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.