Anxiety Poems And Quotes

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the day who allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety. Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities, no doubt crept in. Forget them as soon as you can, tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely, with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense. This new day is too dear, with its hopes and invitations, to waste a moment on the yesterdays.

it does seem the more we drink the better the words go.

Into the dark night Resignedly I go, I am not so afraid of the dark night As the friends I do not know, I do not fear the night above As I fear the friends below.

Take a shower. Wash away every trace of yesterday. Of smells. Of weary skin. Get dressed. Make coffee, windows open, the sun shining through. Hold the cup with two hands and notice that you feel the feeling of warmth. 
 You still feel warmth.
Now sit down and get to work. Keep your mind sharp, head on, eyes on the page and if small thoughts of worries fight their ways into your consciousness: threw them off like fires in the night and keep your eyes on the track. Nothing but the task in front of you.  Get off your chair in the middle of the day. Put on your shoes and take a long walk on open streets around people. Notice how they’re all walking, in a hurry, or slowly. Smiling, laughing, or eyes straight forward, hurried to get to wherever they’re going. And notice how you’re just one of them. Not more, not less. Find comfort in the way you’re just one in the crowd. Your worries: no more, no less. Go back home. Take the long way just to not pass the liquor store. Don’t buy the cigarettes. Go straight home. Take off your shoes. Wash your hands. Your face. Notice the silence. Notice your heart. It’s still beating. Still fighting. Now get back to work.
Work with your mind sharp and eyes focused and if any thoughts of worries or hate or sadness creep their ways around, shake them off like a runner in the night for you own your mind, and you need to tame it. Focus. Keep it sharp on track, nothing but the task in front of you. Work until your eyes are tired and head is heavy, and keep working even after that. Then take a shower, wash off the day. Drink a glass of water. Make the room dark. Lie down and close your eyes.
Notice the silence. Notice your heart. Still beating. Still fighting. You made it, after all. You made it, another day. And you can make it one more. 
You’re doing just fine.
You’re doing fine. I’m doing just fine.

Anxiety is a living body, Poised beside us like a shadow. It is the last creature standing, The only beast who loves us Enough to stay.

Perhaps it requires of you precisely this existential anxiety in order to begin. Precisely these days of transition are perhaps the period when everything in you is working..

Beauty and Bravery When I set out to find my father, I was not being brave. I was acting out of fear or losing the only parent I ever had. They may want you to believe I was simple being brave, but anxiety makes more heroes than history would care to repeat.

I am a book. Sheaves pressed from the pulp of oaks and pines a natural sawdust made dingy from purses, dusty from shelves. Steamy and anxious, abused and misused, kissed and cried over, smeared, yellowed, and torn, loved, hated, scorned. I am a book. I am a book that remembers, days when I stood proud in good company When the children came, I leapt into their arms, when the women came, they cradled me against their soft breasts, when the men came, they held me like a lover, and I smelled the sweet smell of cigars and brandy as we sat together in leather chairs, next to pool tables, on porch swings, in rocking chairs, my words hanging in the air like bright gems, dangling, then forgotten, I crumbled, dust to dust. I am a tale of woe and secrets, a book brand-new, sprung from the loins of ancient fathers clothed in tweed, born of mothers in lands of heather and coal soot. A family too close to see the blood on its hands, too dear to suffering, to poison, to cold steel and revenge, deaf to the screams of mortal wounding, amused at decay and torment, a family bred in the dankest swamp of human desires. I am a tale of woe and secrets, I am a mystery. I am intrigue, anxiety, fear, I tangle in the night with madmen, spend my days cloaked in black, hiding from myself, from dark angels, from the evil that lurks within and the evil we cannot lurk without. I am words of adventure, of faraway places where no one knows my tongue, of curious cultures in small, back alleys, mean streets, the crumbling house in each of us. I am primordial fear, the great unknown, I am life everlasting. I touch you and you shiver, I blow in your ear and you follow me, down foggy lanes, into places you've never seen, to see things no one should see, to be someone you could only hope to be. I ride the winds of imagination on a black-and-white horse, to find the truth inside of me, to cure the ills inside of you, to take one passenger at a time over that tall mountain, across that lonely plain to a place you've never been where the world stops for just one minute and everything is right. I am a mystery. -Rides a Black and White Horse

the philosophical cure to anxiety is not optimism but rather pessimism. optimism says “the world is beautiful and there’s no reason to be sad.” pessimism says “look at all these countries waging wars let’s go get some ice cream and just listen to some sad records.

t this is human life: the war, the deeds, The disappointment, the anxiety, Imagination's struggles, far and nigh, All human; bearing in themselves this good, That they are still the air, the subtle food, To make us feel existence, and to shew How quiet death is.

Poem Written in a Copy of Beowulf At various times, I have asked myself what reasons moved me to study, while my night came down, without particular hope of satisfaction, the language of the blunt-tongued Anglo-Saxons. Used up by the years, my memory loses its grip on words that I have vainly repeated and repeated. My life in the same way weaves and unweaves its weary history. Then I tell myself: it must be that the soul has some secret, sufficient way of knowing that it is immortal, that its vast, encompassing circle can take in all, can accomplish all. Beyond my anxiety, beyond this writing, the universe waits, inexhaustible, inviting.

Every day my anxiety is higher, every day the grief more mortal. Today more than yesterday terror exalts me…

Let me call my anxiety, desire, then. Let me call it, a garden.

We have a task before us which must be speedily performed. We know that it will be ruinous to make delay. The most important crisis of our life calls, trumpet-tongued, for immediate energy and action. We glow, we are consumed with eagerness to commence the work, with the anticipation of whose glorious result our whole souls are on fire. It must, it shall be undertaken to-day, and yet we put it off until to-morrow; and why? There is no answer, except that we feel perverse, using the word with no comprehension of the principle. To-morrow arrives, and with it a more impatient anxiety to do our duty, but with this very increase of anxiety arrives, also, a nameless, a positively fearful, because unfathomable, craving for delay. This craving gathers strength as the moments fly. The last hour for action is at hand. We tremble with the violence of the conflict within us, — of the definite with the indefinite — of the substance with the shadow. But, if the contest have proceeded thus far, it is the shadow which prevails, — we struggle in vain. The clock strikes, and is the knell of our welfare. At the same time, it is the chanticleer-note to the ghost that has so long overawed us. It flies — it disappears — we are free. The old energy returns. We will labor now. Alas, it is too late!

Good poetry, like music or a sweet touch, can doctor us up, be an antidote for an hour or longer, help us to get dressed for another day--combat the blues enough to mount the horse again; and maybe even aid in laying down the insidious weight of some old grudge or deep-rooted anxiety. Herein enters Rumi.

[L]ife is a phenomenon in need of criticism, for we are, as fallen creatures, in permanent danger of worshipping false gods, of failing to understand ourselves and misinterpreting the behaviour of others, of growing unproductively anxious or desirous, and of losing ourselves to vanity and error. Surreptitiously and beguilingly, then, with humour or gravity, works of art--novels, poems, plays, paintings or films--can function as vehicles to explain our condition to us. They may act as guides to a truer, more judicious, more intelligent understanding of the world.

UP You wake up filled with dread. There seems no reason for it. Morning light sifts through the window, there is birdsong, you can't get out of bed. It's something about the crumpled sheets hanging over the edge like jungle foliage, the terry slippers gaping their dark pink mouths for your feet, the unseen breakfast--some of it in the refrigerator you do not dare to open--you will not dare to eat. What prevents you? The future. The future tense, immense as outer space. You could get lost there. No. Nothing so simple. The past, its density and drowned events pressing you down, like sea water, like gelatin filling your lungs instead of air. Forget all that and let's get up. Try moving your arm. Try moving your head. Pretend the house is on fire and you must run or burn. No, that one's useless. It's never worked before. Where is it coming form, this echo, this huge No that surrounds you, silent as the folds of the yellow curtains, mute as the cheerful Mexican bowl with its cargo of mummified flowers? (You chose the colours of the sun, not the dried neutrals of shadow. God knows you've tried.) Now here's a good one: you're lying on your deathbed. You have one hour to live. Who is it, exactly, you have needed all these years to forgive?

