pin-striped designer suits

The dreams of my brothers get sucked into thin air,
vanish into evening dust,
take rest upon uneasy shoulders, still tired
from fucking ugly girls
walking down well-lit streets. They are bought dirt-cheap –
a pittance – are taken into back-roads,
turned into carnival rides and goatee-clad assholes,
vigorous biceps and stable marriages. The dreams of my long-lost
brothers are sold as sure-things, or as dowries to women
who cannot read more than a page, even of excrement
listed on best-seller lists. My brothers' dreams slink
down staircases, across hallways ill-lit, through
the bright sunlight of open fields where we played as children.

The dream of my brothers finds escape in dark
corners of childhood memories,

each walking towards it as long as no one else
is looking – the dreams of my brothers fumbling
and fighting for themselves, for being liked
in vulgar terms – the most intoxicating kind –
where my brothers' dreams were stolen
and bought, and traded. And we wax eloquent
about ourselves in masturbatorial pleasure
unknown to the prudes,
our dicks hanging clean with the after-cum of unsatisfactory fucking.
Always willingly,

making this a most lucrative trade for us all.

We, the owners of such valuable gifts, we the bastions
of times of old, the ones
who swerve off the path, those few
exploring the safe areas around paths of safety. We skipping there
where money and spouses abound.

If only they knew that the dreams of my brothers have been sucked up and
regurgitated. If only we knew
that we were eating shit and puke, selling
it to the whores,
to the souls of our younger brothers.
The requiem plays so softly at times;
the bugles of our youth
working their soft ways into our souls, asking
abeyance to our thoughts and to matters relating to our lazing brains.

Never have we known the truth and never shall we with luck on our side.

I have seen the dreams of my brothers drawn into caves
where the lure of lust seduces the last bit
of us into submission,
without seeing that the simpler worlds we once
had are sold for sums bigger than our simpler vocabularies
of longing will ever understand. We struggle
towards the uniformity of life
with trust
but we see each other selling
our dreams into groups of unknown heritage,
trusting the world to pan out and let all that is good be.

I have seen the dreams of my brothers fucked with
and
ejaculated upon,
tied down
by nice people
in bed, whipped by subdued maniacs,
whispering into others' dreams that they would prefer
death to torture rather than choices.

My brothers' dreams keep me up through nights,
dreaming of tsunamis and destroyed hotels, bloody
cages of glass, and dogs attacking
each other without the correct provocation. I have seen my brothers' dreams
attacked by hungry dogs and jealous cats,
by voices modulated through jealousy;
those dreams never understood.

I have seen the skin on my brothers' arms fall off into the abyss where the corpses of dreams lie.

These dreams wake and walk
sometimes, troubling the fable creatures and legends of yore,
the masks and labels.
They talk of pillars in the courtyard often.
And of the pangs of hunger from the choice between soft
amnesia and satiation, sometimes without battle.

I have seen the dreams of brothers
disappear into sex,
into hash, fermenting
into nothing exciting,
nothing that competes
with the heroes of poetry once venerated,
no overdoses here, no fucking up, a few lines, a little puking,
no tragedy. Maybe we deserve
no fame except amongst the giggling
group of once-upon-a-time-teenagers we'd rather have mouth-fucked. My brothers'
dreams never tell me
if I should be grateful for fantasies or pour a drink.