The Errant Larynx of Sir Anthony Hopkins

A gothic-horror verse in iambic pentameter.

Half asleep, somewhere between midnight and nightmare, I rose and stitched together a gothic-horror verse in iambic pentameter—an unholy chronicle of failed poetry readings, wounded pride, and other creatures of the literary dark. Proceed only if you are willing to wander those shadowed halls.

The Errant Larynx of Sir Anthony Hopkins

At readings, flushed, incandescent with rage,
my iridescent voice betrayed its age.
A single, slow clap from the ninety-three
Some corrective measures beckoned to me.

“How fine,” I thought, “to stand before them all
With Hopkins’ velvet tones in my call.”
For who could doubt me then? My future shone
If I could claim Sir Anthony’s baritone.

Through hill and dale I travelled, grim but sure,
a vocal-crippled rogue in search of cure.
At last I found the man who’d set me free,
and dragged him home through valley, shrub, and tree.

His muffled pleas were lost beneath the pine;
My carpet burned his knees, but soon were mine.
The operation simple in my mind
removed his larynx with a cut refined.

I swallowed down the fruit of stolen heart,
Believing voice could graft itself to art.
Thus bound, the two of us, my captive and me
Fused in fate, from here on in and eternity

Bloodied, bruised, I strode to Kitsap’s stage
And let loose Shakespearean tones from their cage.
I raised my chin with oratory pride
The howling gasps that met me — petrified

For all my effort, all my grisly gain,
My voice emerged from a strangled, lifeless strain.
The horror on their faces told me plain
that Hopkins was the wrong man to obtain.

Defeated, wheezing, drenched in Welsh gore,
I croaked, “Well… that did not go as before.”
Then sighed, “Dear God, what tragic fools we be—
I should have mugged Sir Patrick Stewart, not he.”

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