A cigar is just a cigar

Freud and the penis shaped cigar clenched between his teeth
stare at me from beneath everything I've ever written.
Clearly, he says, this obsession with monsters stems from
a childhood trauma. You're in love with deadly women
because your mother never loved you. You're in love with
the devil because your father never loved you. Your sexual
repression has led to isolation. Your isolation has led to
this anxious pathology.

Why darling, he says, and the cigar jumps, everyone
knows the girl you wrote into this labyrinth is you.
Once you address the source of your problems,
this unhealthy writing compulsion will cease.

So I cut my hair and left my basement for the first time
in twenty years. I took the bus to the center of the city
and spent half a lifetime in warm dens and nicotine smoke,
in bars full of women with amorphous eyes and gentle fingers,
in strip light burst my eyes light, in the back of a stranger's car
behind the abandoned earth. Like a wounded animal I touched
her face. I learned that she liked me to take her panties off
with my teeth.

A burst parade of men and women came to me
and reached through my skin and left. They all wrote poetry.
They all whispered beautiful verse in bedtime paramour.
They all told me, you've learned so well, to love and let go.
You've chased the shadows from every corner of your head.
Your bad childhood never touches you now.

Yet when they sleep I return to the desk and write.

I don't understand, Freud says, why you continue to
speak to the dark engine in your head. There is no
reason left for you to commune with monsters in this
blackened room. Your mother and father are dead. You
strip in white hot light. No childhood mistake returns
from its tomb to strike your face.

As Freud sits there bewildered, I take the cigar from between
his teeth and reach for his lighter.

Sometimes, I say, a writer is just a writer.