For My Brother

The cancer was fast;

Fast enough to

Arrest all forthcoming notions

And freeze for a moment

The vitriol of us in the agar of

Selfishness and deceit.

Insisting for a suspended moment,

Like the fugue after a sneeze,

That you'd have time to do what you wanted

When you got out of here.

I am the assignation of all your moments 

Made to matter.

I am the sentry at the gate of your afterlife

Testing with careful hands the weight of your heart.

I am the the hopeless cause of this

Painfully brought to your bedside.

I am what we never said, 

The time lost to say it without the 

Fucking grotesque insincerity a time limit introduces.

I am become death,

Destroyer of worlds.

The laze of our inconsistent contact
Meant the magic in us both would go untested,
And unpunished.
I heard you gave it away,
To those who loved you.
I heard you were almost a father,
And would've married more than once.
I heard you in the desert,
Calling old names.
I heard you at the door,
The night you...
I told the story of saving your life,
Again and again.

I sit holding...
That which I can't distinguish from memory or possibility:
There was something we were meant to become,
Something under the skin of us which
We never scratched forth.
We never shed our grub shells,
Our infant scales,
To become the greatness
Living in our blood.

We are boy kings lying murdered.
Victims of uncles and fathers
With greed and power more vast
Than the empires of imagination
We always inhabited.

You shed your gown
To bare the hole drilled in you;
Cut deep with the auger
Of that which is inevitable
And felt in the room.

You happened to me.
You happened to me,
And I balled up all your significance into a poem,
So the world could know you by the sound you made
While disappearing.