brothertwin

Everywhere I look I see traces of all the things you wanted to do, and all the things you tried to do.  These are the guitars that took the lightning that shot through your fingertips, and they still play songs in my belly, the rhythms of old school funk from the concerts you dragged me to in high school, and the rhythms of a brain trying to make itself feel better, incantations to rabbits come and gone from the surface of the ground, and a thousand interpretations of the Tao, madalas of a breaking mind.  This is another stack of movies we watched in high school, scenes we'd act out on holidays to make mothers and aunts laugh, freezing moments of the times you were happy.  Everything that was ever good in the world was spoken into being by John Cusack and Christian Slater, and I remember nights wearing thin from too much alcohol, and just enough acid to make a horse see tracers in the hay, and the conversations stumbled into sex and gender, and everything started to fall apart, because something in early readings of a post-feminist present meant that I was changing, and I no longer agreed with all the things that I thought we were taught.  You finished all the books, but I see places where you decided the kitchen had suddenly become too far away, and stacks of thoughts pile up until they look like everyone else's trash.  You don't live like one of those crazy old people who haven't left their houses for years, because the threads are all still there, they're still showing, and I see the logic in these remnants of paper, bottle caps, and the hundred and one empty cans of copenhagen snuff.  It makes sense to me.  Because I'm not far from you, except there are fetish objects that speak of the guilt of the survivors for surviving, because all the things I hoped to do, I do, and all the things I want to do, I'm doing, but all the things I've lost are all that I can see when I'm scraping your floors looking for clues to why you got to this moment.  On my worst days I can't get out from under your weight, and on days that are worse than those, I think I'm free of that.  They say that you have to kill the father early on, but we know what happened to dad, and that took care of that stage for me, because when he was born as someone else, without the anger and the violence, I was ready for someone new.  You always hated it when people went away, when the hundred and one disappearing women went away from you, but I learned to hate it when people went away when they were still living in the same house, when they look the same and talk the same, but they sent the shadow away and all there was left was a real broken person.  I wish I could say that I would do anything to bring your illusions back, to bring them like lost birds to inhabit the walls of your dissolving home, so you could feel the breath of spring in all of this.  But now that I'm learning some things about healing, I'm learning how not to bring those things back, and I'm learning that there are too many that I can't heal, especially on nights like these, when I'm seeing myself in the reflections of your broken pieces on the floor.  But I see traces of the things that I can keep, and the things that I can see are no longer mine.  We never got angry in our house, and now I don't know anything else but that screaming can send some of these childhood things back to their proper home, and my anger is something I can own.  It's a hard lesson, and I'm much harder to love than I had once suspected.  But I'm not going to live with these patterns of ingesting things that I don't like, and I learned that some of the things I thought I loved the most could only poison me at the end of the morning, because I don't know how to stop drinking.  It's always been easier for me to find someone who loves me, and then try to figure out how to be that person that they love, by looking for the traces of my possible reflections on their floor, or in the corner of their eye.  But my eye broke this week.  It doesn't know how to look, or doesn't know what it's looking at, and that might be just enough of a hint to keep cleaning up the mess you made, and clean myself with white chalk at the end of the night, and understand that right now, I'm just not right for anyone else to look into, because they'll only see themselves.  So I move to a small room, close to the canal, close to the mountain, close enough to feel any stones thrown at my back.  This is a mark left by a woman who went away, this is a mark made by someone who left and came back too close so that I couldn't find her, and this is the mark that I made myself, a promise to be better, and I can already see marks on the door made by lovers who I haven't seen in too long, incarnations of loves that haven't happened, and a thousand magic spells to make things sweeter, and if there are already healing songs playing in my head, this is a mistake, something that isn't getting through to this broken mind, because I don't trust a soul and fall in love with ghosts I haven't met yet.  I'm not there yet, and that love is not dead yet, and this one here, the one I hold close like an invisible present, is the only one I want to remember under this moon, but I don't know how to water it yet.  I think it's from Switzerland, but it might do well in the desert, and god, I have a feeling it would be beautiful if it ever did get planted.  But I have to keep cleaning first, and there are other knocks at the door that deserve an answer, because I think I might be getting older.