How mercy gets to exist, where it comes from, perhaps can be seen from the inner evidence and images of the poem — an act of self-realization, self acceptance and the consequent and inevitable relaxation of protective anxiety and self hood and the ability to see and love others in themselves as angels without stupid mental self deceiving moral categories selecting who it is safe to sympathize with and who is not safe.

I primarily use poetry as a purge, a self-medication device when I’m in the depths of loneliness, anxiety or in the throes of depression. When I’m lost in the darkness of mental illness, I spill forth a deluge of words and prose that are oftentimes grim, dark and depressive. And when my poems are spilled forth into one of my poetry journals, I feel a weight has been indeed been lifted from me, and my mind can rest just a bit easier.

Winter Grace It is autumn again and our anxiety blows With the wind, breaking the heart of the rose, Petals and leaves fall down and everything goes. All but the seed, all but the hard bright berry And the bulbs we kneel on the earth to bury And lay away with our anguish and our worry. It is time we learned again the winter grace To put the nerves to sleep in a dark place And smooth the lines in the self-tortured face. For we are at the end of our endurance nearly And we shall have to die this winter surely, For this is the end of more than a season clearly. Now we shall have to be poor, to yield up all, With the leaves wither, with the petals fall, Now we shall have to die, once and for all. Before the seed of faith so deep and still Pushes up gently through the frozen will And the joyless wake and learn to be joyful. Before this buried love leaps up from sorrow And doubt and violence and pity follow To greet the radiant morning and the swallow.

To Hope Oh, Hope! thou soother sweet of human woes! How shall I lure thee to my haunts forlorn! For me wilt thou renew the wither’d rose, And clear my painful path of pointed thorn? Ah come, sweet nymph! in smiles and softness drest, Like the young hours that lead the tender year, Enchantress! come, and charm my cares to rest:— Alas! the flatterer flies, and will not hear! A prey to fear, anxiety, and pain, Must I a sad existence still deplore? Lo!—the flowers fade, but all the thorns remain, 'For me the vernal garland blooms no more.' Come then, 'pale Misery’s love!' be thou my cure, And I will bless thee, who, tho’ slow, art sure.

And sometimes it all arrives at once. The anxiety, the fear, the voices that scratch your confidence like a chalkboard and somehow all the oxygen in the room suddenly becomes water and you begin to wonder if you have what it takes to grow gills. You wonder if you can blend in with the fish. You wonder if you will ever breathe again. And the answer is not every building that shakes will collapse. The answer is not everything that chips will crumble. The answer is this is temporary and yes, you will.

It was freezing, but the cold effortlessly numbed my feet and aching hands. I walked quietly, barefoot, to the end of the block, leaving my shoes behind to remind me how to find my way home. I stood at the end of the street, catching snow in my mouth, and laughed softly to myself as I realized that without my insomnia and anxiety and pain I’d never have been awake to see the city that never sleeps asleep and blanketed up for winter. I smiled and felt silly, but in the best possible way. As I turned and looked back toward the hotel I noticed that my footprints leading out into the city were mismatched. One side was glistening, small and white. The other was misshapen from my limp and each heel was pooled with spots of bright red blood. It struck me as a metaphor for my life. One side light and magical. Always seeing the good. Lucky. The other side bloodied, stumbling. Never quite able to keep up. It was like the Jesus-beach-footprint-in-the-sand poem, except with less Jesus and more bleeding. It was my life, there in white and red. And I was grateful for it. “Um, miss?” It was the man from the front desk leaning tentatively out of the front door with a concerned look on his face. “Coming,” I said. I felt a bit foolish and considered trying to clarify but then thought better of it. There was no way to explain to this stranger how my mental illness had just gifted me with a magical moment. I realized it would have sounded a bit crazy, but that made sense. After all, I was a bit crazy. And I didn’t even have to pretend to be good at it. I was a damn natural.

I'm going to Hell in a basket Weaved in from my sins, Like wicker With little Wiccan ties As if I'm a witch Accused.

Anxiety has forged another weather.

The beauty in being so restless, Racing minds breed wandering souls

My fear extends into the stars Don't you know I never will

Come to me now once again and release me from gruelling anxiety. All that my heart longs for, fulfil. And be yourself my ally in love's bayttle.

Come to me now once again and release me from gruelling anxiety. All that my heart longs for, fulfil. And be yourself my ally in love's battle.

The fury of confession, at first, then the fury of clarity: It was from you, Death, that such hypocritical obscure feeling was born! And now let them accuse me of every passion, let them bad-mouth me, let them say I’m deformed, impure, obsessed, a dilettante, a perjurer. You isolate me, you give me the certainty of life, I’m on the stake. I play the card of fire and I win this little, immense goodness of mine. I can do it, for I have suffered you too much! I return to you as an émigré returns to his own country and rediscovers it: I made a fortune (in the intellect) and I’m happy, as I once was, destitute of any norm, a black rage of poetry in my breast. A crazy old-age youth. Once your joy was confused with terror, it’s true, and now almost with other joy, livid and arid, my passion deluded. Now you really frighten me, for you are truly close to me, part of my angry state, of obscure hunger, of the anxiety almost of a new being.

You sometimes hear people say, with a certain pride in their clerical resistance to the myth, that the nineteenth century really ended not in 1900 but in 1914. But there are different ways of measuring an epoch. 1914 has obvious qualifications; but if you wanted to defend the neater, more mythical date, you could do very well. In 1900 Nietzsche died; Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams; 1900 was the date of Husserl Logic, and of Russell's Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz. With an exquisite sense of timing Planck published his quantum hypothesis in the very last days of the century, December 1900. Thus, within a few months, were published works which transformed or transvalued spirituality, the relation of language to knowing, and the very locus of human uncertainty, henceforth to be thought of not as an imperfection of the human apparatus but part of the nature of things, a condition of what we may know. 1900, like 1400 and 1600 and 1000, has the look of a year that ends a saeculum. The mood of fin de siècle is confronted by a harsh historical finis saeculi. There is something satisfying about it, some confirmation of the rightness of the patterns we impose. But as Focillon observed, the anxiety reflected by the fin de siècle is perpetual, and people don't wait for centuries to end before they express it. Any date can be justified on some calculation or other. And of course we have it now, the sense of an ending. It has not diminished, and is as endemic to what we call modernism as apocalyptic utopianism is to political revolution. When we live in the mood of end-dominated crisis, certain now-familiar patterns of assumption become evident. Yeats will help me to illustrate them. For Yeats, an age would end in 1927; the year passed without apocalypse, as end-years do; but this is hardly material. 'When I was writing A Vision,' he said, 'I had constantly the word "terror" impressed upon me, and once the old Stoic prophecy of earthquake, fire and flood at the end of an age, but this I did not take literally.' Yeats is certainly an apocalyptic poet, but he does not take it literally, and this, I think, is characteristic of the attitude not only of modern poets but of the modern literary public to the apocalyptic elements. All the same, like us, he believed them in some fashion, and associated apocalypse with war. At the turning point of time he filled his poems with images of decadence, and praised war because he saw in it, ignorantly we may think, the means of renewal. 'The danger is that there will be no war.... Love war because of its horror, that belief may be changed, civilization renewed.' He saw his time as a time of transition, the last moment before a new annunciation, a new gyre. There was horror to come: 'thunder of feet, tumult of images.' But out of a desolate reality would come renewal. In short, we can find in Yeats all the elements of the apocalyptic paradigm that concern us.

