Forgetting

I was trying to say to you
that I was worried
about forgetting you.
You looked puzzled with your fingers on your bottom lip.
I should have asked you if it happens to you.
Does it?
(Your father sitting at his favourite place by the window in the pub.)
I live with the fear of faces being papered over diligently, quickly.
Cigarette thin paper
Layers upon layers of it
once I turn my gaze away
Even when I try to concentrate with all my might
Then again there are times that there is a tear, a tiny drop
An image peers through the opaqueness
My grandmother is holding her big tailor's scissors cutting her finger nails
Big hands wrinkled on the outside, soft, very soft on the inside
that held my own little ones
for years
Other times I fall asleep
on all these layers of paper
There is a dribble
from the corner of my mouth
The wetness reveals
his calloused thumb, index and middle finger
Rather than his face when he kissed me secretly
under the thick leaves
where we sheltered from the rain

Forgetting

He wrote a lot
Irrespective of the layers
like the books stacked up high on my bedside
There is her who said:
I don't want to be forgotten
Not by you

Her cigarette ash burns the paper
She still sits on her favourite chair
Her hands reaching out to put out one more cigarette in the stone astray
She picks up her cigarette packet and frowns behind the glasses
to focus on reading to me
what she scribbled on it earlier
about the poem she has just read.