For eighteen years I have lived with this stroke.

          Asking doctors nurse psychiatrists: 

Why is it so black behind my eyes, why can’t I cling on

To images of my family, why can’t I conjure up

Images the way I used to construct poems.

Twice I attempted suicide, even the psyche team

Didn’t know what I was talking, all that anxiety dis-

Pair unable to form form, I called a formless form.

It drove me mad unable to dream but when I first

Took my stroke I could and form images and put

Them in poems but that didn’t last and had to

Use those images over and over to find hope.

One day I was flicking through you tube and came

Across a guy talking to a professor asking why

He couldn’t hold an image of his dead mother.

The professor said he suffered from a thing called

Aphantasia. Why had no one told me this all those

Black hole poems could have had a tinge of hope.

My work was so dark it was getting hard to reread.

The poor guy thought he was going mad and just

A simple name meant you could live with the neg-

Active emotion, it won’t ever make things right but

At least you have a purpose. In the back of my mind

I knew there was something. Aphantasia.

Now I had another to add to my melancholy, a reason

To live now I have aphasia damaged vocal chords like

A poet without a voice, paralysed down my right side.

In a wheelchair and have lost my long term memory.

Most of my childhood is lost and I can’t remember

My sons being born but now I have a name to go on.

A purpose to wake that I’m apfantastic.