No one else had come that close to me. You were a constant grand-opening, ambience on my tape machine, 11, 12 and 13. You wiped the spittle from your face and smiled a sky and split your chest open to melt the gooey cave-in. I did the same, and we saved it. Hormonal search for something intimate, our shoes all full of gravel shit, and wood chips, and fire-spit. You were the footnotes in my horoscope. Like I can't have good luck without your congrats, or I can't have bad luck without your congrats, and I can't have love without a triangle. We laughed a bubble bath in Patrick's kitchen and his basement at inanity and phonics, and a blueberry and tonic, with gas chambers in our mouths because we lost both of our brushes in the woods behind the cemetery. Do you care anymore? Did you even notice? We took your camera out and sang by the tombstones. It had just struck 5:03 and I was stomping on a silverfish. They lived inside your basement and they bugged me in the bathroom while I was on the phone with crazy Megan waking in Michigan. She said she wanted pictures of me tugging at my thinnest skin. But because you were my brother, I just sat and felt disgusting and hung up abruptly after. You see, you were trying to tell me through the fire we made an hour ago that your insides were ugly; the divine had done nothing. And it makes me want to dress up in a garbage bag and lay inside your shower, just to think that I could listen to your whispers, and then sow my seed with blisters in accordance to her whimpers. We aren't so far apart. I just should've said something, like "That is why we're friends, to look up, make amends." This effort's bound to be unfocused, unfolding lotuses of unsent letters old to oldest. I'm writing just to let you know you've been the only constant in my conscience. Please respond. I've been to other houses since the split, when we both gained some social leverage, but everyone who let me in regretted it. And every due I tried to pay with counterfeit caught up with me as soon as I fell out my little bed. Excremental breather purebred, wondering how long it would take to reach cement. When we were knit, as a pair, I wouldn't go anywhere. I'd sing and I'd play and you'd laugh despite the violence in the songs, act like it wasn't intentional. But it had saved me from the violence that had wrought at least 200 children of the same seed, aching. I wish that I could bring you back to be my biggest editor, to make me second guess my sentence, second guess my mouth, expand and retract, fucked ass; I am not your fleeting friend. I am a fledgling, and you are my ending.

I've tried my best to explain you to the present cast of characters that jumped into your clothes. I drag the past into the present, fossilized relevant sentiment all sewn into your robes. You're in my closet, in my drawers and in my pockets. You're written in my records and my books. You were my conscience, wade the waters of my Loch Ness. You stay under with the baby that you shook. I'm not the bestest with attendance; I get nested and I stay home. I write myself out of your history; I wonder if you ever miss me. I won't know. But where can you be? I get antsy waiting. Don't go, no matter how hard your heart or depleted your soul. Because I'm not worth half of what I sing if you're not beside me and inside me, inspiring everything. I was Peter, he was Paul. You're at the center of it all. You wore all black and your dad's hat instead of rags. We chatted up with the homeless while our parents never noticed that we traded every hour that we had. I told my dad through choking screaming tearing breaths that I loved you more than I loved anything. I see the hole inside my church, I see the whole of what you're worth, and you had filled that opening. You stabbed the blow-up Christmas snow globe, and you cried because you had to. I brought a shoulder and a friendship that grew older because it had to. But where can you be? I get antsy waiting. Don't go, no matter how hard your heart or depleted your soul. Because I'm not worth half of what I sing if you're not beside me and inside me, inspiring everything. Arlene! Alicia! Is this what you promised? Is this what you salvaged? Leagues and leagues beneath me now?

I leave my art all over the place. I leave my heart all over my face. In big stalls, and in classrooms, on desktops like restaurants like best haunts for anybody that's pen-armed and hurt. My loner tendencies ready my red-alert. Like, I can't go outside without being addressed, or I can't go outside without making a mess, and it's senseless to me that I push you away over some bloated mini pilgrimage.

I want to sing pretty, I want to sing sweet So I write songs on this toilet while Gerry is asleep But I'm distracted by the silverfish that weaves between my feet I want to sing hoarsely as I bound out of bed So I write songs about the sun while Lois cooks us scrambled eggs But I'm distracted by the silverfish that's crawling up my leg I want to sing softly while the night is so still while the boys play Halo 3 and all take screenshots of each kill But there's this silverfish that's staked a claim on Gerry's windowsill Oh, minute issue, I don't wanna, I don't wanna kill you But I just bought a brand-new pair of gym shoes and you might as well be mildew This one's for you

There's a path lined with pines and the feelings you feel and they stand up as personal scarecrows Whether I'm walking or wishing I was, they point back behind me like arrows They bark, "Island tradition begs you to take your jelly legs and walk where you can't hurt our owner" I crawl in the sand, and I sweat 'til it reddens my hands I was once hard to see in a sea of my seed when you found me with Paul, treading water I played on your strengths and your weaknesses too like a one-on-one desperate doctor Put a stethoscope up to the walls of your cave just to hear what a planet would sound like I could hover and scan, but I never could properly land Lauren saw the good in me She listened to me sing for weeks and all I did was push you away So when I hear, "And now let us pray," I don't feel a thing inside I don't think of you and I and that's the story I'm sticking to

