The Panic Attack

“I love you” 

Her breath hot on my face, 

barely audible but enough. 

She knows I heard her;  

she looks up and synchronizes our gazes. 

Her scribbled cartoon eyes, 

left to right and back again.

 My breath 

is hostage to my chest. 

For a moment 

and only a 

moment 

I am paralyzed,

 petrified. 

A sliver of a split second of delay; a heartbeat. 

Enough for a thousand spinning thoughts, 

a thousand ideas of panic and lies. 

But I cannot lie. 

The truth is 

I expect a future filled with profound loss and sadness. 

Pain- physical, emotional, mental. 

I could break my neck in a thousand different accidents (or just one)

I will lose family and friends to causes

arguments

death. 

I expect losing hearing to bombs, music, concerts, guns, 

LOUD NOISEs and (yelling). 

I could watch the world

destroydestroydestroy itself

as if it never existed

at all.

What a show.

A kaleidoscope 

of song, violence, dance, violence

love, violence, loss, violence

hope, violence, hurt, violence

stars and (mostly) empty space,

atoms and elements,

particles and waves and strings of the Mortal Coil.

Her dress is garden green, 

mellow, and salted. 

It sticks to her skin like a wet rubber, 

golden  and 

bubbly and soaking up 

the colossal fireball in the afternoon sky. 

For all I know

she made it herself, 

but she’ll never tell. 

She keeps her secret 

inside opal eyes, 

some menstrual red, 

molten orange. 

The orange earned her hate 

and it alone hides from her tempest gaze. 

Of all the spectrum of Crayola,

it is banished into solitude. 

Like the secret of her dress, 

I too am exiled to the 

furthest recess 

of her conscious mind. 

Though I, in her rolling 

ocean eyes, am restricted to the 

shades of the Earth- 

I am mud, almond, rotted bark.

I am the mountain dirt and frozen muck. 

I am the bottom of the barrel. 

Gutter gray. 

I am atomic ash, 

and my eyes are benign blue, 

a dull reflection in a dirty mirror. 

My skin a pale, placid peach. 

I am a face in a crowd, 

I am a grain of sand, 

beached and unworthy 

of the ocean floor. 

I am only a single cell in a 

living universe 

and I am meant to die.

Instead

She died and I wasn’t sure what to say. You have to say something, it’s expected. 

So, naturally, I denied it. Vehemently and violently. 

My throat tore as vocalizations of things I would never have said in the face of reality liberated  lungs. Were I able to think- I could not. I only felt. An instant, ineffable emptiness. 

As if a universe that I never knew existed inside of me had suddenly and irrevocably collapsed. 

As if an unfathomably massive body of knowledge that a million lifetimes could never learn,  save an infinitely expanding vessel of ignorance. 

Such was the love and immediate loss I felt. 

Gone, at once, words on the wind of a soggy, sapphire sky, a memory fading from one shape to another, as pink pillow clouds dancing on the horizon to the indifferent whims of the atmosphere. 

That very atmosphere responsible for the little lives we dare to love. All transposed from the soft, gentle, soothing, caring words to an urgent weapon of violence. 

A million poisonous pins, diseased needles, or all the fangs and knives and daggers of a lunatic vampire novel. 

The germs, guns, bombs, and countless bodies of every war in every existence all compounded to an infinitesimally tiny point in time and space where I could think only one thing: 

Nothing.

Eons of it crammed into a neat singularity which would lead ultimately to something else.

Eons of the frantic efforts of every shivering atom coming together some billions of years later for one life out of the void. 

To witness it’s passing like an eclipse over ever visible star in the gothic, night sky- a shudder passes through. 

And nothing, no macabre murder of masses or reason, no further exhaustion of the waning and waxing hopes could distract me from this moment: 

the birth of a black hole in the heart of man.

There is in me, beyond the ordinary spectrum of color and vision, a hole that cannot be seen. 

It exists, and no love or light can escape it. All that approaches my heart is captured, carelessly stretched apart over the event horizon. 

The love breaks down at the seams, thread by thread into its finite subatomic structure, where it will no longer exist as love, but something else: elements and particles. 

It’s a dream, recurring and recombining and dark. 

She’s in a dress, she’s dead, she’s In my heart, my heart is a bottomless pit for which there is no edge. And then I hear my heart crack in two inside of my chest. 

Like a rifle in my head, but why would a heart crack? 

Because it’s not a hole, it’s stone, and it’s brittle. 

Death comes over me, like a wave in the singing seas, a torrent of the tons of pressure and rolling atmospheres that it is. 

It covers me and what does it do? 

It turns to stone as well. 

It spider webs out over me in, the final moments I have 

alive before it fills my lungs and solidifies and suddenly I am awake. 

I’m in bed, it’s not a heart attack or spontaneous brain death after all- 

no, instead the sun has exploded, and mere minutes will pass before I am burned up or disintegrated or whatever I’m not really sure this has all only just woke me up at two, maybe three AM, and whatever scream was  in my chest in the nightmare is now roaring out of my scorching throat, specks of blood and spit carrying the weight of hollers or cries for help barely audible over the dying star. 

I am an elevated heart rate, soaker of sheets, wide pupil’d and out of my mind. I am a panic attack, by the book. 

I am alone and afraid.

I see the world in stereo. I hear it in black and white. 

A sick snake walks upright through my thoughts. 

My guts hold my burdens, I am tormented with disease of the brain. 

Drugs devoured my taste for the rational, and built a tolerance for the unreasonable. 

It’s only in bed, eyes closed, sleep closing in that, 

in the lonely depth of the night, I begin to think with clarity. 

The words always haunt my attempts to close the rest of the world 

off to rest and escape to a cosmos of dreams, lucid or murky.  

There are hundreds of ways to say the same thing, 

and I think of them all, a night author and sleepy linguist. 

I think of her 

humdrum musical 

whispers

of love.

I want to tell her

I love the court 

we’ve been strutting. I want to tell her 

that I love her voice in the mornings,

or her dance of tongue and hips 

when she’s been drinking.

I think of our adventures

and that the sum of their parts

make an odyssey. 

I think while I can. Remember.

The dead  don’t.

Reviews

[Sami Khalil]

"I think of her
humdrum musical
whispers
of love.
I want to tell her
I love the court
we’ve been strutting. I want to tell her
that I love her voice in the mornings,"

A splendid read and write...Thank you for sharing...:)...................