More Than a Feeling

And on that bleak winter day
in the therapist‘s office he grumbled;
“What have I done to deserve this?”
(Fall to pieces, crooked shade,
  foggy hazy burrowing badger,
  tempestuous unflappable holocaust,
  essential haunt and tremble--the doctor nods...)
Tales of anxiety, the flash, the purge, the banishment
of calm, and coming forth like howl is panic
wrapped in eruptive fidget,
flittering in riot,
bursting hot
in gnawing disquiet.
The doctor makes a note, goes, “Hmmm...”
The patient continues undaunted,
grants the spotlight threadbare rags,
the agitated whirr within
the slicing dizzy plucking pinch
of mental malady.
And dread, those white-hot blades of fear
in unison with myriad streams of butterflies
beneath the sternum;
this, the swift impalement of sadistic satyr,
the call for relaxation’s abdication
to let massive bleeding,
coils of precisely sharpened barbed-wire
pulled along raw ligament.
He spirals unfettered,
driven by desperate surplus.
The doctor strokes his black goatee.
Patient’s eyes are pleas in question,
for, why is often an arduous void.
Inside, anxiety declares
with bayonets on bone,
as darts flipped by sots
in disadvantaged reel.
The hour ends.
The doctor cannot answer why.
(Listen to the falling rain,
  listen to the rain!)

40 Lines
Writer's Cramp Co-Winner
9-30-16