Panic

There was no going back now!

One morning, Sal’s life flashed back and then forward

before her very eyes;

She was at once hot then piercingly cold,

particularly along her spine,

And a feeling of pins and needles at her back.

She seemed to be convulsing,

whilst sitting on the step of the front porch,

with uncontrollable palms trembling,

And an unwholesome feeling of being about to black-out.

“Uh great, she thought, “I’m gonna die alone, typical!”

Briefly holding one palm to her throbbing chest,

her heart felt as if it was going to beat right on out of her!

This was surely the panic attack to end all panic attacks.

Life was never going to be quite the same if she got through,

This she knowingly understood.

She stumbled back inside with a slight feeling of floating..

and immediately called her mum on the phone.

“Mum there is something wrong with me -

I can’t seem to calm down,” as she struggled to hold her body up in a chair.

Sal’s posture seemed to be both limp and tense simultaneously.

“Can you please help me?”

“Can you please take me to emergency? I can’t..”

She was still shaking a little and,

had taken some Valium from the top kitchen cupboard,

then rested her head on the tops of her palms,

placing these flat on the glass dining table,

her eyes penetrated through her fingers,

and locked on to the rug below with the animal print,

and below that the tiles, and then the brown earth..

Straining to think coherently,

She obsessively placed, with fumbling fingers, a guided meditation on

from ‘Smiling Mind’ from her iPad whilst she waited.

Such shortness of breath. Breathe dammit breathe!

What is wrong with you!?

She didn't hear a word of the meditation -

just a meandering humming at her ears,

Instead, there was a mishmash of multiple inner-voices

in her mind scattered with a few pictures,

with an abhorrent feeling that they seemed to be moving

along a train track faster and faster and faster!!

Fifteen minutes had passed and

her breathing began to slowly regulate.

She’d remembered before she hung up the phone to her mum,

That she’d uttered, “I love you” -

as if it might be the last time they spoke.

She would rarely say that to her mum ordinarily,

she was too proud for that, yet Sal was scared to the core.

She still didn’t feel quite right!

Was her soul under attack by her ego’s rifle?

Shooting at her nervous system again and again,

Knocking her back down, down, down?…

Was this Sal’s ‘dark night of the soul’ before the ego-death or,

perhaps a mystical kundalini experience of reawakening?

Time would surely tell..

As she slowly looked around,

Why did everything have this pervasive,

ominous ugliness?

From tables to walls to

dark dysphoric corners of the room,

and the greasy grime in the kitchen,

It was as if these manifestations were tangibly coalescing with her body,

making her skin itch!

Can she find her safe space and can she relearn to self-soothe?

Sal would have to wait,

And patiently wait through a time of much hard work,

To let go of the shackles that chained her asunder,

To be and to be free -

- 2023

Thanks for reading my free verse poem about panic attacks - written for the “Sensational” challenge.

If you liked it, please consider hitting the heart or subscribing for more to encourage my future poems, short stories and film reviews. Many thanks.

You can also check out another of my recent free verse pieces “That ‘something’ Memory..” here: