My Friend With Alzheimer's Poem by JIBAN GOSWAMI

My friend with Alzheimer's

Oh he is so lonely…
His mind is hazy, cloudy, shrouded in a cloak of solitude
He is closing his eyes…
there you see, everything’s is pitch dark
What’s smelling so dark? Memories? Whose memories?
Teetering on the brink of sanity
Memories are the props he seeks
As he lurches and stumbles on uneven thoughts.
Bizarre dreams assault him. Those are dreams, aren’t they?
Faces look familiar, where did he see them last? When?
Wools, wools everywhere
dense, amorphous wools... white as cotton
or winter fog? Fog?
They clog his brain,
Isn’t it brain that they are clogging?
Should he take a long detour to bypass those clogs
And reach those memories playing hide and seek?
But it’s all so confusing, the paths look so much the same,
Which one to choose?
One of those on his left, or one on the right
Or may be one of those at front or one behind?
Oh there are also those going up and those going down.
Hell, which does he choose, ? Why?
Where did he want to go anyway? How the hell does it matter?
Did he want to go anywhere at all, he wonders.
Oh! Dash it! What the hell!
Who bothers? .
It’s too much. Too confusing. Too painfully confusing.
Would he rather cry? Will that be OK?
This fog is so comforting, so faceless, so …nothing!
Better let it smother me, he thought
So mindless, so timeless!
I surely am alive, he tells himself.
See, I am pinching myself, I feel the pinch.
So I am here, alive and kicking.
It is here and now, that’s all that matters.
What past? What future?
How do they smell? Or taste?
Only if it were a tad warmer,
A little less lonely,
Why is there nobody around?
Where have all gone?
Was I always this lonely?
I surely was
I surely must have been,
White fog, so comforting, so faceless
so timeless, so nothing!