Brother

To you, brother, frere.
You never called me names,
We grew up divided by sentient
Being versus fiction.
I always won.
We played football with a ball that
Never existed and ran around a field
That exists, but not for you.
We dated girls that dated
Other men, but because of you
We dated them, all of them.
You had a son, by a girl that
had a son.
But not by you.
We played in snow that was never
disturbed apart from the feet of
birds.
We threw handfuls of sod,
That disintegrated mid air like muddy fireworks,
yet that sod is still
in the ground.
We found shells that
Never left the rock pools, and I cut
myself on a crab I imagined in a pool
When I was six.
You laughed but
It never hurt me.
We fought but never drew blood,
No flood of tears at each others
expense.
Just tears after stinging
nettles that stung me, but not you
even though you fell straight in to the middle.

To the brother that I never had,
I made a card for you.
I put it in
The envelope you never gave me,
And wrote that address that you never
Lived in, on it.
With a hand that never
Stops writing a name that never existed.
Brother.