The silver tide is rising, a global, greying swell,
As millions move to live within a physiological hell.
The city in the skull – once a vibrant, humming hive,
Now struggles with the chemistry of staying half-alive.
The ‘rubbish collection’ fails, the cellular sweepers tire,
As misfolded proteins set the neural woods on fire.
It is a shared collapse, a failure of the sweeper’s art,
That tears the map of human life and dignity apart.
In Alzheimer’s, I wander through a thick and foggy haze,
Where Beta-amyloid plaques choke my memory’s ancient maze.
Like wet cement in gears, the protein builds its wall,
While Tau tangles inside the cells ensure the structures fall.
My hippocampus shrivels, my history turns to sand,
I’m holding onto ghosts in a fast-eroding land.
The synapses are strangled, the neural pathways frayed,
I am a disappearing act that memory has betrayed.
Then Vascular Dementia strikes a different, darker blow,
Where the rivers of the blood simply find no oxygenated flow.
It’s a plumbing of the spirit, a starvation of the core,
As the oxygenated thoughts retreat
From my brain’s once-fertile shore.
The vessels narrow, brittle, till the circuit starts to break,
A structural collapse for every step I try to take.
Small strokes like silent lightning leave patches of the dark,
Killing off the city’s light, spark by spark.
The memory loss is structural, a crumbling bridge of stone,
I am starving in a palace that I used to call my own.
In frontotemporal halls, feelings of ‘me’ are cleared away,
Though my memory is sharp, my soul has gone astray.
The frontal lobes are withered, where the social filters sit,
And the temporal decay claims my empathy and wit.
The protein builds a grave of who I used to be,
Then builds the very coffin that once defined the ‘me’.
The past is burned, no more ‘he’ or ‘she’.
I am a robot of my own memory.
It is the cruellest theft to keep the facts of who I am,
While the ‘self’ is washed away behind a broken, neural dam.
Welcome to my harsh reality where my mind can still recall the past,
But my ‘will’ and ‘self’ are melting, far too broken now to last.
In Parkinson’s, I’m frozen, though I’m desperate to run,
The alpha-synuclein hides my spirit from the sun.
The dopaminergic spark, the grease that moves the wheel,
Is swallowed by the Lewy stains that turn my limbs to steel.
A mask is on my face, a tremor in my hand,
A statue made of muscle in a shifting, silent land.
The Substantia Nigra pales, the signals die away,
While the tremors of the hand keep the restless world at bay.
A mask is on my face, a statue in a shifting land,
Trapped within a body that won’t follow my command.
Then Motor Neuron Disease leaves the lightning in my head,
While the wires to my body turn to heavy, useless lead.
Oxygen free radicals burn like acid through the cord,
Leaving motor neurons scorched, the physical ignored.
My muscles waste and flicker, while my mind is crystal clear,
Trapped within a digital voice to mask my rising fear.
The TDP- 43 clumps in a dark, molecular crime,
As my muscles waste to nothing in the ticking clock of time.
My mind is a fortress, but my voice has turned to stone,
Reaching through a digital screen to make my presence known.
I am trapped in a digital, robotic breath,
Clinging to a tablet screen in the shadow-lands of death.
Outside the skin, the world begins to feel the heavy strain,
As hospitals are flooded by the mystery of the brain.
A care gap expands before us, a canyon deep and wide,
With no working-age battalion to support the silver tide.
We move from reactive cures to a long and palliated wait,
Using tech to bridge the silence of a dark, neuro-fate.
The economic cost is climbing, a debt we cannot pay,
As the wisdom of the elders simply flickers and fades away.
Ninety-five percent are idiopathic storms,
Unpredictable and cruel in their microscopic forms.
Without biomarkers found, or a cure upon the sea,
We are lost within the protein of our own pathology.
Solving this is not a choice, but a desperate, final must,
Before the future of our world is ground to neural dust.
We search for early warnings, for the light before the dark,
To save the human story from this cold, molecular shark.