That poem doesn’t say I have to like accepting the things I cannot change, just that I have no other choice. Anxiety is the antithesis, maintaining an illusion that somehow stress can make a difference, when it can’t. I can’t lie to myself.

with his words in my head I slept for thirty or forty forevers while the grass shrieked and the trees tremored it was crazy letting my youth pass like that giving myself up to the abstract fears balconies collapsing over the east river as far as the eye could see until all is miniature wind over water without end when I am dead I will have something to say about death & all the men stretched out a girl must be a graveyard I am a descendant of fields and want to keep my mind off it, especially

How do I describe the feeling of nothing? I wake up and I feel nothing. I stare out the window and I feel nothing I want to sit in silence and feel nothing My eyes are always tired and I love to sleep Because when I’m not awake I don’t feel anything at all.

Staying Strong When you acknowledge pain, you validate its impact on your life. There will be those who will try to disregard your hurt or downplay its intensity. Try as you may, you will never be able to make them understand how it affected you. How it severed your confidence. How it reshaped your thinking. How you spiraled downward into someone you couldn't recognize anymore. They will not understand how those hands held and hurt you until you were immobile and helpless to reach out. They wrongly believe that anxiety and depression are self-inflicted.

And there you sit. My eyes burning a hole on the side of your face while the stars are being captured in your eyes from the prolonged, there's-plenty-of-time, full attention you're giving each one. And there you sit. And I'm wishing I could give you every ounce of what you give the stars.

All my anxiety is separation anxiety. I want to believe you are here with me, But the bed is bigger and the trash Overflows. Someone righteous should Take out my garbage. I am so many odd And enviable things. Righteous is not One of them. I’d rather a man to avoid Than a man to imagine in a realm Unseen, though even the doctor who Shut your eyes swears you’re somewhere As close as breath. Mine, not yours. You don’t have breath. You got Heaven. That’s supposed to be my Haven. I want you to tell me it sparkles There. I want you to tell me anything Again and again while I turn you over To quiet you or to wake and remind you I can’t be expected to clean up after a man.

Epithalamium Without silence there would be no music. Life paired is doubtless more difficult than solitary existence - just as a boat on the open sea with outstretched sails is trickier to steer than the same boat drowsing at a dock, but schooners after all are meant for wind and motion, not idleness and impassive quiet. A conversation continued through the years includes hours of anxiety, anger, even hatred, but also compassion, deep feeling. Only in marriage do love and time, eternal enemies, join forces. Only love and time, when reconciled, permit us to see other beings in their enigmatic, complex essence, unfolding slowly and certainly, like a new settlement in a valley, or among green hills. In begins from one day only, from joy and pledges, from the holy day of meeting, which is like a moist grain; then come the years of trial and labor, sometimes despair, fierce revelation, happiness and finally a great tree with rich greenery grows over us, casting its vast shadow. Cares vanish in it.

The population of his feelings Could not be governed By the authorities He had reasons why Reason disobeyed him And voted him out of office Anxiety His constant companion Made it difficult to rest Unruly party of one Forget about truces or compromises The barricades will be stormed Every day was an emergency Every day called for another emergency Meeting of the cabinet In his country There were scenes Of spectacular carnage Hurricanes welcomed him He adored typhoons and tornadoes Furies unleashed Houses lifted up And carried to the sea Uncontained uncontainable Unbolt the doors Fling open the gates Here he comes Chaotic wind of the gods He was trouble But he was our trouble

I’m having a real day of it. There was something I had to do. But what? There are no alternatives, just the one something. I have a drink, it doesn’t help - far from it! I feel worse. I can’t remember how I felt, so perhaps I feel better. No, Just a little darker. If I could get really dark, richly dark, like being drunk, that’s the best that’s open as a field. Not the best, but the best except for the impossible pure light, to be as if above a vast prairie, rushing and pausing over the tiny golden heads in deep grass.

Fear No Fear (The Sonnet) I have zero tolerance for fear, I don't mean intolerance of being afraid. Let the fear come and go, Just never let it make you slave. Embrace it all, and the grip will slowly loosen, Then take care of the cause of your fear. It is quite human to have cold feet on occasion, Just know, your backbone is your savior. Fear resisted is fear amplified, Fear embraced is fear relieved. Most fears are rooted in imagination, Observe yourself and all is revealed. You are the ultimate answer to your own fear. Study yourself without coldness, and all will be clear.

despite my trembling. Let me call my anxiety, desire, then. Let me call it, a garden. Maybe this is what Lorca meant when he said, verde que te quiero verde— because when the shade of night comes, I am a field of it, of any worry ready to flower in my chest. My mind in the dark is una bestia, unfocused, hot. And if not yoked to exhaustion beneath the hip and plow of my lover, then I am another night wandering the desire field— bewildered in its low green glow, belling the meadow between midnight and morning. Insomnia is like spring that way—surprising and many petaled, the kick and leap of gold grasshoppers at my brow.

•​Offering gratitude •​Recording and tending to dreams •​Fresh air and sunshine •​Smiling at a stranger •​Gardening •​Beauty, flowers, color, trees •​Sitting near a body of water, or immersing yourself in one •​Walking and talking with a close friend •​Taking the long way home •​Meandering •​Encountering a wild animal •​Pets •​Reading a poem, and writing one •​Drawing, painting, writing, dancing, singing, chanting •​Being in nature •​Autumn colors, snowfall, spring buds •​Walking in the rain •​Talking to the moon •​Looking at the stars •​Listening to crickets •​Candlelight •​Baths •​Stillness, silence, and solitude •​Doing less and being more •​Being in silence •​Meaningful rituals

To the Dead My concerns belong to the living. I see hear touch weigh myself on a street scale I dodge a blue tram In July I wipe the sweat off a shiny forehead I drink raspberry soda I am tired I am bored I write poems I think about death I buy pretzels and fuzzy peaches that look like baby mice I read Marx I don’t understand Bergson I go out dancing with a redhead and we laugh about the A-bomb the red circle of lips a long golden straw my girl in a green blouse drinks the moon from the sky a waiter carries foamy beer around lights glisten on the eyelashes of evening the memory of you covered my anxiety with a hand. These are my concerns. I live and nothing is as alien to me as you my dead Friend.

sometimes i feel more like a house than a person with the way i decorate my body and my face to hide damaged walls and empty spaces; my heart is more like a door with changed locks because i've made multiple keys for people who walked all over me with filthy shoes, people who said they could live here, but they were just passing through. i hope my eyes are not windows, because i fear what the world might see— all of my flaws and insecurities on display like a coffee table or some shoddy love seat. sometimes i swear i left the oven on and forgot because my mind feels like a smoke detector with the way my apprehension never calms. i smell smoke, but i can't see it; i'm told things are never as bad as i make them, but every wildfire starts with a spark and it's easy to burn when you're a house made of straw.

Now imagine what happened when people would offer a sacrifice but then it didn’t rain or the sun didn’t shine or their animals still got diseases or they were unable to have children—obviously, they concluded, they didn’t offer enough. And so they offered more. And more and more. Because religion had built into it from the very beginning something called anxiety. You never knew where you stood with the gods. The gods are angry, the gods are demanding, and if you don’t please them, they will punish you by bringing calamity. But what if things went well? What if it rained just the right amount and the sun shone just the right amount—what if it appeared that the gods were pleased with you? Well then, you’d need to offer them thanks. But how would you ever know if you’d properly showed them how grateful you were? How would you know you’d offered ENOUGH? If things went well, you never knew if you’d been grateful enough and offered enough, and if things didn’t go well clearly you hadn’t done . . . enough. Anxiety either way.

