From the Therapist / Client Series

CLIENT on a train. THERAPIST in an office speaking into tape recorder.

CLIENT:

(to God)

Sometimes I walk next to You, swallow words, theirs, thoughts, collect things.

Imagine a wading pool with whole novels!

Someone said this was a problem, a way out.

Of what? Reality?

THERAPIST:

Patient romanticizes the imaginary. Distractible speech, incoherence…

CLIENT:

Codfish!

THERAPIST:

…Rather than meaningful relationships…

CLIENT:

Sound, sounds.

THERAPIST:

…sounds, sounds appear to govern words.

CLIENT:

(to God)

I told therapist, too many bookshelves will kill a man.

I’m hopeless, I know. I believe in the Utmost.

Or Highest.

(to passenger)

Not once does God write Christmas cards to electrons

I don’t know. What do you think?

THERAPIST:

She’s…

CLIENT:

(to passenger)

They’ll tell you I’m schizophrenic. I see words in waves.

(to God)

Clarity is morning daisies through a bay widow after You’ve spent all night dancing.

THERAPIST:

Client has effectively manipulated environment of thought. Quarantine.

CLEINT:

(to God)

Your poetry plays into fantastic behavior, an orange and red macaw.

THERAPIST:

One fears the room will fill with pages of her script.

CLIENT:

(to passenger)

I hang thought-maps, damp canyon girls, along the running board.

THERAPIST:

I wake in sweats. Perhaps losing the mind is a communal disease.

CLIENT:

(to God)

Searchlights: I cry about holiness. Searchlights.

Hopeless.

THERAPIST:

Her voice in my ear. She’s in mirrors,

Now.

CLIENT:

(to passenger)

How I sound like blossoms. Inside another’s ear.

Hopeless, I know.

(to God)

Someone must have stored a copy of You in a filing cabinet.

THERAPIST:

(to God)

She’s in mirrors now.

Light taps between ear bone and verbatim.

CLIENT:

(to God)

Thought babies born between us. Same brain.

THERAPIST:

Codfish!