I swear its too much
I'm smiling during the day but during certain periods it all just consumes me.
It's like i'm floating in space
raging and trapped in a cage
That's only big enough for me to stand.
Poems on the topic: anxiety
Poems on the topic “anxiety” on Poets.by.
Secrets
Secrets
infesting my half-sleep...
did you enter my wound from another wound
brushing mine in a crowd...
or did I snare you on my sharper edges
as a bird flying through cobwebbed trees at sun-up
carries off spiders on its wings?
Secrets,
running over my soul without sound,
only when dawn comes tip-toeing
ushered by a suave wind,
and dreams disintegrate
like breath shapes in frosty air,
I shall overhear you, bare-foot,
scatting off into the darkness....
I shall know you, secrets
Counterpanes
I will make myself new thought;
My own is worn and old.
And old counterpanes will not
Keep out the wind and cold.
From borrowed thought I will choose
Pieces, and, row on row,
Patch a quilt of many hues
Like the quilts of long ago.
It cannot be so fine
As what the years have thinned.
But I dread the smothered whine
Of four grey walls' grey wind.
I will patch me a counterpane.
For mine is worn to scars.
And I fear the iron rain
Of a ceiling's splashing stars.
Zenas Witt
I was sixteen, and I had the most terrible dreams,
And specks before my eyes, and nervous weakness.
And I couldn’t remember the books I read,
Like Frank Drummer who memorized page after page.
And my back was weak, and I worried and worried,
And I was embarrassed and stammered my lessons,
And when I stood up to recite I’d forget
Everything that I had studied.
Well, I saw Dr. Weese’s advertisement,
And there I read everything in print,
Just as if he had known me;
And about the dreams which I couldn’t help.
So I knew I was marked for an early grave.
And I worried until I had a cough
And then the dreams stopped.
And then I slept the sleep without dreams
Thief in the Night
Last night a thief came to me
And struck at me with something dark.
I cried, but no one could hear me,
I lay dumb and stark.
When I awoke this morning
I could find no trace;
Perhaps 'twas a dream of warning,
For I've lost my peace.
Apprehension
And all hours long, the town
Roars like a beast in a cave
That is wounded there
And like to drown;
While days rush, wave after wave
On its lair.
An invisible woe unseals
The flood, so it passes beyond
All bounds: the great old city
Recumbent roars as it feels
The foamy paw of the pond
Reach from immensity.
But all that it can do
Now, as the tide rises,
Is to listen and hear the grim
Waves crash like thunder through
Anxiety
The hoar-frost crumbles in the sun,
The crisping steam of a train
Melts in the air, while two black birds
Sweep past the window again.
Along the vacant road, a red
Bicycle approaches; I wait
In a thaw of anxiety, for the boy
To leap down at our gate.
He has passed us by; but is it
Relief that starts in my breast?
Or a deeper bruise of knowing that still
She has no rest.
White Hands
For the second time in a year this lady with the white
hands is brought to the west room second floor
of a famous sanatorium.
Her husband is a cornice manufacturer in an Iowa
town and the lady has often read papers on Victorian
poets before the local literary club.
Yesterday she washed her hands forty seven times
during her waking hours and in her sleep moaned
restlessly attempting to clean imaginary soiled
spots off her hands.
Now the head physician touches his chin with a
crooked forefinger.
Autumnal Equinox
Why do you not sleep. Beloved ?
It is so cold that the stars stand out of the sky
Like golden nails not driven home.
The fire crackles pleasantly.
And I sit here listening
For your regular breathing from the room above.
What keeps you awake, Beloved ?
Is it the same nightmare that keeps me strained with listening
So that I cannot read ?
Rapunzel
All day, all day I brush
My golden strands of hair;
All day I wait and wait. . . .
Ah, who is there?
Who calls? Who calls? The gold
Ladder of my long hair
I loose and wait. . . . and wait. . . .
Ah, who is there?
She left at dawn. . . . I am blind
In the tangle of my long hair. . . .
Is it she? the witch? the witch?
Ah, who is there?
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