This is how panic feels
‘like an orgasm,’ you say.
Evil twin, or cold shadow

of love.
Racing heart

breathlessness

trouble swallowing

nausea

confusion

weight loss

inexplicable

awareness of

wrongness 
adrenaline makes all the veils

come down. 
Psychiatrist says

you are very unwell

he is convincing.
Psychoanalyst says

speak

simple cure.
Psychiatrist says

he is gravely concerned

take these.
Psychoanalyst says

speak.
Red pill

blue pill

(ancient proverb).
You say

experimentally, anaphylaxis.
Psychosomatic epitome

of ego death
memory
you have

a throat that challenges

its walls
memory.
I cannot say: anaphylaxis

in case it is an incantation
alchemy in practice
(gestures with the hand)
clammy on the couch
memory.
Since giving

birth holes

have been drilled and

up it comes

your subconscious

groping

in the light

of day. 
Cut. 
She cuts you. 
A clue that leads

nowhere no matter

how much you search. 
‘Magic realism started

as an aesthetic,

not literary genre’,

you explain

in the car on the way home.
‘A way to depict

things beyond the limits,

um, of the everyday.’
You say

‘um’

when the words

around it are

important.
I listen.
You’re in the labyrinth

trying to put your symptoms

in order trying to

escape from the

ouroboros of cause

and effect. Each

possible diagnosis is captured

and pinned to its

letters like butterflies.

Words become spells they

bewitch you into
allergy

kidney disease

acute cardiac event

hormonal imbalance

brainstem corruption

overactive vagus nerve

migraine
it could be, it could be
definition of labyrinth.
You wake with

air in your lungs

hands streaking towards me

through the darklight.
‘You’re not dying just waking,’ I say.
You have received images.

His hands his face.

(Throat closing over.)

The man who forced upon you

this lifetime of the darkest colour

of confusion, you had got good

at keeping the tide out but now

you are eclipsing.
Tsunami

earthquake

cyclone

plane crash

snake bite

mortal immanence. 
We have a baby

this is where the

wildness arrived

she looks at you

lying in bed

and you don’t, can’t

complete the circuit.
It’s not a catastrophe

we spend whole lives

looking in unresponsive

directions. 
The front door for example

is impassive

no matter how many times

we return home.
You are surprised to find

that it takes energy to fall

asleep, it takes

energy to stay fallen

in love.
I touch your body

full with its unstudied channels

her between us my arms

somehow stretched

to their limits.
‘Love is in the realm

of non-representation,’

you say as we take out the bins.

‘It can’t be described,

which is why we feel

dumb when we experience it.’
I feel dumb.
After giving birth,

the ratio of conscious

to subconscious changes

like a glass filling up with water

past the halfway mark there it goes

glass filling

flooding.
New question, is it good

if the glass is full

if the glass is your mind?

symptom: crying

diagnosis: full glass
Does it begin in

the body or mind

numb arm (stroke?)

tight neck

extreme exhaustion

‘Am I near death?’

you ask with so much

life I want to die

to demonstrate, no.

Nothing feels direct

but everything

is connected we

continue to look

for clues.
When you google psychic pain

the search results give entries for ‘Madness’.
Virginia Woolf

Sylvia Plath

Hildegard of Bingen

Simone Weil

Agnes Martin.
Bodies and minds

in collision maybe

(‘Descartes saved us

from this noise

of our infernal bodies!’

you joke)

like yours producing

magic entirely

disproportionate

to the available mechanisms

of quantification.
I watch you standing

near the bookshelf

trying to separate

reality from (from from) symptom

mind from body.
Psychic pain is hard to diagnose

harder since curses were removed

from medical encyclopaedias around the 1200s

but still you search for answers.  
Psychic detective

plotting marks on a blank map

a pattern emerges it spells
‘Hysteria’

from the Greek word

‘womb’.
A state of emotional excess

peculiar to women. Treatment

used to involve marriage

or hypnosis (same thing?)

now you can take Valium.
At the emergency department

the triage nurse does not

examine your spirit. He doesn’t

understand that we used to run

like streamers through our hours.
Breath, then

was still just

a byproduct.
How did we see each other

when our faces were

so close, all foreground

fuzzy blurry, love?
What did we see

when we peered

at the future

beckoning to us
the secondhand

slapping the wrist

small warning?
Now you’re living twice

at once, this confluence

of past-present pedestrianly

defined as PTSD.
You call it

a kind of internal sonic

boom: history moving forward

faster

than the speed of time.
You get up try to move

physically away from

the feeling.
The curse moves

with you.
Paralysis: not a specific thought

but totally embodied (like Kate

in the Titanic when she rushes

to the back of the ship).
‘Chew ice,’ I say.
A year of this continues

and passes

rhythm of amnesia

protecting you

from your own intensity.
One day you visit the temple

to ask the monk

‘What is a human life?’
He pauses, then says

he doesn’t know

calls another monk over.

Soon there are ten monks

saffron robes encircling you

trying to answer

your question.
Finally, a student says,

‘Suffering.’