little boy with the pretty face by his father’s side
Is eaten up and gone. Death didn’t even leave him a face.
Cancer, inexorably, like Life, ate it all.
Will Death eat me too, Sigmund?
And all my little children?
What Monsters will they have strapped to their innocent faces?
The Secret lived as close to you, Sigmund,
As anyone — so close it grated in your ear.
It puffed your cigars for you
While you escaped its pain to the far continents of the mind.
With all your knowledge and wisdom, Sigmund,
Can you tell me it isn’t so?
I want the burning winter leaves to leap out of the fire
And grow on the trees again.
27 December 2004