Anxiety is a word people use loosely, as in "I'm so anxious about the test." After the title, jayanad's poem drops the word entirely and gives us what lies underneath: a body in alarm. The speaker never says "I'm afraid" or "I'm nervous." Instead the poem hands over an inventory of heat, pounding, tightness, motion and shaking, and lets us work out the feeling from the evidence.
That inventory drives the poem. After the opening line, "I feel the heat in my face," four lines follow the same template: "The pounding of my heart," "The tightness in my chest," "The motion of my leg," "The shaking of my hand." None has a verb. The opening "I feel" quietly reaches across all of them, so the symptoms take over the grammar just as they take over the speaker. The repeated "the … of my …" has a flat, almost clinical tone, as if the speaker were standing slightly outside their own body and reporting on it. Yet each "my" insists that this is happening to me. The word "motion" is telling, too. It is a cold, observational word for a leg that is presumably bouncing, and it suggests someone watching themselves from a distance.
There is no rhyme, and free verse suits a mind that can't settle. But the poem still has a pulse. The list lines run to six syllables each (the opening line has seven), a steady beat that echoes the "pounding" they describe. Then the pattern breaks. "And the low self worth" shrinks to five syllables, and the "of my" structure disappears. This is the first item that isn't a body part and the first that has no place to point to. A racing heart can be located in the chest, but low self-worth has no address. The small word "And" makes it feel like the last, hardest thing admitted, the item the speaker almost left off the list. The word "low" also plants a direction that the ending will follow.
Then the poem turns, and the turn is its most important move. After six lines of private experience, the speaker has to speak aloud, and what comes out is "May I go to the restroom please?" The line stretches to eight syllables, as though pushed out with effort. Judging by the wording, the setting is a room where permission must be asked, perhaps a classroom, though the poem never says so. It is also the only line with any punctuation, so the question mark lands heavily in a poem that otherwise runs unpunctuated. The politeness is painful. The speaker is in real distress yet remembers to say "please," and the gap between what is felt and what is allowed to be said is the poem's central idea. Anxiety is largely invisible, and the socially acceptable language for it is small, ordinary and easy to overlook.
The final line, "Before I pass out on this floor," carries no full stop. It attaches itself to the question as a subordinate clause, so the request runs on past its own question mark and the poem stops mid-thought. We never learn whether permission is granted. The demonstrative "this" pulls us into the room, making the floor a real, specific place. It also completes a downward path that began at "face" and passes through heart, chest, leg and hand, then through "low," to the floor. The first and last nouns even share an *f*, so the poem seems to fall from head to ground in eight lines.
The poem matters because of this contrast between the outer and inner worlds. A person asking for the restroom looks perfectly ordinary, and jayanad shows how much can be hidden behind a courteous question. The brevity helps. Eight short lines mimic the way panic compresses time and narrows attention until only the body is left. For a young reader the poem works in two ways. It tells those who recognise this experience that it can be put into words, and it asks everyone else to wonder what might sit behind a quiet request.