It’s been 114 days since we killed you.
I wake up here without you and drink my crude cocktail
of grief, self-pity, and guilt to intoxication.
Everything gets so blurry,
except the word “MURDERER” tattooed across my forehead.
I let myself believe that I was the saint and you were the sinner,
exorcising your demons by injecting you with poison.
I held you down on that slab with the puss and the blood smeared in your hair,
tainting my hands with what will never wash away.
You stared as you struggled and screamed into the eyes of your Brutus
as I stared back into yours, my only crucialty.
You left me here all alone with your tongue hanging out, legs flailing, and
your eyes ghastly agape.
The poison was fast.
I clutched your still-warm body in disbelief.
Your warmth was waning,
but it seemed warmer than what used to be a furnace inside me.
Ice to ice, I cowered over you to steal the last bit of fire your carcass
harbored
to transplant it into my own.
It was too late.
Your death was as cold as my life.
My life is the iceberg that sunk you
and now there are more than oceans between us.
Your icy voice haunts this tundra existence.
There is no reason you should ever find it within your cremated love to
forgive me
and I don’t blame you.
There is no one else to blame but me,
the brother that slaughtered you.
I was the one you trusted,
the one self-condemned and selfish.
There’s nothing else that’s real inside.
You took it all away with you.
And now there’s nothing I can do to bring me back to life.
Resucitation requires a pulse, a breath, or, at the very least, a soul.