Add Healthy Coping Mechanisms Regardless of how much work we do to heal our root issues, we will always need to deal with life, people, our family, assholes, emotions, pain, disappointment, anxiety, depression, loss, grief, and stress. So we need to not only work on the root causes and break the cycle of addiction, but also to replace our crappy coping mechanisms with healthy and constructive ones. Some examples of healthy coping mechanisms are: breathing techniques, spiritual practices, essential oils, chants and sound therapies, supplements, meditations, positive affirmations, and so on. We need to learn how to incorporate these healthy substitutes—not just know what we “should do.” We need to create an existence where we naturally and impulsively reach for something that builds us up or reinforces us or heals us (a poem or mantra, a meditation, a cup of hot water with lemon) instead of something that just takes us down further (a cigarette, a text to an abusive ex-lover, a bottle of wine, a new pair of shoes we can’t afford).

At the beginning or end of the day, after you step away from tablets and phones and people, spend at least five minutes in solitude. Let yourself dwell in the pause, between consciousness and unconsciousness, between masculine and feminine. If you notice longing or sadness travel up to consciousness through the fissure of the transition, consider moving toward it instead of brushing it aside. Notice what thoughts arise in response to the feeling, then gently bring your attention to it as if it were a fairy or a precious gem. Within this intentional liminal zone, trust where your body wants to lead you. You may want to do some gentle yoga; you may want to dance. You may feel called to sit near an open window and listen to the wind or watch the stars. You may gravitate toward the moon. If you find yourself face-to-face with the moon, listen to her wisdom. Watch for a poem or painting that may arrive. Trust the feelings that long to emerge. Pay attention to longing. Honor the images that float from unconsciousness to consciousness. Even if you’re tired and really “should” get to bed, find a way to express what comes through. Write, paint, dance, breathe, do nothing. Even your silhouette next to the window, drenched in moonlight, is an expression of the divine. Simply being you is enough.

Like drops of water that fall on the rocks of the jungle, the silence is full of tenderness. Whisper softly my poetry unraveling your admiration. In the name of night. Everything I see is simplicity in your beautiful body Like an incandescent light that dispels the darkness Then it bounced on the rose petals in the dim moonlight. Blushing reconciles the anxiety of the soul Comforting a sore heart Your beauty is a flower that unites to dazzle the majesty of the universe. Ahhh love... Your beauty is like a waterfall from the height of a cliff that is so sensual, showing the magic of a perfect panorama. How seductive and alluring is your soft skin..... As gentle as the twilight wind blew the dandelions scattered under the night sky. As soft as a lump of cotton that lay white on the heart rug. As gentle as the caress of the night breeze, flaking your shiny black hair. Ahhh. Let my breath rest for a moment Here, Between two seas of wine flowing red I find on your lips. How beautiful is love When the stalks of a kiss fall lying down Tickling spoiled and whispering intimately about the love that is heaven behind your ear with a warm whisper blowing slowly And Slowly... caressing your face in a long soft moan Lull a thousand touches and then cast your body into a pleasure that you have not found. In the name of my chest. Let our restless tantrums grapple in the flames of burning love. Until our passion quells the passion, Wet and subside. ️

From the Desire Field” I don’t call it sleep anymore.         I’ll risk losing something new instead— like you lost your rosen moon, shook it loose. But sometimes when I get my horns in a thing— a wonder, a grief or a line of her—it is a sticky and ruined         fruit to unfasten from, despite my trembling. Let me call my anxiety, desire, then Let me call it, a garden. Maybe this is what Lorca meant         when he said, verde que te quiero verde— because when the shade of night comes, I am a field of it, of any ready to flower in my chest. My mind in the dark is una bestia, unfocused,         hot. And if not yoked to exhaustion beneath the hip and plow of my lover, then I am another night wandering the desire field— bewildered in its low green glow, belling the meadow between midnight and morning. Insomnia is like Spring that way—surprising         and many petaled. the kick and leap of gold grasshoppers at my brow. I am struck in the witched hours of want— I want her green life. Her inside me in a green hour I can’t stop.         Green vein in her throat green wind in my mouth green thorn in my eye. I want her like a river goes, bending. Green moving green, moving. Fast as that, this is how it happens—         soy una sonámbula. And even though you said today you felt better, and it is so late in this poem, is it okay to be clear,         to say, I don’t feel good, until I can smell its sweet smoke,         leave this thrashed field, and be smooth. Natalie Diaz, poets.org (5 June 2017)

It was through this imposed accumulation of chaos that she struggled to move now: beyond it lay simplicity, unmeasurable, residence of perfection, where nothing was created, where originality did not exist: because it was origin; where once she was there work and thought in causal and stumbling sequence did not exist, but only transcription: where the poem she knew but could not write existed, ready-formed, awaiting recovery in that moment when the writing down of it was impossible: because she was the poem. Her hand tipped toward the paper, black stroke the pen made there, but only that stroke, line of uncertainty. She called her memory, screamed for it, trying to scream through it and beyond it, damned accumulation that bound her in time: my memory, my bed, my stomach, my terror, my hope, my poem, my God: the meanness of my. Must the flames of hell be ninety-story blazes? or simply these small sharp tongues of fire that nibble and fall to, savouring the edges and then consume, swept by the wind of terror at exposing one's self, losing the aggregate of meannesses which compose identity, in flames never reaching full roaring crescendo but scorch through a life like fire in grass, in the world of time the clock tells. Every tick, synchronised, tears off a fragment of the lives run by them, the circling hands reflected in those eyes watching their repetition in an anxiety which draws the whole face toward pupiled voids and finally, leaves lines there, uncertain strokes woven into the flesh, the fabric of anxiety, double-webbed round dark-centered jellies which reflect nothing. Only that fabric remains, pleached in the pattern of the bondage which has a beginning and an end, with scientific meanness in attention to details, of a thousand things which should not have happened, and did; of myriad mean events which should have happened, and did not: waited for, denied, until life is lived in fragments, unrelated until death, and the wrist watch stops.

Cochise Jones always liked to play against your expectations of a song, to light the gloomy heart of a ballad with a Latin tempo and a sheen of vibrato, root out the hidden mournfulness, the ache of longing, in an up-tempo pop tune. Cochise’s six-minute outing on the opening track of Redbonin’ was a classic exercise in B-3 revisionism, turning a song inside out. It opened with big Gary King playing a fat, choogling bass line, sounding like the funky intro to some ghetto-themed sitcom of the seventies, and then Cochise Jones came in, the first four drawbars pulled all the way out, giving the Lloyd Webber melody a treatment that was not cheery so much as jittery, playing up the anxiety inherent in the song’s title, there being so many thousand possible ways to Love Him, so little time to choose among them. Cochise’s fingers skipped and darted as if the keys of the organ were the wicks of candles and he was trying to light all of them with a single match. Then, as Idris Muhammad settled into a rolling burlesque-hall bump and grind, and King fell into step beside him, Cochise began his vandalism in earnest, snapping off bright bunches of the melody and scattering it in handfuls, packing it with extra notes in giddy runs. He was ruining the song, rifling it, mocking it with an antic edge of joy. You might have thought, some critics felt, that the meaning or spirit of the original song meant no more to Cochise Jones than a poem means to a shark that is eating the poet. But somewhere around the three-minute mark, Cochise began to build, in ragged layers, out of a few repeated notes on top of a left-hand walking blues, a solo at once dense and rudimentary, hammering at it, the organ taking on a raw, vox humana hoarseness, the tune getting bluer and harder and nastier. Inside the perfectly miked Leslie amplifier, the treble horn whirled, and the drivers fired, and you heard the song as the admission of failure it truly was, a confession of ignorance and helplessness. And then in the last measures of the song, without warning, the patented Creed Taylor strings came in, mannered and restrained but not quite tasteful. A hint of syrup, a throb of the pathetic, in the face of which the drums and bass fell silent, so that in the end it was Cochise Jones and some rented violins, half a dozen mournful studio Jews, and then the strings fell silent, too, and it was just Mr. Jones, fading away, ending the track with the startling revelation that the song was an apology, an expression, such as only the blues could ever tender, of limitless regret.

