My brother in arms

Battles against the world, himself,

And me. His entire family.

 

My brother in arms,

An encyclopedia who seems to know the entire world—

And everything throughout—

To the extent that he wants his own out.

 

You appear different in this light, brother.

I could almost see a very different person—

One I did not recognize.

A stranger. You seem a stranger to me.

 

The stranger's eyes I see

On a face I well know—it's yours, I have no doubt—

Are vacant and uncluttered,

Free of what the world believes of you

And filled with what you perceive the world to contain—

Only a place of violence that holds an unbudging view of you.

And I do agree; there are those who have a grudge against

Lovers.

There are those who declare their disgust stems from faith.

They claim that God's light has granted them clarity on the subject.

They claim that you are damned by the commandment

Which proclaimed you an abomination and your act a sin.

But damned you may be, my brother,

I have a different faith—one in you, in peace

Instead of internalized words and hurts.

You close your eyes because you feel that you have seen enough,

And you listen instead to their whispers.

But those sounds come from behind a closed gate, where

You could never go for purity of heart.

Take comfort. Life has just begun. This is your start.

Ignore the beliefs they hold. Leave the shadowy corner absent of light.

Your love is my love. Brother, let us not part.

 

And those eyes I see—open, now—

Staring vacantly?

They were what I once saw in the mirror,

Helpless and pleading.

 

Your bitterness enshrouds the days that remain,

Stuck in a room which you can't come out from

Else you see a new dawn.

That, and that alone,

Is a fear that trumps the best.

That is a fear that—I must admit, when pressed—

Remains the prevention to stopping all this madness.

Because those feelings that remain

At the end of the day

Do not leave some

After weeks, months, years.

Those feelings may stay within the vulnerable form,

Leaving the individual—like you—directionless.

 

I once had physical pains

And a head that wouldn't clear

Accompanying an endless year

That felt like a day sprawled into itself.

Time warped and was unnaturally changed

While I limped along with it,

A shell of myself. I wore the worry, the guilt like a coat—

From things I should have felt, things I should have said—

Wishing I could somehow take the coat off;

It felt heavier than a jacket made of lead.

I could not see that you were there also,

Straggling behind even me

On that year-long journey.

I was so focused on the ground,

On how far it would take to fall,

That I could barely concentrate on my surroundings.

I did not see.

 

So, my brother in arms, in legs, in feet, in birth.

My twin, almost. My first friend.

I have no words

That can express

Truly how much I understand.

 

My brother in arms, fear the trigger.

You cannot see

How much you'll always, always mean to me.