POEM 1
The Weight of Shadows
Stifling whispers wrap tight, unseen, A paralyzing grip, where life has been. Shadowy figures, sneaky, sly, Piercing cold beneath a heavy sky.
Malaise settles in with a sickly hue, Eroding the spirit, once vibrant, true. Tidal shifts of fear rise, relentless tide, Unbalanced steps, nowhere to hide.
Jittery heart, a restless drum, Impatience beckons for solace to come. Undermining thoughts erode the soul, Exhausted, sickly, longing to feel whole.
But through the cracks of this heavy shroud, A light appears, steady and proud. The tide recedes, the cold abates, Hope renews where despair once waits.
Recovery whispers, “You are strong, The shadows fade; you do belong.” From stifling binds, a breath is drawn, A brighter tomorrow, a healing dawn.
anon
POEM 2
A Spy in the Back of My Mind
Anxiety, lurking in the corner of my thoughts.
A shadow and a silent spy.
You whisper doubt.
Pouring slow poison on my breath.
In crowded streets with others,
your gnawing gut growls and twists
and I wrap myself in a mask of normalcy.
Leaving a façade to face the world
Challenging what I think I know,
Your echoes turn confidence into dark humility.
Your whispers sew unseen thorns,
“You’re not good enough to be here.”
In the mirror of a crowded room,
Reflections of your disdain rebound.
To make me doubt my worth,
And then you slip back into the shadows.
I wince to face the outward moment
In a disguise that feels unmasked,
In skin tattooed with anxiety.
“I don’t belong here, I don’t belong.”
While others softly laugh you slither close
And whisper deep and slow,
“Now they know. Now they know.”
Marking me a fraud in broad daylight.
You whisper that I’ll never be enough,
That I’ll fail and fall. Always fail. Always fall.
None can see the cuts from my silent spy
They see me laugh. They think I’m alright,
You are a stubborn vine that chokes my core,
Denying me praise with your shadowed whispers.
And you hide like a coward cloaked in the night,
Complicitly, I deny you, giving you the alibi you need.
You’re always here but not a part of who I am,
You’re the alien symbiont living within.
And you cannot be without me, nor I without you.
So you and I must learn to make our peace.
TarJay
POEM 3
Thank You for the Silence
Oh, worry’s weight, you set me free,
if only for a breath or three.
Your whisper fades, your grip unwinds,
a fleeting gift of quiet mind.
No racing pulse, no hurried thought,
no battles waged, no fears are caught.
The world is wide, the sky is bright,
my heart unburdened, soft and light.
I know you’ll come, I know you wait,
but not today—we’ve changed the fate.
So let me rest, let me be,
and thank you for this pause in me.
POEM 4
A Quiet Departure
Anxiety, you’ve stepped away,
left me breathing, light and grey.
No tangled thoughts, no restless fight,
just stillness wrapped in golden light.
For once, my chest is free to rise,
no thunder breaking through my skies.
No racing mind, no tightening cage,
just peace that soothes, not fear or rage.
I know you’ll knock another day,
but for this moment, stay away.
Let me rest, let me be—
thank you for this gift to me.
POEM 5
To Anxiety, Standing at the In-Between
You cling to the edges of me,
pull at the frayed threads of who I was,
whisper that I am losing something—
but isn’t change always a kind of loss?
I stand between doorways,
one foot in the past, one reaching forward,
the space between them stretching, aching,
a bridge made of uncertainty.
You tell me to turn back,
to stay where it’s familiar,
where I know the shape of every shadow.
But I am learning that fear and growth
wear the same face at first.
That to step forward is to grieve
and to bloom all at once.
So whisper if you must—
I will still walk on.
POEM 6
Unraveling (Anxiety & Change)
I’ve made more space for myself—
but I still feel your presence,
pulling at the
f r a y e d
threads of who I have been.
For years, you told me safety
and the potential for happiness
lay only in the familiar.
Where I know the shape of every
shadow.
I listened too long.
In time, the light of the familiar faded
until shadows were all I could see.
I long to claim these
l o o s e
s t r i n g s,
to weave something new.
I must learn patience—
I have never used a loom.
TL
POEM 7
Untitled
In shadowed crevices of a mind unseen,
Where whispers of doubt coil and serpently lean,
Lurks a creature of dread, a specter so vast,
A monster named Anxiety, forever to cast
Its pall over thoughts that dare to roam free,
A prison of fear, a tormentor’s decree.
Its eyes are the gleams of a moonless night,
Where the darkest of shadows hold their fright.
It slithers through corridors of doubt and despair,
A phantasmagoria, an ever-present snare.
With tentacles reaching into the abyss,
It feasts on the hope that you once possessed.
