False friends fight to the alphabet’s end
Brothers muffled on roadsides
Soon to be cognate in ice
Parsed by the grammar of days
Fate covers them in common ash
They’re familial only as information
They listen for the drones and moan
They’re muted by a shared gun
And then washed away by time
They’ve broken the bread of flesh
Into language and starve
Laying waste to the present tense
A battlefield of Cyrillic characters
Mangled like twisted smoldering alloys
Wars begun in shared languages
End in babel and begin again