The Untenable

Something within me learns with shocking ease
how to distract my therapist; I hadn’t
thought myself that keen a people-reader.
You see what you (or it) will do when roused.

And that is all the cure I self-allow:
I get to watch her watching me pull verbal
wheelies up and down the street, go skidding
into parked cars, winning no awards.

Perhaps her boredom will at last unhitch
me from the authorised version of myself;
or if not hers then mine, or stranger yet
an ennui that is nobody’s, that swells

within the gaps, the patient’s ums and errs.
Even my lapses are in artifice!
Why talk (like this) at all? Where does it get you?
The room seems soundproofed, inescapable:

I smuggle something out, perhaps a word,
unstifled, keening softly for new use.
Something I have begun to make a pact
to keep alive, to keep myself alive with.