On Anxiety Attacks

[ How am I - How are you? ]

How are you?
I am not very well
oh - what is it?
it is the emotions
oh
it might be a nervous breakdown
oh
it could be anxiety attacks
oh - what happens?
emotions drown me
oh - what is it like?
feeling tidalwaves over me
oh - what feeling?
- being this cracked
- this poor, this broken
- grief at the good which died
- fear of rejection again
- love for my nativity land
(a country made nouveau)
- grief at our lost assurances
- anger at the neglect
- pining to be loved
- grief for how we are
- homesick for dinkums
- despair in our cowardly leaders
- disappointment at pretence
- afraid of experts and statistics,
- chronic love of small beauty,
- of hopes unrealised
- of vision undone
- impatience for faith to come
- too much thinking - I cannot do
- too much feeling - I cannot shake
- my unrequited soul
oh - what effect does it have?
it cripples,
oh
it knocks me for six
oh
washes me out to sea
oh
or else it opens a chasm beneath me
oh
and inflates my fear of heights
oh
and I frieze as if in vertigo
oh - are you okay then?
Since I am not obeying it:
not bad, no.

30 August 1999 © Wayne David Knoll