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.