I Remember Me

There are not enough faces. Your own gapes back
at you on someone else, but paler, then the moment
when you see the next one and forget yourself.

It must be the dreams that make us different, must be
private cells inside a common skull.
One has the others look and has another memory.

Despair stares out from tube trains at itself
running on the platform for the closing door. Everyone
you meet is telling wordless barefaced truths.

Sometimes the crowd yields one you put a name to,
snapping fiction into fact. Mostly your lover passes
in the rain and does not know you when you speak.

~Carol Ann Duffy