I can see him now

My brother never came home from the war. I can see him now, still out there somewhere, slipped under jungle air, sticky as the rubber trees, limping from one life into the next…

…jasper red faces of memory floated in deep indigo violet, their industrial night, faces like masks, faces of the three-headed hound—surveillance, management, control—eyesight, space, liberty, hieroglyphic subheadings demarcating the order of necropolitical desire, an agenda of wolves, authored by their fathers and amended by invisible hands. They carried out their orders with glee. And so did I.

“Raze life!” they shouted. For the dream city was empty, a row of ghost towers built brick-by-brick by the delicate hands of the men made of the bones carried in the feathered serpent’s talons, like the blue-capped traveler of many worlds, a grain of sand his pittance for the dead, one bit at a time, dripping in his blood; reconstructed, I step forth by the light of the shaman’s fire, a guilty foot soldier.

Mom cried for him every day until she died, and then I cried for her. He cried for the both of us. At night, I could hear all of us wailing away into nothing, silently…

…into theater, lights up: a backdrop of pale king’s blue, warblers strung along diagonal in angles of pretended reality, above marshland wet and heavy with refinery egg-scent. Before a wall of Cyprus and Spanish moss buzzing cicadas, the tall cordgrass in which I plot…

…eyes watch my every move, jaundiced sclera like the grackle’s eyes, fool’s gold scales of the Midgard Serpent smelted a lemon yellow moat, sour apricot in which every vision circles a drain of infinite density.

And I drowned. At least, they saw me drown, watched as I slipped through deep slate singularity, disassembled as I was torn beyond all logic, before being reassembled as an awareness in the topological space. I became the threshold itself, the archway upon which death was spilled in tribute to gods who hid in privileged silence, in fear, in quiescent reign; now I lie, waiting, breathing, watching the sacralization by blood, knowing the secret shapes and melodies that will one day unlock color and song again; until then, drift in neutral gray tomorrows and windswept walls of childhood homes, run your fingers along the names chiseled in the memorials, remember their faces, and dream.

Their cities are now the hunting grounds of the jackals and were-jaguars. Hungry, they stalk the sidewalks both day and night. They feed on the young, but are cared for by the old, taken into their homes, given shelter by a fire that burns but does not consume, waiting until the earth is pregnant and time comes to feed again.

...and I miss my sister. I miss my sister, and I’m never going home.