Book Excerpt | "Ode to My Panic Attack", from 'Annus Horribilis' by Avinab Datta-Areng

Avinab Datta-Areng wrote 'Annus Horribilis', a collection of impressionistic poems.

In a slim volume of poetry, Annus Horribilis, Avinab Datta-Areng describes what is often indescribable. Excerpted below is the poem "Ode to My Panic Attack", in which he describes being stuck in a nightmarish situation, anxious to get out but finding that even after making an effort, "it doesn't go away".

Ode to My Panic Attack

You wake each day within

a peach or half-buried

blade with the feeling

that something is simultaneously

preserving and fucking

you, a thought

so naive and clear like god

thinking of themselves, before the first

fuchsias or baby-blue eyes,

the ones now cowering

with the grace of nothing’s will

as you refract past.

Between giving in this time (to hell

with trying to get better any more)

and convalescing without any work,

there’s a blue begging

that still wants to know . . .

But you are not in you any more. You are being

passed along to camouflage

the braindead cirrus, bitter phantom

of eucalyptus struck by lightning. You climb

the ringing green meadow, it doesn’t

go away. The breathing

doesn’t stop, it’s what you think

you want, it’s everywhere,

the breathing doesn’t stop.

Excerpted with permission from Penguin Random House.