Saturday Poetry – ‘Self-Care Is a Psy-Op’ by Jameka Williams

Saturday Poetry – ‘Self-Care Is a Psy-Op’ by Jameka Williams

This week’s Saturday Poetry matched with mobile photography/art is entitled ‘Self-Care Is a Psy-Op’ by Jameka Williams. 

I have matched mobile art by @_klimtt with this image untitled. “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 a psychological breakdown: the speaker likens her own existence to that of a clickbait video about a goose with no feet” she explained.

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‘Self-Care Is a Psy-Op’ by Jameka Williams

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 humour 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. 

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