POEM: Anxiety

You feel butterflies in your stomach. 

They flap their wings crazily 

And it makes your stomach hurt. 

The unrequited love keeps your stomach clenched 

And it won’t let you go. 

It goes on and on for years. 

You stop eating, 

You stop sleeping, 

You lose weight. 

You cry nights in a row. 

The butterflies in your stomach are hungry for love 

And they consume you from the inside out, 

But in fact, you are battling anxiety. 

You never tell your doctor how you feel. 

You never treat anxiety with medication, 

And it’s still there in you. 

What’s the point of treating it, you think, 

If the doctor will treat the effect and not the cause. 

But you don’t care about the effect, 

You only care about the cause. 

Your anxiety will go when its cause goes. 

And until then, 

You learn to live with it, 

And you make it part of you. 

You learn to accept the pain 

And you make peace with it.

~~~~~~~~~~

From my book of poetry Sunset in Toronto, page 45.