APHANTASTIC

 While the world opens up beyond

my blue disabled door, life goes on

I'm left here in limbo, don't get me 

wrong I can handle solitary con-

finement, I've done it for years.

I know that I will never walk, wheel-

chair no use on sand or grass but

my mind is good for one thing.

Words flow out of me like rivers

to the sea, lost once more in under-

currents like when I was a boy.

I think the year was sixty-nine.

The year that changed everything

for everyone in Northern Ireland.

Felt so good to be away from tear gas

and rubber bullets, crates of petrol

bombs at every corner pavements

torn up from the streets, you would

think the world erupted. Buses 

burning on every street.

I wish I had another view but this is it. 

Like it or lump it's mine alone. I'm not

romantically minded, would you be. 

Unable to walk, talk, paralyzed unlike 

Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth. 

I'm lonely there are no daffodils, iCloud

is all I've got. I  have no mind's eye.

1. Aphasia, 2. Aphantasia;  Broken cords.

The inability to form mental images of 

objects that are not present.

Can you smell the stench of the street that's

as good as it gets? Grass and sand are text-

tures that I will never know. Locked away

in a syndrome, I will write my way home.