Experience alone is not enough to understand what makes your rough spots rough Your brain's been a back door to Mordor I'd like to be a ferry just for Gerry to bring you back to something ordinary I've known you as a boy of valor Assimilate our goals, eliminate our roles Turn baggage into savage acts that bandage our souls Can this be our so-treasured credo? But the hill, the hill, does it matter still? Or would you rather flatten it with sheer ill will? I squawk all alone like an oboe You should be taught in a school so someone can relate to all the subtleties that break my balls I think you'd die if I told you the truth That you're the definition of a labor of love and that's the truth and that's the whole truth and that's the truth about you

Tell me how you manage yourself, how you polish every surface of your mental health. Because sometimes I just try to conceive how you keep your countless secrets in each time you breathe. I used to write to calm myself down, but these days, that's not helping after what I've found. That now my love is a business plan, with charts and graphs determining where fate will use his hurting hands to place me. Do you get me? And now, I am overdrawn, and I can't recreate what's gone. It's all too much to focus on. So I guess in these few months 'til you leave, you'll burn each bridge you've built from love and common grief. And your timing couldn't have been made worse; you could've taken time to make this blow seem less rehearsed. The thinning circle of my close friends is not even worth counting when you're absent. And your vacant space is all I see when I'm supposed to count my blessings, and each song is stunted halfway through, with no backbone, so guilt-prone and overblown. Let me be the act of God that sets the lightning off and knocks you from your horse and off the ground. You'll lay thinking, always thinking, about all your life's subordinate pawns (a group in which I now belong). It's all too much to focus on. So I may be going overboard, but I get the feeling that we won't be talking anymore. So I'll get used to the silence, while this rhythm issue will become a meter I'll protect. And it goes like: "Stress, unstress."

We haven't talked in months; it's time I speak I've led a little lifetime in 20 weeks It had a very small midlife crisis too, and on that dark dark day, I thought of you I'm stable now, from bike to trike and I date a short girl that I really like She's olive-skinned and smiles so much and buckles under thumb like living plush And I cry in the bathroom a lot and this is barely even a song; it's just some silence that I break I wanna hold your crown so heavy in the sky and sing, "You're my favorite guy tonight" I'll hit you with my endless supply of sighs But I hold her to my breast, say "You're the girl that I love best” It's true; she may be my girl, but she's not you It's not sexual, it's something else It's a willingness to turn into my lapdog self and a willingness to cancel plans and pledge to you on two right hands It's my dirty feet, so brash and bare when I walk your block, and you don't know I'm there and the trees bow down to every house so thick with futures unannounced It's a rendezvous between divorcees so sick of every three word phrase They sit and stare over empty plates then one of them swallows and says, "You look great" Then smiles crack open, and knowing looks unravel like in romance books and I just can't keep my stupid face from cracking open like your mom's vase And it hurts, and it's hard to explain and I'm sorry that I brought it up it's just hard not to sing

(It's like, once I get closer to the truth, the problems broaden from the thin red lines to the width of an ottoman or coffins. I don't feel speared or betrayed, I just feel weird and delayed. I think about Kristen, and I think about her ditch-kissing. And I think about wishing that we had kissed in that ditch, and I wish that you had never even looked at that girl. This song is about flight, and functioning alcoholics, and old religions, and pageantry. and musk in a black hat, and a dead-eyed goldfish that I gawked at, and this dream that I had.) I had a dream that you and I were Siamese, my left eye on your left eye and my right eye on your forehead, and my neck was twisted, face was listless due to how familiar it was in my presumed entire existence as a twin. And that's the state I dreamed that we were in. And in that dream, the surgeons then divided us. There were doctors of the ears and nose and throat, and neurosurgeons, and some plastic ones to make us look as normal as we could upon our sudden separation. They did all that they could do. But in the middle of the surgery, they lost you. I love you too much. I was Peter, he was Paul. You're at the center of it all. The sheets are Lady in the Radiator white, and the room smells like sulfur. I caught the bullet in my independent hands, but your little neck ruptured. And you can see my soul leaving through my eyes when I wake up in the middle of the night and I find myself reaching out. Reaching out. Screaming loud. I keep screaming 'til I'm so fucking exhausted, and I wish they had never split us up. They could've waited centuries; it still would be abrupt. I keep my hands cupped for communion, but I'll spit it right back soon enough. Why can't I be strong right now? And when will I stop reaching out?

What do I do at the end of the day? I think of my old lives What do I do at the end of the day? I stew and stew and stew And it's just like me to write about you, exclusively you; that's so something I'd do and I just feel strange through my vibrating day and unloveable night I saw you, the Man in the Planet cranking until I left my bed I'll say it in Aramaic or write it in Sanskrit: You and Christ aren't equal in my head What do I do at the end of the day? I think of my old lives What do I do at the end of the day? I stew and stew and stew And it's just like me to write about you, exclusively you; that's so something I'd do and I just feel strange through my castrated day and impossible night And I hope when we land next to the corpses of our wives it will be known by every stone that somehow we survived Though baseless and upset and strange until the end we wobbled through our lives We survived We survived I saw you at your new house last Sunday It looked like the house I'd known before I thought about houses and felt so strange on the bus home and I just felt strange nothing more