My brother and I stood three years apart.
We stood toe-to-toe, fists clinched,
each of us angry at the world, each of us an avatar,
each of us angry at the other.

One carried the mark of Cain, a discrete tattoo.
The other wrote poems, an acceptable sacrifice to the gods.
I never recovered the ink he stealthily stole from my desk.
i never recovered his confidence. My fist never unclinched.

At night, we frolicked in Bacchanalian revelries,
in psychotropic highs only poetry could eclipse.
Yet he never respected my temple of books, desecrating pages.
The written word was not his friend. Nor I, in the end.

He had a son out of wedlock; I dedicated poems to the boy.
But he could not speak English; his small tongue would not fit
the hieroglyphics on the page. My brother chiseled them off.
He died in middle age, unsung, poorly read. Still angry at the Word.