In order to grasp how exploitation is overcome by sublimation, it is not enough to stay with this standard definition of sublimation as the elevation of an ordinary object to the dignity of a Thing. As Lacan aptly demonstrated apropos courtly love, an ordinary object (woman) is there elevated to the dignity of the Thing, she becomes an “inhuman partner,” dangerous to get too close to, always out of reach, mixing horror and respect. The paradox of desire is here brought to an extreme, turning the experience of love into an endlessly postponed tragedy. In true love, however, comedy enters: while the beloved remains a Thing, it is simultaneously “desublimated,” accepted in all her ridiculous bodily imperfections. A true miracle is thus achieved: I can hold the Thing-jouissance in my hands, making fun of it and playing games with it, enjoying it without restraint – true love doesn’t idealize – or, as Lacan put it in his seminar on anxiety: “Only love-sublimation makes it possible for jouissance to condescend to desire.” This enigmatic proposition was perspicuously interpreted by Alenka Zupančič who demonstrated how, in the comedy of love, sublimation paradoxically comprises its opposite, desublimation – you remain the Thing, but simultaneously I can use you for my enjoyment: “to love the other and to desire my own jouissance. To ‘desire one’s own jouissance’ is probably what is the hardest to obtain and to make work, since the enjoyment has trouble appearing as an object.” One should not shirk from a quite concrete and graphic description of what this amounts to: I love you, and I show this by fucking you just for pleasure, mercilessly objectivizing you – this is how I am no longer exploited by serving the Other’s enjoyment. When I worry all the time whether you also enjoy it, it is not love – “I love you” means: I want to be used as an object for your enjoyment. One should reject here all the Catholic nonsense of preferring the missionary position in sex because lovers can whisper tender words and communicate spiritually, and even Kant was too short here when he reduced the sexual act to reducing my partner to an instrument of my pleasure: self-objectivization is the proof of love, you find being used degrading only if there is no love. This enjoyment of mine should not be constrained even by the tendency to enable my partner to reach orgasm simultaneously with me – Brecht was right when, in his poem “Orges Wunschliste,” he includes in the wish-list of his preferences non-simultaneous orgasms: “Von den Mädchen, die neuen. / Von den Weibern, die ungetreuen. / Von den Orgasmen, die ungleichzeitigen. / Von den Feindschaften, die beiderseitigen.” “Of the girls, the new. / Of the women, the unfaithful. / Of orgasms, the non-simultaneous. / Of the animosities, the mutual.

I returned to my pillow and comforter, both of which I loved; they smelled like lavender, and were so cozy, poems should be written about their epic cozy wonder. I snuggled against their softness and willed away the touch of anxiety I felt about my mom’s strange behavior.

And they went on. “Listen, the heart-shackles are not, as you think, death, illness, pain, unrequited hope, not loneliness, but lassitude, rue, vainglory, fear, anxiety, selfishness.

It was through this imposed accumulation of chaos that she struggled to move now: beyond it lay simplicity, unmeasurable, residence of perfection, where nothing was created, where originality did not exist: because it was origin; where once she was there work and thought in causal and stumbling sequence did not exist, but only transcription: where the poem she knew but could not write existed, ready-formed, awaiting recovery in that moment when the writing down of it was impossible: because she was the poem. Her hand tipped toward the paper, black stroke the pen made there, but only that stroke, line of uncertainty. She called her memory, screamed for it, trying to scream through it and beyond it, damned accumulation that bound her in time: my memory, my bed, my stomach, my terror, my hope, my poem, my God: the meanness of my. Must the flames of hell be ninety-story blazes? or simply these small sharp tongues of fire that nibble and fall to, savouring the edges and then consume, swept by the wind of terror at exposing one's self, losing the aggregate of meannesses which compose identity, in flames never reaching full roaring crescendo but scorch through a life like fire in grass, in the world of time the clock tells. Every tick, synchronised, tears off a fragment of the lives run by them, the circling hands reflected in those eyes watching their repetition in an anxiety which draws the whole face toward pupiled voids and finally, leaves lines there, uncertain strokes woven into the flesh, the fabric of anxiety, double-webbed round dark-centered jellies which reflect nothing. Only that fabric remains, pleached in the pattern of the bondage which has a beginning and an end, with scientific meanness in attention to details, of a thousand things which should not have happened, and did; of myriad mean events which should have happened, and did not: waited for, denied, until life is lived in fragments, unrelated until death, and the wrist watch stops.

At first I felt something like an oppressed anxiety when I was near the little sick girl, which later changed into pious and reverential awe in face of this dumb and strangely moving suffering. Whenever I saw her, an obscure sensation would arise in me that she must surely die. And then I grew afraid to look her in the face. Whenever I roamed the forests during the day, feeling so joyful in this solitude and peace, when I stretched out wearily on the moss and gazed for hours together into the bright, shimmering sky, into whose very depths one could see, when a strange and profound sense of joy thrilled me, I would suddenly think of the sick Maria - then I would get up and roam aimlessly about, overwhelmed by inexplicable thoughts and feel a dull pressure in my head and my heart which brought me to the verge of tears. At times when I walked in the evening along the dusty main street which was filled with the scent of the blossoming lime and watched whispering couples as they stood in the shadows of the trees; when I saw two people pressed close together as though they were one being, sauntering slowly beside the fountain as it quietly played in the moolight, and a feverish thrill of presentiment coursed through me as I thought of poor sick Maria; then I was seized by a quiet yearning for something inexplicable and all at once I saw myself strolling arm in arm with her in the shade of the fragrant lime trees. And a strange radiance shone from Maria's great dark eyes, and the moon made her slender little face appear still paler and more transparent. Then I fled upstairs into my attic, leaned against the window, looked up into the deep dark heavens where the stars appeared to have gone out and for hours abandoned myself to formless and confusing dreams until overcome by sleep. And yet - and yet I did not exchange so much as ten words with poor sick Maria. She never spoke. I would only sit at her side for hours gazing into her sick, suffering face, feeling ever and again that she must die. In the garden I lay in the grass and breathed in the fragrance of a thousand flowers; my eye was intoxicated by the gleaming colours of blossoms flooded with sunlight, and I listened too for the silence in the air above, interrupted only by the mating call of a bird. I sensed the ferment of the fruitful, torrid earth, that mysterious sound of ever-creative life. I could then darkly feel the greatness and beauty of life. Then it semed to me as if life belonged to me. But then my eye lit upon the bay-window of the house. I could see the sick Maria sitting there - silent and motionless and with closed eyes. And all my thinking was again drawn to the suffering of this being and remained there - became a painful but shyly conceded yearning which struck me as puzzling and confusing. And I left the garden timidly, silently, as though I had no right to linger in this temple.

In the naked reality! In the nakedness of the reality, She reflects in my mind’s imagination, Sometimes she becomes a dream of endless beauty, Where she is everything, even reality’s beautiful personification, In the smile that slowly grows over my face, She neutralizes every feeling of anxiety, And how happily my heart beats pace, In a feeling of love’s sobriety, Then as I hold her hand, In the midst of Summer flowers, She assumes the form of beauty that grows in my land, Land of reality, land of Irma’s dreams, Irma’s kisses, Irma’s beauty, the land of lovers, We tread and walk for sometime, In this naked moment of the reality, Invaded by a feeling of joy sublime, Because I walk with the most authentic form of beauty, At night when the sky is shimmering with distant glowing dots, We sit under a chestnut tree, To experience our love and a feeling that never departs, Wherever we might be, Finally in this naked moment of reality, I grow over her skin like a shadow that grows over something, I kiss her and then her beauty, Until we both become part of everything, The thing itself and the shadow that covers the thing, The feeling of love that covers us inside out, Then when our hearts no longer beat, but they only sing, I hold her hand and experience love with nothing to fear and with no doubt, And this romance continues to grow, Like two shadows fused into one, And as my endless feelings of love over her skin flow, We lie in this state of naked reality without letting anyone know!

