YAWN

The doorbell rang and echoed through loneliness, 

he pressed the key fob around his neck and the blue-

dis-abled automatic door swung open and a girl stood 

there holding a bouquet of multi-coloured tulips. 

He had ordered them online to say thanx to the care-

workers Rachel, Tirna and his niece Stacey.

‘You get more hope from negativity, he thought than sentimentality’. He was a filthy realist in a wheel-

chair paralyzed down his right side. All his long-

term memory was erased during a massive stroke, 

it lmost killed him. They say he died for seconds, 

on the operating theatre. He couldn’t remember that, 

his childhood, a marriage of eighteen years,

 and three sons being born. 

After a year in rehab hospital from having physio

to stand, living with the fact of never being able

to walk as the stroke bled through his memory

and his balance. Speech therapy to mumble like 

a drunk Jap with damaged vocal cords. A, E, I, O, 

FUCK you every day for a year, learning to wipe 

your ass and toothbrush and be a good little 

stroke victim.

When released I lived with my mother but his brother

was an alcoholic, which added to my confused damaged mind. 

He rented lived like a dog alone for three years.

How I survived is beyond me, living with broken windows 

in freezing winter. He recalled one Christmas in bed 

with coat, gloves a monkey-hat and the heating broke. 

Wind whistling through broken windows. I have never 

before lived in such dispair.

the ouThistles as tall as a man.

What son does that and can sleep, you wouldnt let a dog

live like that let alone  your motherd 

v ngalow, swith six rooms but the wheelir could only acess

bathroom, kitchen,  sitting-room every room is

a sitting-room a whellchair trionented hell-hole had very ble

little do with the world. He lived in his ownroom four rooms 

four walls of his o wn he had disabled, hadn't much to 

do with

He woke from a stroke/coma just seconds after he 

was declared dead. He sat bolt upright like some-

one given an adrenaline boost but this not fiction.

He sat now in his wheelchair and had to make 

a life in this strange reality of forgetting to remember. 

His computer was his only link to the outside world. 

The world rumbled up and down the road beyond his dis-

abled cul-de-sac.

He had been a year on a re-hab stroke ward that was like

living one flew over the cuckoo's nest. Tried living

at his after his release, he knew who they were but

for the life of him, he had no memory recall. 

fusion, he lived like a dog alone in a private rented

bungalow, with six rooms but the wheelir could only acess

bathroom, kitchen, sitting-room inair every room

is asitting-room a whellch trionented hell-hole had very 

little do with the world. He lived in his ownroom four rooms 

four walls of his o wn he had disabled, hadn't much to 

do with anyone, family and friendooms he had no memory of tthey

drifted away, his sons still called, his firs born every week

butned cul-de-sacwdiableor soe called it, like atprisoner locked in his locked-in-syndrome.

For ten or so years he had tried to live independently in his own world of recovery.

Everyday he wrote a blog, trying to capture memory. Forty five years of his memory 

was erased, he remembered snippets from his short term memory bank but no 

detail of when or why, everything seemed fragmented to him.  

 He went on Spotify after reading a review in a music magazine on the new C.D. 

Yawn by Bill Ryder-Jones.

Clicked on the track,’ no ones trying to kill you’,  and it was as if the track spoke

to him remembering his time just after taking his stroke when he thought the nurses

were out to kill him. He was so paranoid then, the drugs that kept him alive 

were making him hallucinate.

He had nothing in his mind, his brain was like porridge gruel, all he could do was grip

the blankets of his hospital bed in a white knuckled clench and hope. Thinking he was in

 a Stephen King story, He saw a man behind his bed with a chainsaw ripping up

body parts and throwing them in a skip then he woke in a cold sweat.

The next track he heard was, don’t be scared, I love you, and his senseless scars

were healed it was as if the record was speaking to him. He remembered

that same feeling was just like that when he read Raymond Carver, Henri Michaux,

Keats, Kavanagh or Robert Lowell a universal felling then he remembered a line

By Fernando Pessoa who said