In Case of Anxiety, Break The Bank: Prose Poetry

Will you hold your breath when anxiety knocks on your door?

Will you dig yourself into a wishing well on a cloudland tucked away in your capillaries? Will you try to speak when the shards of broken wind chimes clog your pulmonary arteries?
Will you swing on the pulley like a trapeze artist at the Jumbo Circus you begged Ma to visit? Will your hands spiral like Icarus when you are sun-kissed?

When your thought trains have a nervous breakdown, there is a stampede of passengers in your windpipe. When humans read the poetry of the Earth to keep themselves alive. When your passions are folded by society like secret school notes. When an off-key Moonlight Sonata bathes in your throat. Then, please proceed as follows:

Insert five coins to see:

A blow straw painting of lightning in the sky.
Who can decipher Gods when their pleasure and wrath look the same?
Indian autumns ignited in vintage lamps.
When love was the colors of the electromagnetic spectrum, and home was a postcard in weekly mail.
An address book of self-hatred.
Is it narcissism or self-pity?
A handcrafted jewelry box in the attic.
When you tied poems on your jhumkas in the bazaars of the Lake City. 
A vanity mirror with an array of makeup and toxic positivity.
Maybe you and your self-love need couples’

Fingers carving crescent moons on the inside of your palms.
A metaphysics of madness scribbled on your hands. 
You trip on jump ropes of consciousness.
Memories have a shelf life, a butterfly garden built on wastelands. 
Carmine bites on your lips.
Bloodstained verandahs of ancestral havelis swindled in property wars.

Overblown balloons filling up your chest.
Capitalizing on your entropy on virtual doors. therapy.

Insert four coins to feel:

Fingers carving crescent moons on the inside of your palms.
A metaphysics of madness scribbled on your hands. 
You trip on jump ropes of consciousness.
Memories have a shelf life, a butterfly garden built on wastelands. 
Carmine bites on your lips.
Bloodstained verandahs of ancestral havelis swindled in property wars.                                              Overblown balloons filling up your chest.
Capitalizing on your entropy on virtual doors. 

Insert three coins to hear:

Art whispers, “There is no wrong way to be holy”
We’re iconoclasts not afraid to sin because heaven prohibits our existence.
Humdrum of the market where identities are bartered at the magic shop.
Growing up is an act of warfare when the Battle of Plassey wept for the 1857 resistance.
The sound of panic when a child leaves your finger and runs with light-up sneakers in your mind.
The world is mismatched, mislead, whole, apart and in-between but you keep this away from you smiles.

Insert two coins to smell:

The turpentine of rage tucked into the deepest folds of your braids.
Sometimes grief is the mortgage for creating art.
The breath of fabric softener in handknit sweaters of metaphors.
The desire to hide and the desire to communicate plays Jenga with your heart.

Insert one coin to taste:

The taste of leftover hope.
You folded a thousand paper planes for a wish to come true.

Humans read poetry of the Earth to keep themselves alive. Healing begins when you start writing one.
Now, go open the door.

//”In Case of Anxiety, Break the Bank”// enigma

Copyright © 2016-2023 Enigma. All rights reserved.

Picture Credits: Enigma (Inktober 2020 Art Day 24 Dig)