Alzheimer's

[dukealien]

It seems so blah to me, not quite sure how to fix it.

1. Nostalgia perched on frail limb,
   
2. Fading notes of mother's hymn.
   
3. Across the sea, a wooden mast,
   
4. Rips and creases mar his past.
   
5. Love surrounds, he's unaware,
   
6. Family grieves, he only stares.
   
7. A flash of white, a bitter taste,
   
8. Once again, another place.
   
9. A blink, a cry, he's so alone,
   
10. His body strikes, his heart still roams.
    
11. That fickle fate, trapped his mind,
    
12. A stranger, all it left behind.
    

Interesting poem.  Composed of rhymed and near-rhymed couplets, basically tetrameter.  Rearranging words and tenses could make most or all of the rhymes exact,  but the near-rhyme suggests disorder without becoming actually incomprehensible.

There are cliches, particularly in the later part of the poem - "fickle fate" in L11, notably.  A more inventive word for one of the two (random fate, fickle chance) might be substituted to advantage.  "So alone" in L9 is another.

In some of the couplets, the line breaks seem to call for more decisive punctuation than a comma - to me, L5 calls for a colon or semicolon, for example.

Don't want to rewrite it, but there are some nice, original lines that seem short a metric foot:   reading L1 - a good image - I'm tempted to give either "perched" or "frail" two syllables.  Similarly in L11, I itch for an added word, perhaps between "fate" and "trapped."

"Strikes" in L10 may be an intended ambivalence.  In addition to the idea of the the body on strike (like a labor union), I see two traditional naval usages - "strikes" as in, to strike the flag (surrender), and "strikes" as in, "she [the ship] struck hard," used intransitively, meaning she ship grounded or hit a reef.  All those definitions of "strike" fit, making it a very rich line since all are appropriate (even additive).

It might be useful to re-punctuate as free verse (capitals only at the beginning of sentences, perhaps no line-end punctuation except periods) to see how it reads.  It's choppy now, but this mimics the abrupt movements of a person suffering dementia.

Stick with this subject - it's well worth an edit cycle or two.