I call him Freud – my seven-year-old
General Electric Potscrubber 970.
He forces me to re-scour every id,
ego and superego pot and lid I’ve got –
like Freud, he washes philosophic
while I lie on my couch of a kitchen sink
and nit-pick dried-on pieces of pasta
fused to the brain – strain, drain,
feign to fix the mess, break every one
of my fingernails in the process.

He doesn’t understand the perk of real work;
insists getting things clean is a patient
patient’s scheme, not the analyst’s job.
He mutters the standard “Um-hmm”
and “What do you think that means?”
in those nifty fifty minutes it takes to ponder
life’s ponderous enigmas, like why I stay
in a house where I’m no longer sappy happy
and why heat-sealed red sauces
won’t peel off plastic Tupperware tubs.

Precisely when I’m on the urged verge of catharsis,
removing the final vestiges of spiced rice
turned to concrete on the steamer basket
that is my life, Freud stubs out his just a cigar,
patronizingly burps, “Sorry, but I see our time is up
for discussing dream scenes of screwing yourself
over in the rinse cycle of relationships.
You consciously missed a spot on the unconscious.
Resistant to transference, eh?”

I’ve considered replacing that bastard Freud
with a harder working Perls, but the emotional vault
to Gestalt is a somersault assault of conversational
confrontation too intense for me to trust
to a Kitchenaid Model 230 I hardly even know.