A Patient Skull, A Borrowed Brain

There is a quiet after pain
that feels too empty to be peace. 
My thoughts drip slowly through the brain
like thawing ice that will not cease.

The room is warm. The lights still burn.
The clock insists the world is real.
But something in me will not turn
toward anything I'm meant to feel.

My hands still move. My lungs still breathe.
My mouth performs the shapes of speech.
Yet something hollow underneath
has slipped beyond my mind's own reach.

It started small - a gentle loss,
a little silence in the head.
A thought mislaid, a word across
the tongue that felt already dead.

Then came the numbness, slow and deep,
a creepy frost beneath the bone.
I prod my mind as one might keep
a corpse to check it's still their own.

I fear the day I'll finally see
how much of me has stopped being me.

How much was carved out quietly,
how much went missing without a sound?
How much of what I used to be
was hollowed slowly from the ground.

Perhaps the rot began with thought,
a small decay behind the eyes -
a place where something cold was caught
and learned to wear my shape and size.

And if one morning I should wake
and find the silence absolute,
I wonder what this world will take
this breathing body to compute.

For something empty may remain,
a face arranged where mine should be -
a patient skull, a borrowed brain,
and not a single part of me.