• Shaking My Head on Adam for Eating the Fruit that Would Eventually Break All Sister’s Hearts

    We ran up the phone bills as often as we could
    One night we were working on wasting October
    And the line went silent.
    Brother!
    Earlier he said no one but his sister could make him laugh like that
    But that night his laugh stopped, like a hospital machine playing a dying pulse
    Father asked me to speak
    As we dropped my love in the dirt
    I said the following in honor of my late brother:
    We’d act out your favorite scenes from your favorite films
    I’d beg you to sing in Japanese and we’d explore different realms
    And you’d tell me about the beauty you enforced at school
    How merciless you were when it came to the cruel
    When your frame fit my form
    In my ear you whispered "we would soon be sworn-
    A knife would soon cut our veins
    Biology’s mistake, no longer our pain
    Then your blood would beat in and out of my heart
    And I’d swim beneath your skin; we’d never be apart"
    But a mortal’s whispering is not to be confused with a promise
    You are gone and separation is upon us
    Here I stand, full of my own lonely DNA
    And you lie there cold with no replies to say
    Your chin sat on my head
    Your lips pressed into my hair
    But now your lips are dead
    Past tense is chronic pain
    And I wish we could do all this again
    But it’s quite different with a corpse
    Like an adolescent trying to feed a doll- desperation at its worst
    My dear is gone. Along with our rapture.
    The reason he slept, I’m sure, was to escape the absence of laughter
    Then what does his death say about comedy?
    When he died, so did my hope for humanity.