Whenever you have to grow, little brother.

I will imagine your 12-year-old fingernails cracking

under the guitar chord strains of Green Day’s ‘Good-Riddance’

a whole childhood lining the thin threads of dusty band shirts

that lay to rest in attics stashed with stuffed animals

you pretended could all talk with the same voice (yours)

 

and I will remember the way you built up toddler temper-tantrums

to towering tornadoes that shook the most creative K’Nex creations

I’d ever seen, as they watched you bleed

wishing they could snap themselves to colourful splinters for you

 

see these lungs can still scream that they love you

these heartstrings will still soar upward toward yours

from the bottom-basement of my skeleton

dip dovetailed with my pride tribal drum-beating

against the bloodlines of your teenage palms

as I wish them well, with my own clasped in prayer

 

but my throat will remain dry,

frozen outside your bedroom door at 1am

fumbling in ragged grey pyjama’s on the landing,

I am the humbled, crumbling old man

wanting to fold you into the walls

where you have delicately drawn out your dreams

hold you up from sadness that could

 

thinking that if I snuck inside to scrawl

all of my mistakes on pretty post-its

placed them bare upon your patterned pillows

you would awake at sunrise, peel them from your boyish cheeks

and write back: ‘youth is about getting lost, kid’

 

then you’d promise you won’t let go,

the way those moments in music

hurt like they have fully fucked us to the floorboards

lip-kissed our memories with quiet choirs of fleeting friendships

swirling like kites reeled closer and caught in motion

leaving our spun hearts sprawled across the fingerprints

of too many album discs

 

though we both know there’s no such thing

as too many album discs

and they are scratched with every city’s arms

that hold us as we sleep

pressing pieces of ourselves to endless sofa bed creases

 

so as I watch those wobbling eyes bravely waltzing

beneath a sky traced with your big headphones

blazing for the world

 

I’ll need you to always hear 38 Palmerston Street

whatever dreams may sing beneath your skin

and there she will come, the worn, withering voice of mum

swearing at you for not using the butter knife right

still her words will touch you deeper than anything art can offer

she is a boiling kettle and Tesco shopping bagged angel

purging booze pulsing-parties and first-class flight window seats

fuck first-class flight window seats

 

because the best part is:

you could turn 35 headcaved to an all-day all-night rave

tip-toe dancing backwards across glistening Icelandic glacial rivers

or swallowing the dune-drenched dustclouds

of Afghanistani Middle-Eastern barren desert

 

but there are more ordinary roots

that will pluck at that worldly wingspan

as you touch base with stitched family feathers

blossoming from beans on toast in the measliest living room

HP sauce on demand, Fraiser reruns crackling from the telly

grandma’s snug stories soundtracking dad’s hopeless one-liner grins

china mugs chinking with the shrill gossip of boisterous aunties

 

here may seem like nothing

but little brother if I may ever speak one truth for you

 

I will pledge that here in this scene, breathes our everything

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