Come to think of
it, I never speak of Mom
much now, though I go on and on about Dad.
My generation's given "Mom" a beating.
I think there's no son who hasn't got his gun
out for the old dear--the dear in the headlights!
Think it could be, like, you know, like . . .
Freud?
Speaking of
beatings, who's taken more than Freud,
lately? From the belly of "The Beast," not Mom's:
Shtand ze kike against zer vall! Aim ze headlights .
. .
But why beat Freud instead of dear old Dad?
Dad's the one who's always pulling out his gun,
longing to give someone a "Christian" beating!
Freud got a few
things wrong--that's worth a beating?
Let's whack some Christians instead of poor Freud.
It's clear they understand about "The Gun"--
but what about "The Cave"? No, no, not Mom's--
and let's not even go there about Dad's.
Their
zeitgeist is a scramble toward headlights--
figures projected
on a wall by headlights--
then, once there, instituting someone's beating.
How do you break it to your "real-life" Dad
that twenty centuries of this
schadenfreude
are too much? That this smokescreen called "Mom"
just hides the cave of God-Our-Daddy's gun?
They co-opt Jesus
into their hired gun--
that rabble-rousing Jewish kid, with head lice--
then claim he cut this strange deal with
his Mom?
And he'll return--to give the "sons" a
beating?
No wonder we're devouring poor old Freud!
We'll swallow any tale "revealed" by "Dad."
"I can sell you
anything!" My own dad
points his shaking finger like a gun
at me. He wonders who the hell is Freud;
he winks and elbows me about "headlights."
His diaper leaks. His pride takes a beating.
I shoo him off to Florida with "Mom."
Amerika: a
graveyard, a Mom-and-Dad
beating. Whistle past. Switch on your headlights.
A gun can be a gun, even for Freud.
James Cummins
from
The Antioch Review
and The Best American Poetry 2009