I wear a disguise
And bare myself only to King Close-Your-Eyes.
I’m slipping, I’m ebbing, I’m melting like wax,
I’m out on the sidewalk down into the cracks,
I’m under the ground where the silence is loud
And that weight on my face is my shroud.
And whatever else may be true,
My name will always hurt you.
He comes up in me sometimes, now, my dead brother, like a high sweet sickness, when I’m driving at night on highways fast. It might be a song that triggers him: “Some Girls,” Mick Jaggers’ wet, loose lips and Matt sits straight up from the waist the way dead people do in movies. He sits up like that in me and my arms will burn to jerk the steering wheel, send me careening into the barrier wall. I see myself lying on the highway in the dark on a sparkling bed of glass, watched by hundreds of cars, their engines silent.
Long before AIDS, long before his body withered and dropped away, my brother was contagious. There was no protecting me, I so young, tender, it was such a virulent strain, and I succumbed to the shame. It’s a shame. Incurable.
I was sleeping in the queen pre-marital bed when Dad called to say Matt died, 2:00 in the morning, August 13, 1991. I hung up and let it lie down on me that he had died and with the weight in place I went back to sleep.
The three years before he died, we weren’t supposed to know he was sick; it was a secret, his shame. When we talked to him, long distance, we didn’t let on that we knew and so the subject of his future was a blankness that existed between the words of the conversation. I never went to see him in those years. I was afraid he would bite me....