Bill Roberts

On Being Sigmund Freud's Last Patient

My parents paid a huge sum of money (at that time)
to transport Dr. Sigmund Freud from Vienna
to our home on the Potomac, his last - and quite
surreptitious - analytical endeavor on earth.

My snooping parents found me each day manipulating
the machinery in my undertogs, my crystal-ball-
gazing mother predicting I'd be blind before I was
twenty, a mere eight years beyond Dr. F's arrival.

Sigmund noticed my trembling hands, said it was Long-
fellow's Palsy, tell-tale sign of the masturbator, and, as
Mumsie predicted, I'd go blind before too long.
I admitted, to his delight, that I also played with others.

Which sex, he inquired, and I further admitted both,
because my sight was failing and choices were quite
independent of rational thought, just free thought, he
nodding in agreement, my ego surging to superego.

He did me no harm, Sigmund, and little good as well,
for blindness did ensue, my rational thinking slowly
advancing to the irrational, my choices of sexual
partners irresponsible at the Sightless Children's Home.

To my credit, though Sigmund might have disagreed,
I was the first to marry a person of the same sex,
though by then, in my mid-twenties, I was no longer
given to foreplay, content with blissful companionship.



Bill Roberts has had over a thousand poems printed in nearly 200 online and small-press magazines.  One was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2009, another for Best of the Net.  He offers a seminar on how to write a poem a day in 15 minutes, then take it to market.  A new dog, Princess Honey, has joined the family; she hates the Colorado outdoors, pees on the rug.


 

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June 2011

Holly Day
Karen Kelsay
Don Kloss
Kayla McAuliffe
MaryAnn McCarra-Fitzpatrick
donnarkevic
Carson Nunnally
Sam Piccone
Christina Rau
Bill Roberts
Lucille Shulklapper
Jason Sturner

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