(De)colonial Therapy

The cat releases his urine on
your side of the bed
where it neatly
pools in the indention
you nightly rest your head

How am I to infer this male urine?
A stream of (un)consciousness?
Relief(-lease) to my neuroses?
A psychoanalytical sweet caress?

The cat releases his yearning
on my side of the bed
Westernized tentacles of Thought
Colon(-ized) instinctual urges
s(M)other the Matriarch’s head

My dynamic unconscious reaches
to strangle the cat, my past life
extends a hand to stroke fixations,
relief with each sleek touch

The cat (wise old man) releases his Jungian
approach, vicissitudes flood my bed-
lam. The body politic morphs, treaty lines
blackened with cedar charcoal. Your
Urban Indian complex(ations), fix(you)ations thunder and split
                                                                       lightning
                                                          awakens
                                                                         oppressed
                                                                                    id
                                                                                          cathars(eizing)
                                                                                  soles
                                                                    limbs
                                                     head

Copyright © 2021 by Esther Belin. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 25, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.

Subscribe to the Poem-a-Day Podcast 

  

“This poem uses psychoanalytical thought to comprehend an Indigenous psyche; the poem is irony. If not every Indigenous person on the planet, then most carry and/or are working on healing from intergenerational/historical trauma. I have been doing my personal work for decades and am at a place where writing and educating folx about the process is no longer re-traumatizing. Enjoy this offering and celebrate with me in the revitalization of Indigenous poetics.”
—Esther Belin