Coma
Waiting for Zippo
It was so queer it was as if fairies had stolen me
and left a log in my place. Randall Jarrell, c1965.
Sometimes I felt like a pre-lingual infant
or someone brain-damaged in an accident,
silent and unresponsive, treated
like vegetables you cosset
knowing you can speak freely in front of them
about how they look, their quality of life,
prognosis, euthanasia.
But linked to some electronic device
they communicate with total clarity,
humour even, given the limitations
of the apparatus, and people feel startled
as when animals in fairy tales
address them wisely and in a logical manner,
indignant too that some quip of theirs
which might conceivably be thought spiteful
had been understood
by the person referred to.
Certainly I had lost direction
as if the speech-centres of my brain
had been eroded away, and the knots
binding words to their meanings had ruptured.
Ideas no longer raced along express tracks
sucking associations into them like fallen leaves,
compacting them. Instead, hollows of
labyrinthine burrows set them hounding off
diversely, hop-scotching in all the wrong squares,
the thread undone, the trail of breadcrumbs
through the forest eaten by birds,
yet still trying by endless restlessness, walking
through night's darkness mirroring the darkness
of day, to find their way out of the maze.
Page(s) 75
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