For My Brother and His Wife

Sometimes I think men should not have birthdays

Only the mothers, they did the work, the kid just showed up

Celebrate the love that lets us share our names

Letters rearranged like daughters and mothers, sisters and brothers

Life has a way of piercing in the needle

The slim prick of why a body has to risk touching the spinning wheel

The allure of time in the moment slipping a life instead of making nothing

The hours drinking away into the fret of never trying to reach to feel that alive

The shedding of blood to be human raw right in front of another

This is me naked, afraid, and shaking like redemption in bones

Holding hands out in a prayer pose to a divinity I see in you

Bowing to say, “I hear you.  I am present.  This path to here was all for this.”

To begin like a whisper from the man that lives in the belly of the sun

To the woman that lives around the womb in the moon

Reflecting everything he gives her to be the inspiration to the artist

Because no one can look at him directly

Covered up in kind monsters begging demons to spin records

Hang loose for a toke in the garden of the soul warrior’s ancient drum

Beating like a hibernating bear’s heart constant in the cavern

Sinking his time to find his muse in the moonlight

Calling from the land of the North to bleed borsch red blood

That eclipses and celestial confluences occur maybe not often, but enough

For two hearts to find faith that these animals within may rage, may slumber to numb the quakes

These spirits may have raked the honeycombs for sweetness and stingers

And come running, always come running back to you

Marked up with a punched gut and cracking knees from years in the fields

Finding a purpose for softness to find a home in all this hardness

Blacked out and timed out that tears were like capsules of hope

For bodies to parachute out the sky after walking that moon dust upon boots

Hoping that something worth believing in this universe could make flowers grow in snow

Choices see forks and battling that decision between love and fear

Weighing like pounds of flesh and soul on the scales

Knowing that life sometimes gives a heart another chance to make good

On what one always knew one could be

Daring that bridge and holding on to see homecomings and birthdays,

Anniversaries and mainstays like an always, like an always

Knowing what it means when you’ve never had an always