A Silent Explosion

While reading through the online news,
oblivious and tranced,
the words began to leave the page,
as letters slowly danced.

It all became a blurry soup,
no longer making sense;
I shook my head and wiped my eyes
and grew extremely tense!

Forgetting how to work the mouse
and keyboard made it worse;
my right hand felt like it was in
another universe!

I looked up to the paddle fan
while it was not turned on,
to find the paddles on the right
were 50 percent gone!

Confused and scared, I wound up in
the local I.C.U.,
discovering I'd had a stroke,
from tests, they put me through.

Neural pathways had exploded,
severing connections,
wiping short-term memory out
negating all corrections.

My swollen brain was slow to heal
and kept me in my bed;
I listened to the internet
on audio instead.

But gratefully, my legs and speech
were perfectly intact,
and it was painless, otherwise
in spite of the impact.

~William A. Tatum