Informant38

{meta-Freudian ninja riposte}

Talking Cure

...The doctor believed that if she had been a normal girl

A house was on fire.
she would have responded with the attraction natural
at fourteen, not this blunt disgust. Diagnosis: hysteria.
Reversal of affect, displacement of sensation. Basically,

My father was standing

beside my bed
she was a prick tease, for her would-be lover must have
gathered from numerous signs (a man knows such things)
that he was secure in the girl's affections before proceeding.

and woke me up....

Cathleen Calbert
in the magazine Hotel Amerika

via Poetry Daily January 23, 2003