Twelve short lines, no punctuation, and a title that seems to contradict almost everything beneath it: Dominic Black's "My Choice" is a poem about silence that cannot quite keep quiet.
The speaker has been stripped, line by line, of what lets a person go on: faith, hope, a voice, finally authority over the self. The opening, "Have no faith / Have no hope," can be read as a confession or as an order, and the ambiguity matters, because the lines that follow are full of orders: "Told to keep isolated," "Forced to stay quiet," "Forced to shut down." The central idea is the gap between what is called a choice and what is actually compelled.
The grammar shows how little of the speaker is left. Apart from one "I" tucked inside "One I cannot say," nearly every line opens with a subjectless verb form: Have, Told, Having, Forced, Abandoning, Letting. Nobody is named as the one doing the telling or forcing, so the pressure feels total and faceless. The poem never says whether it comes from other people, from circumstance, or from the speaker's own mind. Repetition ("Have no… Have no," "One… One… One," "Forced… Forced") circles like someone pacing the same few walls.
The central paradox sits in lines three to five. The speaker is "always writing poems," yet they "contribute one note / One of silence." A note of silence is a contradiction, but a productive one. It borrows from music, where silence is a rest written into the score, and makes it the speaker's only offering. "Contribute" is a curiously formal verb, as though one voice in a choir were allowed to take part only by saying nothing. Then "One I cannot say" pushes further: the note is not merely quiet but unsayable.
Sound backs up the argument. The lines are short and uneven, from three syllables to seven, and the first two land like blunt blows. Rhyme arrives late and tightens. "Hope" and "note" share only a vowel sound; then "say" and "way" (lines six and eight) lock into full rhyme, and "down" and "crown" (ten and twelve) do the same. The say/way pairing is telling: "One I cannot say" meets "Having no other way," as if speech and escape were the same closed door. By the end, the rhyme has the finality of a latch clicking.
Imagery is sparse, so the last picture carries the weight. "Shut down" sounds mechanical, a device switched off, while "crown" belongs to kings and queens, rule and dignity. Side by side they suggest a person treated like a machine who still clings to something like sovereignty. The verbs matter too. The crown isn't snatched away but allowed to fall, and "abandoning my control" sounds like leaving a post rather than being thrown out. The poem ends on "crown," so that a symbol of status is the last thing we hear just as it drops.
That brings us back to the title. "My Choice" can be bitter irony: when you are told, forced and left with "no other way," the word is an insult. It can also be grimly literal. If every other option has been removed, giving up is the last decision available, and a monarch who abdicates is still choosing. The poem holds both readings without settling on either. Its significance lies there, and in a final twist: a poem about being unable to speak is, of course, speaking. The silence it describes is imperfect, because we are reading it.