So that I can be his voice

It hasn’t been long
since my father’s stroke
but, I am already forgetting
the smell of his voice.
That whiff, in which
we could hear
the squelch of anxious bodies
jostling on a Railway Station.

Our voices
hung over his reticence
like crimes.
And his few words
were rust
barely holding
the metal of a sentence
together.
The angst of his boyhood
would often crumble
through the grease of time
like oxidised self.

While he eased
the sorrows of machines
the cogs of his family
eroded.

His love for us
was measured
in his privations.
The cadavers of his
frayed shirts
and the fossils
of his worn shoes
were like the deserted cities,
held together
by ghettoes  of hope.

In rooms,
which grieved
of claustrophobia,
my mother’s shame
would drain his embrace
and his respite.

The streets
where she perished,
and he lost the
syllables of speech;
at their zenith
noise will be deep.
But I must reach
to scrape
for the sounds of their memories.

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