The hamster ball is going!
Can't you feel it? Round and round.
There's no exit on this elliptical,
Upon which feet and heart pound!
There's a twitchy, horrid movement;
Not your body, though, don't fear.
It's buzzing behind your temples,
and building in your ear.
The mundane is something beautiful,
And the unchanging is perverse.
The two are often confused with the other,
But they are complete inverse.
Do you feel those clenched-up fingers?
Feel them clawing at your skin?
Keep going, little hamster!
Let's see your wire-wheel spin.
YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO BE THE JUGGERNAUT.
YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO GO GO GO
AND NOW YOU ARE STUCK IN SOMETHING WRONG
THRASHING FAST AND STILL TOO SLOW
To fix is to feel forwards;
What does that mean? You used to know.
There is progress found in pushing onward
But you can't push walls. (you've tried. but no.)
Okay. Let's breathe about it.
Let go of your skin. Let go.
Wipe the blood off of your fingers.
Make your lungs and heart move slow.
That's better. You're alright now.
You've moved past the panic! Well done.
I'm sorry this created verse today.
That's not art: and that's not fun.
But look at how the world works,
once you put vigor to voice to verse---
The bad parts have dissolved now.
You stopped it from getting worse.
Now, go to bed and process.
(don't dwell. you know they're not the same.)
I'm proud that you fought your fearful fire
With a passionate, directed flame.
This poem is the result of feeling a month’s worth of stressors and frustrations (coupled with deadlines and feelings of helplessness) culminating in a near panic attack for pretty much no reason. I’ve been feeling physically limited lately, unable to get the exercise I usually do. I told Lucy it felt like being a hamster whose hamster wheel has been taken away, and everyone is shocked that the hamster is chewing off her own legs.) It got so bad by the time I got out of the shower that I felt like I was going to explode! So, I thought that maybe writing a poem AS I was having these panicked feelings would help. And you know what? I think it did. You’ll notice the poem starts in a bad spot and ends in a much more positive one as the real feelings I was going through started burning off while I wrote them. It’s kind of an interesting roadmap of how the whole thing moved through me. I’m sure that in the future I’ll come back to the angstier verses near the top of the poem and cringe, but for now I’m just glad to have a written poetic record of my ability to work through hard feelings.
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