That way Dude Freud might realize that a cigar is seldom crude.
He’d grin beneath his bristled beard,
And blame the joke on something repressed and long interred.
He’d stroke his couch and softly muse,
On dreams that tiptoe in our shoes,
On Oedipal sons and watchful mums,
On guilt that hums and thumb-sucks thumbs.
He charted slips of tongue and pen,
Found meaning hiding now and then
In teacups tipped or doors half-shut—
In every “if” that masked a “but.”
Yet while he mapped the psyche’s seas
With tidy Latin phrases meant to tease,
He dosed himself with snowy cheer—
A little cocaine now and here.
At first he praised the powdered light,
A tonic for the weary night,
For headaches, gloom, and nasal woes—
He wrote it up in glowing prose.
But chemicals, like dreams, expand;
They take the mind by subtle hand.
The doctor doctoring despair
Found stimulation everywhere.
Analysis became his art:
Lie down, speak up, disrobe the heart.
Free associate—no censoring guard—
Let mother, father, cat, and card
Drift upward from the basement mind
Where id and ego intertwine.
The id, he said, wants cake and kiss.
The superego hisses, “Cease and desist.”
The ego, sweating in between,
Attempts diplomacy unseen.
We are, he thought, conflicted beasts,
Hosting rival inner feasts—
Desire and duty, shame and need,
The wish to wound, the urge to plead.
Civilization, thinly spread,
Keeps primal thunder in the head.
Scratch the varnish—rage and lust
Rise up from evolutionary dust.
And still he’d argue, calm and shrewd,
That Freud need not quite rhyme with Lewd;
For though our drives are dark and broad,
They’re merely human—hardly odd.
So raise a couch to Herr Professeur,
Of dreams, defenses, and demur—
Who sniffed the soul, both high and low,
And told us what we didn’t know:
That every joke and every feud
May hide a wish both fierce and rude—
And somewhere, under thought’s façade,
A child still bargains with his God.