Locked-In Verse

Writer and Poet Paralyzed by Stroke

Here’s the joke: a poet loses everything
except his mind, becomes a living
metaphor for the space between
thought and expression.
My nurse thinks I’m sleeping,
but I’m composing villanelles in my head,
counting meters with my eyelids,
one blink for iambic, two for trochee.

The specialists call this “locked-in syndrome,”
as if I’m a first draft trapped in a drawer,
but they don’t understand — I’ve always been
locked in with my poems, only now
the door’s bolted from the other side.

My wife reads my old notebooks by my bed,
and I want to tell her that new verses
are still blooming behind my eyes,
that my silence holds more sonnets
than my voice ever did,
that every twitch of my left cheek
is a line break trying to escape.

Funny how it takes total stillness
to understand that poetry never came
from my hands at all — it was always
this internal river, flowing
whether I could write it down or not.
Now every thought is a poem,
every blink a publication.