A Tale of Two Kings

A Poem by Max Rwizi, Jr.

It was around the time puberty had opened its doors for me
A time of chaos and self discovery.
That's when our paths crossed and our friendship began to unfold.
We were clumsy architects of our own identities standing on the threshold of a change we didn't understand.
In that shared haze of growing pains we discovered we were both juniors
Shadows of the men who came before us trying to find where their names ended and ours began.
There was a quiet symmetry in how the world titled us
My second name carried the weight of a king’s presence while your first name whispered of a little king in the making.
Two unpolished crowns sitting on young heads ruling over nothing but the dirt beneath our sneakers and the infinite dreams of the restless.
The fourth year of high school arrived like a sharpened blade cutting our daily path in two.
You walked toward a different gate, a different uniform but the distance was a lie.
We didn't just remain friends
We became brothers by choice knotted together by more than just proximity.
We outgrew the curiosities of youth, trading the cheap thrills of pixelated bodies for the ink stained sanctity of poems and novels.
We stopped looking at what was skin deep
and started carving our souls into the page
Finding more truth in a metaphor than we ever found in a screen.
We spoke often of the labyrinth of love,
How it bruised us
How it felt like a language we couldn't quite fluently speak.
Now, you have found your shore.
You are in a better place, anchored and calm while I am still mid ocean waiting for the current to be kind to me.
But even when the weight of the world feels heavy,
We still find the joy in the gears.
We laugh about Transformers,
About things that are more than they appear
About how we have spent our lives shifting form, from boys to men, from lust to art.
We are still those two kings,
different thrones, same heart writing our way through the dark.