Montag, 14. März 2011

My Brother is an only child



Alone on the swing
Flying through the night
I suddenly stopped to think
About how I could be with
The swans and the woman with
Her uncontrollable hair
But you see I can’t because
My brother is an only child.

It took my parents years to find out.
They asked the doctor
But it was the hanging scientist who really
Gave them the answers.
They told of his hairnet and his chewing gum,
How he was afraid of the eyes of a street corner
With the fleshy street lamps

As though they were dangerous.
Red light makes him dangerous
With a tonne of steel in his leg.
He kicks like a child without
Ice cream, which of course is not the answer.
There is no reason to tell you why
My brother is an only child

I asked him once
While we climbed the
Eiffel Tower
In the centre of Paris
I couldn’t hear him
Because he was whispering
Like a harmonica that plays in the silent
Background night under curtains of red silk.

In the deepness of afternoon he
Wrote on my hand
I come from a small desert hidden
Somewhere that no one knows.
He said that the books would slap
His face if anyone knew and the least
I could do was close my eyes.

I went to India on a boat and did not see
The slow curve of his back
Before I left
Ten years later he had cut off his hands.
Shock ran through the streets like
Mice without cheese
I swam to his hotel and bashed in the door.

There he sat drenched in milk,
Quivering as the walls fell down around us.
The blindman wouldn’t fix them.
So I asked about his hands
But he told me he now had plaster
And if I really wanted to know
I should look in my personal life.

Lazily, I drank my emergency whisky.
He laughed as it fell out of my ears
Then it tunnelled to my nose.
I fell to the floor my head spinning
Like a Ferris wheel before sundown.

As I lay there he pointed a giant
Finger and he said I know who
You are and your lies of greed.
The attempts you made to make yourself
Interesting
Which you’ll never be

But I don’t care anymore.
I have a new story to tell
All those gossip wanderers
Whose life you destroyed
By making my own into a smokescreen.

I will tell them with my sunglasses
Of lead and a pipe in my lungs
That it took me years to find out
That my Brother is an only child.



Michael Black

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