Honey Badgers for Anxiety

We were at a Thai restaurant
In Austin, Tx
A few fellow poets
And the girl I was dating
A guitar player

She would open for hard rock bands
Just her,
An acoustic guitar,
And the songs she wrote
Rocking the venue

But this night,
She had one of her anxiety attacks
Right after we ordered.
She was outside,
Sitting balled up
Leaning back against the building
World around her spinning
Breath caught and pressed
By boulders

I sat with her,
Told jokes,
And recounted
Scene for scene
A documentary on my favorite animal,

The honey badger.

Considered the most tenacious
Animal on the planet,
It attacks lions, and poisonous snakes
Without a care.

But it gets its name,
From its love of honey.
And the reckless abandon
With which it dives into
Underground hives
Being stung thousands of times
Just to pull out the
Sweet sweet honeycomb


Maybe that is like
Working through an anxiety attack.
Knowing the honeycomb,
The ability to take a
deep, sweet,
Breath of air
Is worth getting stung
By shortness of breath,
And vertigo.
So you don’t ever
give up trying

The whole time I talked,
I kept a hand on her belly,
Made her focus on breathing.
Trying to keep it slow and deliberate
Eventually we stood up
as everyone filed out of the restaurant

We missed dinner.

A couple weeks later
There was a package in the mail
A stuffed animal,
An official honey badger
I had no idea
That they even made those

It must have been much
Harder to obtain
Than my stories were
That eased her anxiety

And receiving it eased mine,
Concerned about
How much I actually helped.

Apparently,
Honey badgers
Work better
Than Effexor or Zoloft

But like all anxiety meds,
The side effects can be brutal.

Biting and clawing,
Resulting in excessive bleeding