The beast whispers lies, a siren’s sweet song,
Of futures forlorn and of all that’s gone wrong.
With a voice like the rustle of ancient tomes,
It recounts fears and failures, all that you’ve known.
It grows in the silence of a heart’s quiet din,
Where sanity’s shores are worn thin and worn thin.
Ancient and haunting, from a realm not our own,
It feeds on the tremors of your deepest unknown.
It knows your secrets, your deepest despair,
A creature so shadowed, so thickly ensnared.
Its breath is the chill of a grave’s damp embrace,
A foretelling of fate you cannot erase.
Tentacles coil around your weary soul,
A dance of despair, a relentless toll.
It speaks in tongues of forgotten lore,
Of cosmic horrors that lie in wait for more.
You struggle and fight, you try to break free,
Yet it clings to your essence, a silent decree.
But fear not, for you hold the key to the door
Where this monster dwells, forevermore to explore.
Within you there lies a power so vast,
The will to confront what you fear at last.
Embrace the abyss, let the darkness pass,
For you are the master of this monstrous mass.
Invoke the light of courage and hope,
Let them shine forth from your mind’s deepest slope.
The monster will tremble, it will recoil,
As your strength grows and its power turns foil.
Speak to the beast in a voice so clear,
That echoes through the realms of doubt and fear.
“I am not your prey, nor your servant bound,
You’re a shadow cast by a mind unwound.
I’ll face you each dawn, each eventide’s hush,
For I am the master, the one that you’ve crushed.”
And so, in the depths of your mind’s own sea,
You’ll tame the creature that taunts thee.
For anxiety is but a part of the whole,
A challenge to conquer, a tale to be told.
Embrace the monster, let it be known,
That you are the hero of your own saga, alone.
With every dawn, with every setting sun,
You fight anew, for battles are never truly won.
Yet, in facing the beast, you shall find,
The strength of your spirit is forever twined.
So, let the creature of darkness retreat,
As your light shines forth, so pure and so sweet.
For in the end, it is you who will reign,
A conqueror over fear’s dark domain.
And though it whispers still in the night,
You’ll face it with courage, with all of your might.
Anxiety, the monster that once taunted me,
Is now but a shadow of what I used to be.
H.A. Schweizer
POEM 8
Processing Unemployment.
Prompt and poem.
Enter a prompt.
Receive a poem.
Processing.
The machine is processing.
I’m not.
I am a spectator to the prompt.
But it was my prompt.
My flicker of a soul flame that was handed over.
to the soulless.
For Processing.
And I’m a spectator to it,
so that I can see how I might feel.
if only I’d let myself feel it all the way through.
So, the words populate the screen.
and they look like some little Nancy Myers vision of a Sylvia Plath nightmare.
distilled into familiar phrases and rhythms.
But I’m the one whose burning,
while a machine takes my flame.
and burns my world,
and leaves me burnt,
but not warmed.
Anyway, the prompt was
I’m unemployed and a parent.
Thanks, I hate it.
(See?
I can use memetic phrasing too, bot.)
Do what you love,
and you’ll never work a day in your life.
Became doing what I loved
in two part time jobs,
with hours of commute in between them.
So, I got used to working being my whole identity.
And now we’re a generation unemployed,
and what’s the identity in that?
Little motors whirring without working.
Work is force times distance.
And I’m forcing it
but I’m getting nowhere.
That’s how you know I’m out of work .
So, I guess the machine made me mad enough to poem about it.
Thanks, I guess I like it.
JD
POEM 9
Untitled
In the abyss of my psyche, a creature dwells,
Eight arms of doubt and fear it wields.
Its tentacles twine and tightly coil,
A silent scream within my soul.
A cunning beast, in shadow’s guise,
It whispers lies that amplify my cries.
Its eyes, pools of darkness, never sleep,
Vigilant, watching my mind’s deep.
Manipulating thoughts with silent ease,
It tangles my dreams in a suffocating seize.
A dance of dread in the quiet night,
It feeds on fear, a voracious plight.
Stifling whispers in my ear,
Its grip is tight, it’s always near.
The fiend’s embrace is cold and sly,
It shrinks my world till I cannot fly.
Yet in the murky waters of my mind,
Where it lurks and I am blind,
I find a strength, a flicker faint,
To face the foe and not to faint.
With every breath, a battle’s start,
I fight the tentacles that seek to part
My will from sanity’s shore,
And piece by piece, I strive for more.
Though it clings and tries to hold,
I’m not a vessel to be controlled.
With each dawn that breaks the gloom,
I fight the octopus’s impending doom.
The light within, a beacon bright,
Guides my way through the tumultuous night.
Others unaware of this silent fight,
Where anxiety and I take flight.
Anon