Memory Unit/Dementia

Memory unit, somewhere between
the ports of reason and south of confusion,
with no parallels of longitude and latitude to
mark the spot exactly, you will find the memory unit.
Passports are not required.
Patients wandering aimlessly like broken toys,
lifeless limp ragdolls.
Minds, like pieces of broken glass,
once whole, now shattered, that peer through
narrow openings to a different reality,
outside their encased prison walls from which
there is no escape.
There are no visible horizons.
Awareness, shrunk to the size of a quarter, extending out
only several inches and getting smaller.
Meaningless communications. Childlike gibberish, 
with thoughts stuck in first gear.
Brain in malfunction mode. No exit, except death,
that will come, but slowly.
Living corpses. Erased memories never again to be recalled.
Lives, sputtering, flickering out like dying florescent bulbs.
Dementia, a malevolent thief that does not discriminate who
robs the recesses of the mind.
Frayed wires. Lost connections.
Irreversible, irreparable.
“Do I know you?” “I’m your husband, Roy.” “No. Do I know you?”
Eventually sleep and the confusion stops for a while.
Nursing staff in multicolored uniforms, talking, laughing
over the word salad and garbled phrases of their patients,
who remain slumped over in chairs with vacant stares and who make
muffled pleas: “I’m lost. Can anybody help me find my way back home?”
In space, nobody can hear you scream.

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