Self-Care Is a Psy-Op
—a meme
I am taking my iPhone to see my therapist.
& I’m all like See see see see listen look there was a goose
born without webbed feet I saw on Instagram & Farmer Gene
fitted Andy (that’s the goose’s name!!) with baby-sized Nikes
so Andy could walk but someone killed him anyway. The goose!
Clipped at his throat; wings severed & missing. In 1991.
Never caught who did it. I’ve been drunk about it all day.
& my therapist wants to learn more about me & I tell her
what the FBI already downloaded: In 1991, I was born
under a cloud of red, stolen feathers.
I’ve been meaning to tell you that I’m taking myself
seriously for once. I’ve learned so much since I paid
my internet bill. I quit hissing. Jasmine tea miraculously
appears in my mug where there once was rum. & now, I can
laugh, entertaining Eric with my strong strategy for the future
dystopia, in which I escape to the Minnesota lakes to harvest
milk from the last of the nation’s orphaned goats.
You & my therapist say I spend too much time online, stupefied,
with the curtains drawn & my hand down the front, clicking myself.
But you don’t understand. The metaphor being I am the goose &
I’m contemporary to some degree. God knows who in this country is
Farmer Andy. But my sense of humor is the webbed feet & the Nikes
are my Blackness & my mellow but I’m killed anyway. You say turn It off,
but It’s where everyone contemporary is having contemporary arguments
no one started. Individuality is a phenomenon for which none of our social
structures adequately prepared us. I am always a better version away from
myself. & I can realize nothing else.
Copyright © 2023 by Jameka Williams. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 2, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.
“I’m addicted to the Internet. I waste a lot of time self-soothing with tweets and clips. I come across a glut of ‘self-care’ online content, creators masquerading as therapists. It’s hardly possible to care for one’s self in the modern world under capitalism. The speaker of the poem is without community. She can’t make sense of her addictions, her wasteful pastimes, and her individuality in the murky ‘sameness’ of the digital village. It’s a tragicomic poem, which ends with psychological breakdown: the speaker likens her own existence to that of a clickbait video about a goose with no feet.”
—Jameka Williams
Jameka Williams
Jameka Williams is a Black poet and the author of American Sex Tape™ (University of Wisconsin Press, 2022), winner of the 2022 Brittingham Prize in Poetry from the Wisconsin Poetry Series. She is an assistant book editor at Haymarket Books.