A Poem For My Brother
I thought for whatever verdant idolatry there were in the night its gifts of sorrow that somehow I could disappear into the past as if you were no more than the brother I followed into the trees chasing after the apparitions of tomorrow to discover in their passive shadows that opium of dreams, but to love is not to escape disappointment, only to express in the things that lay over our shoulders like a cross the enchanted music that breathes into the air the misunderstood lessons of our youth.
I still love you, forever, as for me, you are standing against the gates of evil with the hawk like gaze of centuries drifting over the earth with whatever will to live causes you to look after the animals, the flowers and the rivers that speak to the wind the philosophy that illustrates the poetry of their souls where they rest beneath the stars and give to you the passion in your eyes.
Of course there is nothing to fall back on but those empty trails where we walked and talked about “The Wind And The Willows” and I thought that there was no peace but when words cease to matter and the very air is like a woman’s womb, breading out of the earth the suffering that lends unto the mind its empathy so that all there was to do was love you to chase monsters while you carried me on your back so that I believed bones were a bed where worms crafted in their mute speech the poetry of our youth.
It is enough.
Greece
How long can I stand still until I lay back against the sun and talk to you of opium and alcohol as you take the piece they gave you and put it under your tongue so as the rest of the drug addicts shift back and forth on their hips and smoke cigarettes prose turns to poetry and young men learn to die as they watch you through the wild forests of Greece and write to Dianna their dreams that she make them innocent as they starve on the speech with which she speaks to the stones in a river bed with the psychology she uses to comb your long black hair with the suffering of some idle apparition?
I knew I’d never be with you in bed but all the same as we passed the time together our bodies drained dry of chemicals I came to see faith as a kind of cancer against which the cynical Olympia of your chest when you leaned across the table became the bone upon which angels built an empire with her populace a community of tears.
One could make the argument that we came here to grieve as if to say I love you is not enough but to get clean one must say good bye to the breathless immaturity in which dreams will wither to paint out of the civilized world her sea of malevolent idols and it is with us, you standing there with your eyes like doorways into the jungles of south America or wherever you come from that I don’t know except to say that I’m sorry but I’m too old to see you as you are, and I’m starting to feel as old as winter though it was summer then and I’m still just forty one but I saw then and still see now when I remember as you smiled the paradox where death becomes the passion of your youth, the despair of acceptance when your arms were like a coffin holding me tight as if the hours we had yet to waste after we said good bye were terrible as mountains.
Keith Aaron Munroe was born and raised in Northern Virginia. He has spent most of his life trying to be a writer. In the past he took care of horses for a living.