FLOAT Like you / my social anxiety / ability to connect with people always manifests itself / as gravity / messing with me in every room / I go into / Every party / gathering always starts / for me / with reeling / this feeling that isn’t floating / but a sinking / up / People talking on the ground / & I’m walking / on / the ceiling Yes / it’s hard / to make new friends / while upside down Hard / when everyone / just thinks / I’m frowning But tonight / you sail / into the room shoes off / dancing / in the chandelier’s / gold hue a spinning top / & everything / I see / goes right side up / We never say a word / take our seats on the ceiling fan / whirring / laughing / without a care for those below.

Your special someone! In the vastness of her inner mind, In the confines of her selective memories, In the visions of her eyes refined, I want to discover our love stories, In the blinking of her eyelids, In the movement of her hands, In the flickering of her lips and their deliberate wet slides, I wish to create our empire of love lands, In the mere act of her standing and doing nothing, Just standing there staring at time, In her thoughts, in her feelings, and in her everything, I want to be her companion, or a mere shadow always cast on her moment of time, In the idleness of her mind and its moments of thinking, In the days of her life and the nights of her dreams, In the smile that springs from her face when her beautiful eyes are blinking, I wish to be her happy dreams and those infinite love beams, In her playful mood, in her pensive moments, In her feelings that originate from somewhere within her, In her heart beats and her life’s pavements, I want to be her blissful destiny, just like a feeling always living within her, In the moments of her secret confessions, When her heart secretly talks to her mind, In her secret love breeding sessions, I wish to be her passion, her emotion, her feeling, her everything that she wishes to find, In her North, her South, her East and in her West, In her quest to seek her moment of glory, In the adventures of her heart where she is the best, I wish to be the beginning and the end of her life’s every story, In the day when she is awake, And during the night when she is asleep, In the silence of her mind, where she, her darling worlds does make, I wish to be her treasure, her feelings, that always towards me leap, In the sensitivity of her actions, In the beauty that glows on her beautiful face, In her simple, yet charming attractions, I wish to be that ingredient of eternal grace, In the silence of her room, In the tender fluttering of her window curtains, In the beauty of her Summer bloom, I wish to be her heart’s only happy bulletins, In the tip-toeing of her feet, In the humming of her favorite song, In the relaxing rhythm of her every heart-beat, I wish to be her movement, leading her to my heart and memories, where she truly does belong, In the feelings of her passionate kiss, In the passions of her midnight dreams, In the moments of her sensual bliss, I wish to be her desire, and the loveliest dream, that so real seems, In the sunshine of the beautiful Summer day, In the calm of the warm Summer night, In the sweet corner of her room, where, she her dreams of passion does display, I wish to be her anxiety, and her love’s delight, In that every thought where she thinks of someone, In that step that she takes towards that special someone, In her need to be with someone, Irma, I wish to be the only one, that special someone!

Your special someone! In the vastness of her inner mind, In the confines of her selective memories, In the visions of her eyes refined, I want to discover our love stories, In the blinking of her eyelids, In the movement of her hands, In the flickering of her lips and their deliberate wet slides, I wish to create our empire of love lands, In the mere act of her standing and doing nothing, Just standing there staring at time, In her thoughts, in her feelings, and in her everything, I want to be her companion, or a mere shadow always cast on her moment of time, In the idleness of her mind and its moments of thinking, In the days of her life and the nights of her dreams, In the smile that springs from her face when her beautiful eyes are blinking, I wish to be her happy dreams and those infinite love beams, In her playful mood, in her pensive moments, In her feelings that originate from somewhere within her, In her heart beats and her life’s pavements, I want to be her blissful destiny, just like a feeling always living within her, In the moments of her secret confessions, When her heart secretly talks to her mind, In her secret love breeding sessions, I wish to be her passion, her emotion, her feeling, her everything that she wishes to find, In her North, her South, her East and in her West, In her every quest to seek her moment of glory, In the adventures of her heart where she is the best, I wish to be the beginning and the end of her life’s every story, In the day when she is awake, And during the night when she is asleep, In the silence of her mind, where she, her darling worlds does make, I wish to be her treasure, her feelings, that always towards me leap, In the sensitivity of her actions, In the beauty that glows on her beautiful face, In her simple, yet charming attractions, I wish to be that ingredient of eternal grace, In the silence of her room, In the tender fluttering of her window curtains, In the beauty of her Summer bloom, I wish to be her heart’s only happy bulletins, In the tip-toeing of her feet, In the humming of her favorite song, In the relaxing rhythm of her every heart-beat, I wish to be her movement, leading her to my heart and memories, where she truly does belong, In the feelings of her passionate kiss, In the passions of her midnight dreams, In the moments of her sensual bliss, I wish to be her desire, and the loveliest dream, that so real seems, In the sunshine of the beautiful Summer day, In the calm of the warm Summer night, In the sweet corner of her room, where, she her dreams of passion does display, I wish to be her sweet anxiety, and her love’s delight, In every thought where she thinks of someone, In every step that she takes towards that special someone, In her every need to be with someone, Irma, I wish to be the only one, that special someone!

with heart that pounds i try to sleep to close eyes and imagine something nice but i can’t hold back the bad anxiety fuels stress my heart then burns everything burns why is it so hot it’s dead of winter heart again pounds to dream of sweet release just wanting peaceful sleep

Talk to your anxieties and your insecurities. Don’t ignore them completely. Remember, the more you talk to them, the more you’ll understand them, and gradually come out of their murky grip.

Her luggage was so heavy but no one ever offered to help. Her luggage was so heavy for someone so small.

I carry my body in and around many rooms, most of them much quieter than this nervous chatter within. - A Thousand Empty Rooms

My mind is cramped with voices, and I cannot tell anymore, are they yours or mine?

Mention Homer across a table and a kind of anxiety comes into the face you are looking at, a sort of shame, perhaps a fear of seeming stupid and ignorant. Almost no one loves the poems he wrote or the phrases that recur in them.

Here was a man who was trapped in a thicket of fear and confusion, powerless to escape. Dante’s verse captured the feeling of my own depression and anxiety precisely. Wild animals blocked the man’s path at every turn. Suddenly the shade of a great poet of antiquity, Virgil, appears before the man and promises to show him the hard road to a good place—but first the man has to trust him.

I've been writing poems since I was sixteen. Back then, poems were an obvious release for all the frustrations and anxieties associated with adolescence. Mostly, they were a way for me to impress girls, even though I never remember any girls being impressed.

Sometimes my helpless blood runs numb and, if only for a second, I forget how frail bones can be.

Some writers might tell you that writing is like a piece of magic - a process of creating something out of nothing, and I guess I used to think about it that way too a long long time ago. But as I've lived my life and loved and lost friends and family, and seen dreams smashed and resurrected, and marveled at the pettiness, drear ambition and ignorance of the herd of which I am a part, I can no longer say that a poem or a story or a script comes from nothing. If it's any good, if it has any power, any potent emotional body, then it's something that a writer has paid for, not only in time, but in all the anxiety that accompanies living and those small fret-filled acts of becoming present that make it possible for us to see beyond our little patch of immediacy. It's not just a reaching out, but a reaching in, into the depths of our being from whence we've sprung.

What Rhymes with Therapy" is a unique self-help book that offers psychological guidance for depression, anxiety, grief, anger, trauma recovery, and relationship issues. The book’s distinction is that the guidance is written in the language of rhythm-and-rhyme poetry. Each poem comes complete with a full description of the therapeutic intervention and exercises that can be used to implement the ideas into real life.

