Brother (realize podcast)

This is something I wrote months and months ago and never got around to podcasting. But it's a podcasting kind of day. Sorry if it's really quiet, like it is on my computer. And sorry about my cold.

Brother
you used to play me songs
as rich and sweet and strong as golden honey
on sunny, whirling autumn days
and in my childish haze I saw
a world of patterns, moments paused,
reflecting as your fingers bent
and sent
premonitory glass repents.
The air was thick with your sickness,
thick with moths and quicksand rhymes
in double time,
your strings emitting sound ignition
--adolescent metacognition--
in Lego fortresses
and dandelion doll dresses
and time capsuled petty stresses
and you immune as your delicate tune
floated into dust between my rusted eyelashes,
your intuitive crashes
--so inevitable--
yet in my time wasting, cloud chasing, reality facing view,

you

were my barefoot, thistle-scratched, pomegranate stained reaction,
weaving twigs in my hair, 'cause there
you weren't yet a broken Polaroid
of plastic toys and genuine grins
you had yet to begin
your spiral into silver smoke
and worship tokes
and uninspired, barbed wire, melancholy madness
'cause your un-callused fingers were still blindly groping

hoping

for some phantom switch to flick back on the light.

You used to take me places with miles
of fluorescent tiles,
we'd walk side by side between the lines,
and feel our minds weave spider webs
that ebbed and glowed and showed our insignificance
--our desperate yearn for comeuppance--
exposed as we posed like those we knew we'd never be.
We used to see unflattering mirrors and steer ourselves around,
we used to drown
in empty promises
and let door hinges keep our rhythm as they slammed behind
our dotted lines of footprints.

You used to hint
at mystery Christmas presents,
your omnipresent voice of temptation
accenting our flawed relations.
Your word was law and law was scattered like marbles on the floor
as my skull stored
the thousand dreams you etched for me
on the plastic slides and carnival rides,
with jackknifed rebellion your only vice.

You let them slice
your soul from you.
I watched them nail you to stone
and watched them own
your patterns and your ways
'till day by day the dark shadowed crowd was all you were.
I watched them stir
the pensive process you pursue,
the subtle blinks I saw in you.
I watched them peel your reel of grins,
watched it begin and watched it end.
I watched them bend your spine,
felt mine bend with it,
felt both our stitches pried apart,
our practiced art unstuffed for the crows,
the life you'd been owed stripped from your now
bruised, abused and overused hands

and you became a man

as the golden strings were dessicated,
and your barefoot shadow evaporated.

I watched you watch yourself dissolve,
your fall illuminating all the shreds of you,
your faithful marble tunes
settling
like feathers you'd lost in a storm.