I wrote this last year when I was reading a lot of Freud and thinking a lot about shame. I found Freud’s work helpful in a great deal of ways but his thinking on fetishes underwhelmed me: 'I announce that the fetish is a substitute for the woman’s (mother’s) penis that the little boy once believed in and – for reasons familiar to us – does not want to give up.’
Oblivion game
So much of it was true, Sigmund, you who pit the cherry
of the conscious and tongue-tied its stem, who spoke
revelations into obviousness, you king! But Doctor, your
thorn. Dopamine made me a girl shaped like shame.
No, the shame was a container! And I lived inside it,
mute as a doll. I wore a white dress and stripped my feet
bare and tapped lonely ciphers into the walls. Could you
have found the story hidden in that reticence?
You press your ear to the container. You listen so hard.
Behind you marches a parade of shy boyfriends
made dumb in their self-consciousness, not like you,
attentive Sigmund, your cheek against the cell,
moved by my secret world, my sweet female
perversion, unlike these shy dumb boyfriends united
against the erotic in all its ridiculous forms, Sigmund,
my degeneracy is a little friend. Together we browse
the internet. We have fun dreams. We wear a tiny shirt.
We’re a tease. We tiptoe into the fetish club and leave
nihilistically, all this heartache I’ve known, for what?
Sigmund, it’s easy to play my oblivion game. Put down
your mercy. Show me your hands. My arms lift like two
wands. A storyline, the loss of storyline to hot blush;
imagine the entire beautiful party breathes
onto your neck and into your ears, and also you’re falling
forever. That’s where I live. Here is a soul confined
to the body bound to the bed damned to the planet
lodged in its life – so many ways to go nowhere,
Sigmund, look at all the nothing I can do! Brief
Almightiness, hiiiiii. Fantasy makes foggy the room.
Gasps fill the cosmic well of gasps. The mind falls
away to some other place and the body is an infinity
of frisson. Meanwhile the essence of the body
and the essence of the mind, something like I,
move together to the little yellow heaven that glitters
at the nexus of feeling, submission, and attention –
your special attention, Sigmund, its bright circle,
through which you read my face, a treatise of sensation;
I become very sweet with your hands on me, remade
in the image of your will. Is this tenderness, too,
a pathology? Sigmund, you know what’s next,
you wrote this script: imagine we’re kids. You chase me
through the yard and hold me to the soft grass. Motes
of dandelion flit across the timeline. I am young forever.
What we are is innocent. But what of the innocence
that clings, that demands to be remembered,
these geometries of shell? Are my desires a kind of hiding?
How I longed to be made separate from my life,
to be a preciousness cast in a loving and curious spotlight,
so what I’ve become is no surprise. But why? Can this ecstasy
really be a ghost-sheet draped over some horrific absence?
Good Doctor, will you hold my hair and pull the sheet aside?
Will the space it hides be full of stars?
