Why I Hate Therapy

This isn’t my first time in therapy—
first when I was five, after watching
an electric company worker die
of electrocution and fall to my front yard
like Icarus, scorched wings and burned
hands still twitching; when I was eight,
after my father ran off with my college fund
and a woman firefighter; at ten, when my father’s
fourth wife smacked me across the living room
of her apartment, breaking my nose, and bled
all over her white carpet; when I was thirteen,
after leaving a suicide note in my mother’s lunch.

This time is no different.

I sit in your leather chair, my hair
hiding my face. You ask if I’ve lost
weight recently; I shrug. When you ask
how I sleep, I tell you I hardly sleep,
wake frequently. I don’t tell you
about the fragments of dream
stuck like pottery shards in my face
when I wake up too early, too often.
I don’t tell you much; I know you resort

to noting my body language on your legal pad.

I am conscious of observation
from the moment I walk into
your office, when I sit down to wait
in those black directors’ chairs.
I move aside outdated magazines,
reject Newsweek, People,
Martha Stewart Living. I pick up
a weekly science journal three months old
and read the few articles I understand.

You don’t look at what I’m reading.

Instead, you ask me about my writing.
I tell you I’ve written about everything
from dead bugs caught in my kitchen window
to a preacher having a midlife crisis. You point out
the dead roach in your fluorescent light.
I look up so I don’t have to make eye contact
and say the shape is too vague to prove
that it’s a roach for sure. You say,
sometimes you just know things.
Why don’t you tell me what you know
about what’s going on. I stop smiling,
stare at a news article about you
and bonsai trees. I can’t tell you.