Occam’s Razor
I used to shave with Occam’s Razor,
scraped simplicity across my stubbly
cheeks each morning before I
began my day as a psychoanalyst.
The depressed, anxious, confused,
and obsessional spewed out their
stories in rich complexity. Together
we waded through waves of worry,
tsunamis of strife, typhoons
of hopelessness and fear. My job
was to reduce those multiplicities
to their most fundamental equations—
balance each side with the other.
The voyage we created, my patients
and I, was a tributary flowing out
of a much larger river—the grand
river of their lives. After we were
done, they had a simple life jacket
that allowed them to navigate those
much calmer waters. But what did
we lose? Where would the currents
in the larger river have taken them?
To what sea would they have sailed?
At what port would they have landed?
Charlie Brice won the 2020 Field Guide Poetry Magazine Poetry Contest and placed third in the 2021 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Prize. His tenth poetry collection is A Brief History of the Sixties (Alien Buddha Press, 2026). His poetry has been nominated for the Best of Net Anthology and the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Atlanta Review, The Honest Ulsterman, Ibbetson Street, Chiron Review, The MacGuffin, and elsewhere.
