Gone in the Night

Walked through the door cold night air gripping
Darkness clings these walls whisper secrets
Stumbled in shadows looking for light
Found you lying eyes closed heart still

I search craigslist for sadness: a white couch the only result.
Happiness lands red shipping containers, and that's it.
I wander through days like an envelope marked please forward.

Bed became an altar sacrificial sorrow
Needles and smoke dreams shattered tomorrow
Silent you lie body cold as stone
Friend gone forever left me all alone

Gone in the night lost to the abyss
Why'd you fly so high crash to this darkness
Life was chaos you sought sweet release
Now your spirit haunts in pieces never at peace

Listen. My brother is a ghost. I keep thinking, I am not a brother anymore, though others assure me I still am. Just brother them, builders say to make a thicker beam, or to span a distance, join the faces of two-by-sixes with nails, make more from less, make do. No one will let me have my sadness or tally what I've lost. I make lists like recipes for how to go on alone.

Memories flood voices of laughter
Now ghosts dance shadows of disaster
Grief like thunder breaks my mind's dawn
Can't escape this night your soul forever gone

Empty bottles needle's cruel bite
Life drained to vapors vanished from sight
Searching the sky for some kind of clue
You're out there somewhere broken and blue

I draw his death when I doodle, making little crime scenes, as if this epidemic were a murderer, a suspect, a criminal.
I draw him on every sidewalk to inflate the numbers, to give my brother to everyone. Inside the outline, I do some math. I add him to seventy-two thousand and subtract him from me.