Off to a great start already you gave me the run-down of who you are and asked me why I was there The truth was because I wanted to die.

I am with you, rafēgh (comrade) By Siavash Kasrai Translation: Darya Saudade --- I am with you, rafēgh (comrade), in wherever you are and struggle. I am your neighbor when, beside the window in the evening's gaze, you hum the people’s anthem to yourself. I walk in step with you when, devoted to anxiety and eagerness, you hand out a nightly leaflet to every passerby in the alley, with the ring of every word, you awaken a heart, a city, a whole homeland. I am with you when among the people, like a restless fish in water, you slide and come and seek, and warn the sleeping of the flood coming. I work alongside you when the body is worn out from work, but, in the fields, the factories, you keep working, you keep working. I am your fellow-sufferer when with the caress of your hands you beckon the child to patience, as if awakening a bud from its slumber I am your fellow inmate when you fill the dragging moments with forgotten memories in the corner of your confinement or in the fever of torture and the throes of anguish. No, my soulmate, my comrade, no, I won’t leave you alone, when at an unknown dawn you sacrifice your life for ideals and love. I am with you, rafēgh, I am with you, rafēgh, In wherever I am and struggle. In wherever you are and struggle.

America" Loans Interest rates Endless advertisements Usury and deception Countless heavy bodies filled with fear Migrant, refugee, and illegal bodies that came escaping America’s oppression in their own countries… America Depression, anxiety, and pain relief pills A political, media, and institutional matrix of power ran by one lobby… Credit cards Bankruptcy Debts Drugs The homeless Racism Weapons Strict security measures Suffocating any attempt for any meaningful change under the pretext of the homeland security… America Sanctions imposed on this country and that, Internal psychological sanctions imposed on a majority of the naïve who believe themselves to be free… America Tasteless fruit, vegetables, meats, eggs, and cheeses, injected with hormones, sprayed with pesticides and many other carcinogenic substances… America Houses that look beautiful from the outside, inhabited by people who are mostly lonely, going through psychological or nervous breakdowns, or perhaps wrestling with depression or hysteria, the luckiest of them are on daily pills to help them adapt to the psychological and spiritual death surrounding them from all sides… America Fruitless trees and scentless flowers, as if as a punishment or a curse from heaven upon those who stole the land from its native people, after erasing most of them… America Bills Sad letters in the mail, mostly from companies and advertisers wishing you a delightful day and great consumption, encouraging you to solve your problems with more consumption, and reminding you that you may die abruptly of loneliness or the toxins that you consume, and therefore, you must seriously consider purchasing your casket and the plot under which you will be buried… [Original poem published in Arabic on August 27, 2024 at ahewar.org]

Speak to me of your anxieties. You don't always have to be so positive, the strong one.

I've replaced my anxiety with curiosity. Well, this is my revolution.

Along with its unforgettable description of the eerie space this woman inhabits, the poem also locates her very precisely in time, offering two almost unique words which transport the reader into the exact moment of her sorrow. First is uhtcearu, a compound which means ‘sorrow before dawn’ or ‘grief at early morning’. In Old English uht is the name for the last part of the night, the empty chilly hours just before the dawn, an especially painful time for grief and loneliness (as well as other kinds of threat: the dragon in Beowulf is called an uhtfloga, a creature who flies before dawn). The word suggests the sting of waking to the memory of sorrow, or the anxiety of lying awake in the early morning, worrying over what the day will bring.

Fear resisted is fear amplified, fear embraced is fear relieved.

Beauty and Bravery I’ll tell you a secret no one wants you to know.   You do not have to be good to be brave. You do not have to be perfect, your mind completely clear, your heart full of joy, everything soft and sacred.   They make it out like the brave never lie, but the truth is, all of us lie at least twice a day and that has no bearing on how much courage you can hold in your heart. “When I set out to save my father, I was not being brave. I was acting out of fear of losing the only parent I ever had. They may want you to believe that I was simply being brave, but anxiety makes more heroes than history would care to repeat. It is better than sitting and waiting, letting the demon claw into your mind with worry. Anxious people are resourceful, they need to know how to keep the sea of panic at bay so they do not drown.   When I chose to stay at the palace in place of my father, I was not being brave. I was acting out of love. The idea of him here, sick, old, in this damp prison, under the care of that beastly creature when I, healthy, young, could take his place, of course I chose to take his place, what would you do? We would all give up even the ashes of ourselves for a parent we love more than this fire of a life.   When I chose to come back for the beast, I was not being brave. I was acting out of devotion and panic at the idea of loss. This being, who had respected my love of books, who was the only one who had ever known the real me and esteemed me for who I am, I came back for him, I could not let them take him from me. We do not abandon those who truly accept us for who we are, and if you could save all the people who accepted you completely, wouldn’t you go back to save them too?   So I’ll tell you a secret no one wants you to know. You do not have to be good to be brave. You just need to know how to love. You just need to unfold your heart and recognize where you stand and who you are.

Horizon of love The sky was blue, and like always spreading everywhere, And under this blue sky, I knew she was somewhere, Where but, I had no idea, how far, I did not know, But I bore her memories and her feelings in all my emotions and feelings low, And sometimes when I looked at the sky, the sun was everywhere and so was the moon, I wondered and hoped if she were like them; these were my thoughts one placid afternoon, Then as I watched the sun set and kiss the horizon, I remembered her with my deepest passion, Because just like the sun that sinks into the horizon and disappears in the vastness of its waiting lover, In me sink her memories, her feelings, her thoughts, creating a world that is fairer, But filled with waves of anxiety, longings; and a lot of wishes that surface as bubbles everywhere, As they are burst one by one when I look at the red sky and imagine her there somewhere, Then the sun disappears, and what remains of it are just the dying shades of red, It is then my desires leave me, my wishes forsake me too, because into her world they now tread, Into the world that is red with passions and stretching wherever my imagination takes it, For now this is how she exists in my world: She in me, I in her, and our restless desires together cast into it!

Where? Where have all those moments disappeared, Where to has her smile escaped, When was the last time when on her face a smile had appeared, When was it that she in her flashing radiance was draped, Nobody knows nothing, Nobody seems to care about anything, Until one day she was lost like that insignificant Something, Until that fateful day when her beautiful smile was reduced to nothing, Where was she lost, her smile and she with it, Where did her tormentors mislead her to, When she realised it, she was already drowning in it, When her mind screamed frantically, “whereto!” Her heart had forgotten to feel, Her feelings were dealing with fears of escalating anxieties, Everything appeared fake to her in the surroundings real, She had sunk deep in the abyss of perplexities, Where was the lover who loved her and kissed her so many times, Where was the guardian who vowed to protect her, When she faced exceptionable and unwelcoming times, When every reason that made her smile was dying within her, Maybe the lover was busy kissing her beauty, Maybe it was the only wish he wanted to fulfill, And it seems he accomplished it with a sense of unwavering duty, And today her absence with false sympathy he tries to fill, Where was the sympathy when she needed it the most, Where was the lover who feels, when she was alive, When he was supposed to be with her, he was somewhere else, thus her smile was lost, When he began kissing the smileless face, he had already killed her when she was alive, So do not tell me you loved her with your heart, So, she suffered more when you did not realise she was suffering, Then she decided to leave and finally depart, Then she left you long after you had learned to kiss her in ways more voluptuous than loving! Where is she now, remains to be a bafflement for the lover in you, Where are those smiles that her mirror sometimes reflects, When she escaped from the prison created by you, When you completely avoided acknowledging her emotional facts, She left you, as for the rest of us, she is everywhere, She is here, she is everywhere we wish to see her, And for you when she was physically with you, you never learned to seek her spirit anywhere, And since then you began losing a part of her, until one day, when she was right in front of you, you could not recognise her!

Grown-ups now, we occupy our concrete paths, little griefs buzzing around our ears like mosquitos. We swat them away. We turn our heads, swallowing our sadness whole.

