In Comp. 3373 you were invited to mull on a line that Sigmund Freud almost certainly did not say, ‘Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar’, substituting another object if it seemed apt. In the event there was plenty about cigars as substitutes and not so much about their substitutes as substitutes. A word in praise of Frank McDonald’s lovely poem about the transformations wrought by imagination and Gail White’s ‘Cat is simply cat’. Also deserving of a mention: Alex Steelsmith, Janine Beacham (‘Cigars are just cigars, no deep complex… Good Lord, stop thinking everything is sex!’) and George Simmers, whose poem ends:
Then he, being an utter bastard,
Quoted Kipling to provoke:
‘A woman is only a woman,
But a good cigar is a smoke.’
The following win £25.
Perusing Ludwig Wittgenstein I read
‘The world is everything that is the case’.
Does this mean, as my mother would have said,
A place for everything then? Watch this space.
Perhaps not. Moving on, do I recall
A Freudian apocryphal aperçu
That sometimes a cigar is literal?
It all depends upon your point of view.
‘A rose is a rose is a rose, avers
The modernist virtuoso Gertrude Stein.
This famous insight or soundbite of hers –
Obscure tautology – is not my line.
I sought to plumb the secret core of ‘is’,
Discovering what I always feared:
That isness is a complicated quiz.
Ontology is frankly rather weird.
Basil Ransome-Davies
Cigars can be Churchillian:
Calm. In control. Iconic;
Like Groucho’s, vaudevillian;
Pacino’s: chilled, sardonic,
Exuding masculinity,
Epitome of cool,
Or Roger Moore’s: virility –
‘Name’s Bond. Nobody’s fool.’
Some smoke it presidentially
Like Eisenhower or Clinton,
Who, strictly confidentially,
Would give one to his intern.
Sometimes cigars are just cigars, Fidel:
A bundle of tobacco leaves to light -–
Except, of course, for that one, truth to tell:
With added CIA sweet dynamite.
David Silverman
Sometimes, it’s really a phallus,
Priapic, a symbol of lust –
Belongs to a bloke who is bulging with smoke,
And ready to thrum or to thrust.
Sometimes it’s made out of chocolate
And filled with pistachio paste –
It won’t burn your lung, but explodes on your tongue
With a moreish and glorious taste.
Sometimes it shows off your status:
Take Churchill, or Castro, Capone;
For Groucho, George Burns, it was part of their turns –
Add in Dietrich, Mark Twain and Stallone.
But cigars, which are simply cigars,
Keep the mouth and the larynx employed –
Till the sinister sloth of the cancerous growth
That killed Desi Arnaz and Herr Freud.
Bill Greenwell
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,
they’re nothing more than what they are,
a bunch of leaves slow-dried and rolled
then lit, inhaled – and yet you’re told
the phallic symbol ’twixt your lips
can lead the way to Freudian slips.
Feelings of success or failure
all boil down to genitalia;
never feel you have to smother
fantasies about your mother!
Your carnal thoughts remain unchecked –
or possibly you may suspect
that all this psycho-talk’s a joke?
Then cheer up, folks, and have a smoke,
analysis has gone too far,
sometimes a cigar is just… a cigar.
Sylvia Fairley
He loved her madly, lavished all his time
attending to her constant changing needs,
kept her secure, untroubled by the grime
days threw into her path, inventing deeds
of cosseting attention, watching for
the smallest sign requesting he address
her wants, her inner cravings – not a chore
but proving his devotion was finesse.
His wife, however, wasn’t quite so keen,
calling it an obsession – the way men
get hooked up on perfection, some machine
making them youthful (in their eyes) again.
Perhaps this time his choice was just a blip:
falling for hi-tech kit could go too far
and sink their burgeoning relationship.
Sometimes a car, she said, is just a car.
D.A. Prince
Freud never, even in his wildest dreams,
Would say that things are simply what they are,
Nothing known to Freud was as it seems,
Cigar to him meant more than a cigar.
A man’s cigar might symbolise a sweet,
A shroud or cloak of smoke to hide behind,
An adult’s substitution for the teat,
Or sign of being prosperous and refined.
Cigars, transformed in wartime urchins’ eyes,
Were barrage balloons or zeppelins; all kinds
Of flying objects soaring through the skies
Cigars became in their creative minds.
Freud was a force who challenged every word
And saw in stars far more than merely stars,
He surely would have deemed it quite absurd
To say cigars are sometimes just cigars.
Alan Millard
No. 3376: Suite memories
We are told that avocado bathrooms are making a comeback. You are invited to submit a poem about interior decor fashions of yesteryear (16 lines maximum). Please email entries to competition@spectator.co.uk by 13 November.
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