I took a class at the Freud Museum.
Later, at dinner, I felt abjection.
Believing the pork was human flesh,
I spat in my napkin, actually retched.
My skin was reactive, so I scratched,
didn’t converse, became detached.
(My mother called that barbarism;
per Freud, it’s a form of narcissism.)
I contemplated Totem and Taboo,
the primal horde, the exogamy rule,
and the smell in the flat that my family claimed
I imagined—my nerves were blamed.
But the plumber confirmed I did smell fumes
rising from the downstairs rooms,
an indication of escaping gas
from leaky pipes in the original house
to a leaky unconscious compelled to use
images and vocab linked with Jews,
like Levitical laws and Nazi crimes,
amid the bathos of insistent rhymes.
When Saint Basil defined the Holy Spirit
as “not subordinate, not disparate,”
the Arian council refused to hear it.
Refuse to hear it ≈ refuse to bear it;
refuse to bear it ≈ refuse to spare it.
What holy spirit invaded my flat?
One theory posits that gas emissions
triggered the oracles’ premonitions.