Shift to My Brother

© 1999 Miriam Hamilton
All rights reserved.

Magical hour
Daylight between black night
Neither one,
Twilight
Drinking the last tepid coffee of the day
The one that keeps me going until sleep
Melting into the only comfortable chair in my garden
My chair planted directly in the center of my sanctuary
Walls of watercolour washed blue delphinium
Intricately laced vines
Odd splash of towering red hollyhock.
Everywhere impatients doing what they're named for
Heat of the day fading but only cool enough to gently
Mellow the seduction of the blustering scents
A mid-town oasis
Built by one slave over many years
Watered with the tears of joy and sorrow
Thankless masters fed with blood; roses, wanted only for their
beauty and so bitterly revengeful by their thorns
The resulting energy here
Would be a wizard's dream.
Mind slipping, thoughtless
Into that vague netherworld where dreams and reality are inseparable
Alert suddenly, but sleeping too?
Someone with me, roaming inside the expanded corridors of my mind
I recognize him
It is my brother, a dark and troubled soul since birth
He and I
Still held together by the tenuous power of one womb
Psychic wires cross
Mocking the physical miles between us
And I am hurled into the bubbling, suffocating expansion of HIS mind
Everywhere pools of sulfur burn with the fuel of pain
I dare not move in my terror lest I am swallowed up forever
In this place of fiery anguish
He is calling to me from me
He calls my name
And I am sitting bolt upright in my chair
In the middle of my garden
Tears streaming down my face
My brother is gone
My sleep that night is troubled
Sheets soaked with sweat
Tangled around me
Trapping me in my own flesh and blood
Next morning there is no lessening of this burden he has brought to me
I called his wife in sensible daylight
"He had nightmares last night. He called out for you."
Sometimes still, as twilight approaches
I relive in memory that wandering of my mind
Through that walk of suffering
And I know I have seen secret places
Closed off from our sound reality
And I know there is a hell
Because I have been there
And I know someone who lives there.

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