Pete, I watched Brother break down Ritalin pills using a Wachovia credit card and a 50$ bill one night. The
bill hugged remnants of the pill’s integrity like a fluffy bathrobe. I thought of times spent with Brother in the
bathtub together; and I believed I loved my plastic floating duck more than I loved him.

                                                                                                                                                                        Children like language
                                                                                                                                                                                are abrasive, Pete. 

In a conversation, twenty some years later, Brother said he needed someone to recognise his absence. I need 
the opposite, Pete. My boundaries are partially fictional. They are foolproof; I cannot shake them off after 
such calculated construction. I chip at the edges but, unlike downtown Amman, they are resilient. 
Chemistry, Pete, chemistry, and downtown Amman is a-crumbling.

Amman: its seven mountains
make roads move in 
circles; lose track of descent. 

                                A pamphlet is titled, ‘how to lose track of descent; how to walk Amman hills’. 

Pete, when I park myself at the dinner table next to Brother, I find the gravy particularly offensive. It sits in 
my throat resisting gravitational logic to the point of choke. I cough. I swallow my thoughts into the neck of 
the stomach, where a sphincter muscle paces material passage. My fingers race those of Brother’s to the last 
piece of lamb set on a plate, and it is not survival we are after. We are nourished to the extent of gluttony. It 
is merely sibling rivalry. 
                                                                                                                                                                                    Children construct 
                                                                                                                                                           chains of loosely bound recep-
                                                                                                                                                                                       tacles of thought, 
thought, held together 
by chemistry, Pete.

Boundaries are fickle, alter themselves in my head to the frequency where I cannot anymore finger their 
edges in awe and speak of it. 
Boundaries: watching Brother dissect intellect as frog-legs, a Lebanese delicacy. 
Boundaries, Pete: they
     arrive tethered only to the tail,
                                       to the wrapped up conclusion
                                                   a fleeting presence
                                       they dis-attach and leave unbending;
     only quintessential chemistry;
             covalent bonding;
                                                                                                                                                                              Pete, Brother is the
                                                                                                                                                                             hills’ unbending co-
                                                                                                                                                                                  valent link to me;

the silence of Amman’s hills, 
or mountains, what-
ever you choose to call them. 

After Niedecker: A Bus Poem

Man 

blood splattered 

       shirt and pants

I think:

       surgeon: Aorta ruptured 

into haemoglobin bits.

Collect my things 

       sit next to him:

skitter over thought’s 

       slippery slope.