Another
round
of Xanax, please.
I‘m going
to need a
little help to make it
through this day-–
if I can even
make myself get
out of bed
to armour up
for my confrontation
with the black knight of fear itself.
Copyright 2016
T. Allen Culpepper
Tag Archives: anxiety
Again
Some nights the old fears come back,
rustling around the door as dusk
bleeds light from the sky and then
making houseguests of themselves,
hogging the pillows, drinking up the wine,
demanding too much attention, but here
they are, and like forgotten cousins
or friends from lives you thought had died,
they must be entertained, and so
you dance with them and listen to
their talk and take a certain comfort
in their familiar spirits, but still
you wish they’d go and leave you to
the loneliness they represent.
Copyright 2016
T. Allen Culpepper
Panic Attack
Panic swoops down and preys on him:
a fearsome, famished raptor
ripping apart his flesh
with razor-claws,
digging in through muscle
to devour the organ meats,
savoring his heart and brain.
This is the point at which
the nightmare is supposed to end,
but he’s been wide awake
from the beginning,
and the scenario’s stuck
in a replaying loop.
When he tries to tell others
how it works,
they always advise,
“It’s OK, calm down, it’s
only in your head.”
But that is where he lives.
Copyright 2015
T. Allen Culpepper
A View from Bed on a Saturday Morning in Early Spring
The green and white urge themselves together
at divergent angles in the corner,
the lines of demarcation fuzzy, blurred
by myopic eyes into abstraction,
as the head, its allergic ache
compounded by the stresses of the week,
too little sleep and too much Spanish wine,
tries to clear itself, meditate,
first on nothing, then on respiration,
then, inevitably, on the intruding to-do list–
grading and bills and cleaning and shopping and laundry,
oh, and making time for exercise–
trying to organize itself for the day,
filing functions, tasks into mental drawers
half-shut, half-open, overflowing with bulging
recycled folders disordered and mislabeled,
like a basket of socks arranged by a cat.
Sunlight filters in through dust, highlights
piles of books and clothes, a trail of dirty
glasses and coffee cups. When head tries
not to think, it does, but when it tries
to concentrate on a single thought,
the green and white race together, collide.
Copyright 2014
T. Allen Culpepper
Sunday Evening
Ten on Sunday evening, a lonely time,
sitting on the porch steps as the night
begins to cool, though there’s no wind,
unusual for Oklahoma, nearly perfect calm.
Cat sacked out on the walkway rolls
over onto her back in total relaxation,
stretches methodically, one leg at a time.
Stars fleck the sky, visible tonight despite
the illumination of houses, city streets.
It has been a good day, but solitary;
the solitude agreeable at first, but
now grown tiresome at day’s end,
when I most crave the comfort of touch.
There comes a sadness that would be
beautiful in literary narration, but
whose beauty’s less evident from
inside the experience itself. It’s
that reflective time between the
weekend and the week when old
mistakes return like ghosts and
new anxieties take hold like demons.
Copyright 2013
T. Allen Culpepper
Attention Deficit
W. H. Auden christened the Age of Anxiety,
and many have spoken of the age of information,
but now it seems we’ve entered the age of attention-
deficit disorders: we browse, we skim, we surf
the Web, but we can’t keep our minds on anything for longer
than five or ten–what we were talking about?–minutes.
We know about everything, but we don’t actually
know anything, not deeply, at a level below the surface.
We wolf down information but don’t digest it;
we think we are thinking, but we do not seriously ponder
the meaning, the significance, the implications, for us,
for others, for the world that all of us inhabit.
Copyright 2013
T. Allen Culpepper
