You Are My Brother

by George Cassidy Payne

I don’t give a damn about Ancestry.com.
You are my brother.
And I don’t give a damn if it’s on a census
or family tree.

You belong to me and I belong to you.

We are both spear points among the found
bones of our children’s great grand-children.
We both work to figure out the clues of expansion–
those notions of what may exist if we are not afraid.

We are brothers.

We are mapped out by a shared cosmic background,
both sculpted by the same glowing sheets of bodies
bathed in big, solitary, Texas-sized machines called egos.

The Same Sorcerer

It takes light about
a second to travel
from the Moon to the Earth.

It took me less than
a second to know that

I was in trouble by the way
you hold a cigarette.

You hold it like a wand
of lit magnesium.

In your index finger it has
a snap to it, and I wonder why
I am suddenly chasing my own tail.

That’s not red
you are wearing.

Red does not fit like that.

That is a color painted
on the wall of a pyramid.

Rust-hued and magnificently
unfamiliar, it is brighter than
the gold shining off the handle
bars of a king’s royal tomb.

And then there is that look in
your eyes. They throw sparks like
two nickels thrown into a campfire.

Smiling like a blowtorch, your gale-
roiled black waves blow up
in a magical black mushroom cloud.

I believe we are cursed by the same sorcerer.

BIO

George Cassidy Payne is a poet from Rochester, New York (U.S.). His work has been included in such publications as the Hazmat Review, Allegro Poetry Journal, MORIA Poetry Journal, Chronogram Magazine, Ampersand Literary Review, Pulsar, The Angle at St. John Fisher College and several others. George’s blogs, essays and letters have appeared in Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, USA Today, the Toronto Star, The Havana Times, Nonviolence Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, the South China Morning Post, The Buffalo News, Rochester City Newspaper and more.