Just Us (For My Friend Robert, Who Doesn't Live Here Anymore)

(Album: I Wish My Brother Rob Was Here - 2011)

I swear to goodness I have no fear of failure
A&E will always hold my place as a commercial whaler
Every mistake I've ever made has had a certain inexplicable beauty
You overachievers could never replace
I'm not sorry that I failed you
And I'll unabashedly crawl back under the rock that I hail to
I waste a lot of time perusing Wikipedia entries
Locating algorithms that'll make me famous like Fonzworth Bentley
I don't want to wear technicolor bowties
And I'm sure you could surmise
I'm not the type to ghost ride
I was the kid memorizing danger mouse in my tree house
A mansion is a house with plenty of couch space for all my friends
Real brothers don't care if you're an hour late to make amends

I'm out and about tending to my fruit garden
While you go to Club Sexytime attempting to make your liver harden
My favorite mug smells like bergamot tea leaves
And I find myself dosing off in a heaven of acai trees
Waking up to a feast of sandpears and apricots
Avoiding higher institutions with man-bears for mascots
I'll boycott this fanfare, to kick rocks and stand there
In dirty birkenstocks, I'll return to hip hop when the jerking stops
I'm pointing fingers at the flatulence of pop music
When I played Diablo II I always picked the Druid
I'm rolling with a team of better men
Rocking all black, leather lettermens
Who call themselves the Whethermen
Arbitrarily call myself, "The Greatest Rapper Alive"
Without ever consulting any of you other rhyming guys

Should the person who helped you find your confidence ever vanish
Before you can thank them, in the intricate ways that you had planned it
You'll feel wretched and terribly selfish
I just hope that he can understand
I just hope that he can understand

Every night before I fall asleep I think of where my brother went
How something so real can just disappear, I must be too fucking dense
I'm struggling with why I didn't make it a point to come and see you
Staring at your picture in my phone, I can't be prompted to delete you
Every night trying to convince myself these shortcomings are worth nothing
Where ever you are, my brother, I hope you rest your weary shoulders
There's a lot more to Rob Espinosa than newspaper clippings in a folder
Kurt Vonnegut writes off death with a, "So it goes."
I guess that's the primary difference between a poet and writer of prose
I'm not trying to compress your existence into nicely wrapped tidbits
That'd be an insult to your memory as well as metaphysics
This is beyond my fucking limits
This is beyond my fucking limits

You don't want me to pull memories from way back
Cause you ain't got the necessary jiggawatts in that Maybach
You don't want me to pull memories from way back
Cause you ain't got the necessary jiggawatts in that Maybach
You don't want me to pull memories from way back
Cause you ain't got the necessary jiggawatts in that Maybach

The english language dictates we speak of you in past tense
Can you cross the river styx with a mere half pence?
I don't know the answers
I only know the dances
When your facebook becomes your memorial page
And I swear I cry when I look through the pictorial display