Obituary

Obituary.

Yesterday my brother
Bought a pack of crayons
And went home
To write on the walls.
He wrote until he had exhausted
Every colour,
Reinventing the Hebrew language,
Again, as he went along,
And then he wrote with his fingers,
Scraping blood and skin
Across the floral wallpaper.
When he was done he phoned
Berkley, MIT and Cambridge,
And said that he had invented
The Grand Unifying Theory.
They asked him what faculty
He was employed by,
Where he got his PhD,
And what articles he had had published
In scholarly journals.
When he told them
(None, nowhere and none),
They hung up.

So he drove out to the Brooklyn Bridge
And parked beneath it,
And spent the night naming every part of it,
As Adam had done
In the Bible.
He wanted to be
In the Bible, too.
As dawn broke he called
The Samaritans,
Just for someone to talk to.
In time, they asked his name,
And he told them;
They asked how old he was
And he said five or six thousand years,
Give or take,
And they humoured him.
He persisted
Until they hung up.

This morning he walked into a bookstore
And found the Bibles,
Writing himself in to every copy
With a pen borrowed
From the assistant,
Until Security
Threw him out.
After that he phoned the Vatican
In Rome and tried every extension,
To ask how he could rectify
His omission,
But they, too,
Hung up.

Then he went home,
Turned on the news,
And blew his brains out
With my revolver.

I phoned the family.
Our step mother and her daughters
Gave me their condolences.
Mum and Dad
Don’t talk to me any more, but
I’d like to think
They know.

So, this is his obituary.

My brother
Was born five or six thousand years ago,
Give or take, depending
On how you calculate a generation.
He was the youngest and least regarded
Of three sons,
And he dwelt at first
Between the lines of Genesis,
Near to Eden,
And then in many places.

My brother died this morning,
The time of death placed somewhere
Between the birth of the Enlightenment and
The death of Charles Manson,
During an ad break
On Fox News.
His body was never found.

Yesterday
My brother bought a pack of crayons.
Tomorrow
He will send me a postcard
From Baghdad.