EDWARD LLOYD EILERS
15 December 1922 - 12 February 2015
Birthday Call to My Older Brother,
15 December 1922 - 12 February 2015
Birthday Call to My Older Brother,
Edward
Lloyd Eilers, 15 December 2014
Because
my brother cannot talk I cry.
Notorious
for endless speech, dawn to dark,
on
the phone his is only a wisp of a whisper,
his
reply to my “Happy Birthday” dissolving in
a
weak “Can you hear me?” A few small
words,
only
feelings unspoken, cross a continent,
and
then “I love you” before there is nothing
more
to say but “good-bye,” and an imagined
experiencer
of the totality of our two lives,
and
all the connected feelings and memories,
watches
them float in the balloons we let go,
soon
swept away, lost in the sky over earth.
Because
my brother can no longer talk I cry.
My
last words when my niece takes back
the
phone begin to crumble.
His
first child and I can only mumble
as
speech breaks into crumbs
and
hearts at the end
are
nothing but humble.
– James Thomas McColley Eilers
After learning on 12 February 2015 that my older brother Ed (in childhood known as "Buster") had died that morning, travel plans and other matters were shaken up, and there were calls to airlines, and calls to and from nieces, etc.
I knew I had to get up early the next morning to go from Oakland to a medical appointment in San Francisco, but I could not fall asleep until an hour or two before dawn.
About 3 a.m. on that Friday the 13th, a phrase came to mind that forced me out of bed to write whatever wanted to unroll from that phrase.
Besides the alternating shock and numbness from the death of my brother, the day's national news must have been on my mind -- that day's purposeful murders of three sweet and innocent people, shot execution style.....
Designated killers and their molls are losers.
Guns are the genitalia of the impotent.
While their crimes bring grief to the human,
their victims will shine forever against
the darkness of dim-witted murderers.
Bullets, the leaden seed of the impotent,
are dirty, little jokes – erotic fantasies
of men who will always be more dead
than those they kill. See below
whatever
they wear the shriveled desires of those
who lust for a state reserved for the sacred
souls they cannot penetrate with limp
envy and crude self-righteousness.
envy and crude self-righteousness.
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