Posts Tagged Anxiety
How Might I Squash That Fear?
Later, I remem-
ber being stricken
by dread of
what they felt:
How much did they spy rummag-
ing beneath the crust?
The Day He Began to Change for Real
He parked his too-large automobile
in front of craft shops, wondering
who was watching him, who was judging
his journey, looking up slightly
at the seventy-three hundred
addresses, thinking about West and East,
thinking about which way was going
up so he could find the place. He knew
going in was a chore commanded of him
through a very brief moment of self-discipline
while knowing that this is the last place
he would ever want to go.
These people
are not the people
he would ever choose to be with.
The daily commute had been tortuous
for years. It had been part of his insanity
incubator, his car had become the prison
that had fostered the growth
of the most severe anger at the most
inconsequential things, not a violent anger,
but a fearful one, an anger that starts
with being born, an anger that starts
with his parents, but not an anger at them,
an anger at what they had given him,
all of those disgusting genetic defects.
.
Perhaps, It Should Be Bach
Mahler adds a false drama to my winter afternoon.
I’m the bear who’s been torn to bits by the shotgun,
but I’m not. I’m the silent mouse, daintily crawling,
searching for approval, strangled by all of the thorns
of ice falling with aggression from the moldy brick
buildings. The scampering of the Mahler violins
makes me jump on top of the stale structures, and
the horns, the most powerful horns with the trombones,
they urge me to tear into the buildings with giant claws
made from plastic straws which never transport
the vanilla shake that helps fix my terrible moods,
but the buildings smash back at me at impossible
diagonal angles, shrinking me, forcing me to realize
who or what it is that I am. The man in the cafeteria
Speaks on the phone as if with his lover, and he’s
terribly ugly, but he creates life worth living, while I
pull the shards of ice out of my body, while Mahler’s lush,
glazed violins sing of unspeakably beautiful children, and
just before the children die, hope bubbles in my silent zones,
Trashed again by a man who is really a mouse, a parasite.
.
Vague Is I When Scared
I sit here thinking, supposed to be working,
looking like working, but thinking,
closed in by windows with metal frames
and a wooden door with twelve window panes
of twelve by twelve, shrinking from the searing
orange and black and wicked violet of all of the people
who are buzzing all around for the ice cream social,
fully understanding that one of my sidebar sicknesses
is fear of social situations, boiling in my insanity,
shrinking from my nothingness, understanding
that when there is no escape, when the fire door is blocked,
I am as dead as the tan brick on the face of the building
across the street, which is foreboding in its effort
to keep me from running off the rails and crashing my train
into a grandmother’s little yellow house with bright yellow shutters.
When accused of having a phobia, I feel one point four
feet tall. It’s okay for other people to have phobias
but I am astonished at how stupid I could be
to have a phobia.
Normies don’t have phobias.
Normies always feel good
about themselves.
I work hard
to feel good
about myself,
but I am
not sure
if I will recognize it
if it ever comes to me in my eternal hell.
The daggers of irony, of my Catch-22, knowing that I boil
in my self-hatred because I am too scared to go be with
the people, and at the same time, I am fearful to go be
with the people because I boil in my self-hatred and the
striking hammer-blows of knowing I can never be good enough.
stillfugue 