As I understand it, I said, what happened with our neighbor
Dick and the police last night is that Dick wanted to have sex

with his mother and kill his father. My wife said, Is that
a guy thing?  Is that something you’ve been wanting to do?

I thought for a moment then said, Well, you know me, I’m different.
I want to kill and make love to all my predecessors. I want to do a second

story job with my uncles, get a belly full with them, then listen to morning

music and have congress with the aunts, waiting nervously for the egressions
of my sister, and have the talking cure ready for my brother if he should ever

come back.  I want to wait in the shade forever for my mother. 
That, and milking the bohemians, is what interests me.

I want to grab myself by the chin and lift myself up off the hook of want in general,
that went in through my back then over the ribs, then in through the soul, or the heart…

man, I’d have to say there’s a lot of darkness out there, like what covered Freud
and his sister-in-law in front of the fireplace.

I’d also like to say that whatever else I am, it’s all been done before. 

My wife said, Yeah, families are ourselves, only without all the “truth”.  They’re the
combined, outdated grief we’re unable to sublime by sustaining inheritance to the alpha

tree, lighting on fire at night at the top of a hill our poetries so the pilot landing
the rescue casino can see where we’d like to be buried in a pile of medicine.

I hear you, I said. I feel a reckless causality of ghosts. I feel like birds that have
all been numbered.   My wife said, Oddly, I also have urges against my grandmother

that could get her killed were I ever a virgin.  How I’d like to kiss her mouth
to find out her victim status the night my mother was born so close I smelled

kitchen smoke coming off my sisters; and then cross over some sort of
threshold to confront my niece when I was eleven.

Don’t I know it, I said. Freud’s only service, that I can see, was making literature into
literature, shearing the rough spots off what would then become the smooth surface of

our magical being.  But the life of life is messier than that, like plaster; as for truth
there can be no sub-traction.  See, that was Lenin’s problem regarding Engels:

you can’t predict where the snake is going to go to sleep, and then go there
in advance to chop off its head. My wife said, Don’t get me started on Friedrich.

Okay, well, I’m going to bed, I said. So in summing up, we’ve decided that we
create ourselves in a hurry in this way through mutual becoming of being

and call that marriage and live here in the skull as an otherness, as well, of course.

I think so, my wife said.  In point of fact, she went on, the wolf is what snow made
to talk with the moon, its yell the earth’s first Chautauqua, giving wind instrument,

factoring loneliness, this initial symphony.

That’s right, I said.  Okay, so it’s only god who suffers.
Ah, her majesty, my wife said, picking up her book to read.