Horizon of love The sky was blue, and like always spreading everywhere, And under this blue sky, I knew she was somewhere, Where but, I had no idea, how far, I did not know, But I bore her memories and her feelings in all my emotions and feelings low, And sometimes when I looked at the sky, the sun was everywhere and so was the moon, I wondered and hoped if she were like them; these were my thoughts one placid afternoon, Then as I watched the sun set and kiss the horizon, I remembered her with my deepest passion, Because just like the sun that sinks into the horizon and disappears in the vastness of its waiting lover, In me sink her memories, her feelings, her thoughts, creating a world that is fairer, But filled with waves of anxiety, longings; and a lot of wishes that surface as bubbles everywhere, As they burst one by one when I look at the red sky and imagine her there somewhere, Then the sun disappears, and what remains of it are just the dying shades of red, It is then my desires leave me, my wishes forsake me too, because into her world they now tread, Into the world that is red with passions and stretching wherever my imagination takes it, For now this is how she exists in my world: She in me, I in her, and our restless desires together cast into it!

If you don’t have crippling anxiety you aren’t modern you’re a pioneer woman churning butter in your bonnet, having 12 kids near a wagon et al. sometimes I feel so sharp but my body is so soft

Tears are portal to strength, Insecurity is portal to invincibility. Brood not when you are depressed, Activity alleviates anxiety.

Your sickness came and swallowed you whole. I never left your side just like you never left mine.

The faithful living out of the tropos of the incarnate Christ is the challenge that faces us in all these areas, and what it entails (so Bonhoeffer and Przywara alike insist) is the patient embrace of finitude, the refusal of defensive anxiety about the Church’s privilege or influence, the recognition and valuing of the unspectacular, in life and art, as the site where we may expect the paradoxical radiance of the infinite to become visible. Christian ethics is not about dramatic and solitary choices for individual good or evil but the steady building of a culture of durable mutuality and compassion. Christian aesthetics is not about genius-driven or near-magical transmutations of this world into some imagined semblance of divine glory and abundance, but the gift of unlocking in the most ordinary setting or object the ‘grace of sense’ that allows it to be seen with (to use the word again) durable, attentive love. And Christian metaphysics? Przywara’s work clearly understands the role of Christology in developing a schematic and consistent view of analogy, depending on the recognition that whatever comes into intellectual focus in our human understanding is always already implicated in relations that make its life more than a single and containable phenomenon but something opening out on to an unlimited horizon of connection... ...authentic theology shows itself, in self-forgetting and self-dispossessing practice. The theology that we write and discuss has no substance independently of this formal content, this knowledge of how to ‘enact Christ’ in the world. And it is because of this that Przywara resists a reading of St John of the Cross’s spiritual teaching which simply identifies the ‘night of spirit’ with the negation of the creaturely. Put like this, it can suggest yet another form of the competitive ontological model which we struggle to escape from – more world, less God, and vice versa. But St John properly read – giving priority to the poems rather than the commentaries on them – characterizes the night as participation in the act of Christ the Word. The darkness of our prayer is not the result of a straightforward gap between what we can know as creatures and the unknowable depths of God, the infinite dissimilarity between finite and infinite; it is our assimilation into the infinite’s self-unveiling in the dark places of the finite world, in the wordless helplessness of the cross. And because it is in this way an entry deeper and deeper into the centre of God’s activity, it is a journey into the ‘excess’ of divine light, the overflowing of God’s absolute abundance, which is itself nothing else than agape directed towards the life and joy of the other – in the divine life and in the relation of divine to non-divine life.

Today the verse hook is planted deep. And with it, the wound: that one of the central activities of my life is tinged with the sense of being dissolute, escapist, fey. Even at those rare moments when, fresh off a new poem, I feel the artisanal high of every word fitting flush, the crash comes swiftly: depression and anxiety at having gotten away with something slightly preposterous. I'm in it now for better or worse, but I'm always on the lookout for some clue that can help explain the emergence of the poet who bears my name.

Why do we treat the fleeting day with so much needless fear and sorrow? It's in its nature not to stay: Today is always gone tomorrow.

Poem - Freedom XCIII From the divine orgy The suicidal came But what gods would Be? If not ashes From a forgotten Fenix “I believed in the love Of a fallen angel And as an ashen maggot Which crawls on Christ’s Dirty wounds He stabbed me But the Devil laughed And danced by my side He showed me his helping hand So I could live another day Depression probed me On the house’s dark corners And every time The Devil slept She would come to torment me I screamed and cried in despair But no god could hear me (…) The anxiety would proclaim curses That not even Judas would dare; Bent in my knees With antidepressants in my hands I threw myself at an abysm of a Insanity overdose I crossed the same path as Christ Where he carried the human’s cross And I found him hanged In a tree of lies With a note at his feet- Dance with me And I’ll give you the strength to keep going- Believe in the beast which lives Inside the men And light in you the morning star’s light I got up Drowning in my own blood And proclaimed My scream of freedom- of love! I only want orgies! – From gods I only want the human corruption The deaf depression Which crawled in my disgusting dreams As I proclaimed In front of the mirror of life My desire to live And without noticing She put a rope around my neck… I feel my body struggling In a deep despair Today I die! But I’ll tell Christ That his sons did not honored his suicide Today! I die for myself When the pigs grunt And the wolves howl I’ll be free from life! Which I was condemned to live - Gerson De Rodrigues

What happens next is simply the aftermath of all unrest; and uncontrollable outcome of cause and effect.

Mrs.

This slave to the clock needs no further introduction on the station platform, for the world recognizes him as the bard who named our times “The Age of Anxiety” and won the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for his long poem of the same name set in a New York bar. This is the poet who pleaded—in a poem called “September 1, 1939,” which he later withdrew from circulation—that “we must love one another or die.” This is the heir wearing, somewhat reticently, the mantle of Yeats and Eliot.

Shout-out to your idiot friends/siblings who, as children, would call all vampires “Draculas.

Am I going to die and all I will have are these fucking poems

Giants in Jeans Sonnet 64 Let us be oblivious to security and comfort, In our pursuit and practice of humanity. Let us be oblivious to personal happiness, In our endeavors into the impossibility. Let us throw all fear and anxiety overboard, For the dreams that’ll determine our destiny. Let us trample every foul desire for luxury, And treat the hard problem of inhumanity. Let us pay no heed to gain and pain, In our course of constructing a whole society. Let us not sit around praying for a messiah, And stand up ourselves to carry out that duty. Let others be oblivious to humanity if they want. Even if it's doomsday, sapling of service we'll plant.

What about tomorrow? Tomorrow’s Saturday, isn’t it?” “I’m pretty sure I have some school stuff.” Already, I was thinking too much. I was thinking that Saturday was loaded in a way Friday wasn’t—we had Saturday classes, so Friday was still a school night, but Saturday was pure weekend. If I went out with Dave on a Saturday night, I was pretty sure we’d be going on a date. “How’s Sunday?” he said. “Sunday I’m off.” What I needed to do was just be calm. I needed to come up with the next words to say, to concentrate only on the immediate task in front of me and not give in to the sense that this moment was a monstrous pulsating flower, a purple and green geometrical blossom like you might see in a kaleidoscope. “Sunday is okay,” I said. “I’ll meet you here.” “In the parking lot?” “It’s kind of hard to find my dorm,” I said. “And they’re weird about letting guys inside.” “Gotcha. What about seven o’clock. Is seven good?” I nodded. “These are gonna be the best mashed potatoes of your life. Poems have been written about these mashed potatoes.” By you? I wanted to teasingly ask him. But I couldn’t because my anxiety was exploding, the flower was swirling outward infinitely.

I am every answer— a mathematics of anxiety.

White hedonism cut on blue intelligence and laced with silver anxiety. Bravo.