for C. Latrell

Sonic is a hedgehog: a blur, a ball of the bluest energy.
Knuckles is an echidna: he’s a blood-red climber of rocks.
I’m the first born, like a ghost of my father in childhood.
He’s the second born, blessed with my mother’s mouth.

Knuckles is the echidna, a blood-red climber of rocks;
Sonic is known for speed—he’s my proto-protagonist,
but am I for the boy blessed with my mother’s mouth?
He, more likely than me, moves towards his knuckles.

Correction: my parents were my real proto-protagonists.
I quickly learned the game, traded obedience for freedom
and I wonder if that pushed him towards his knuckles:
before Shadow the Hedgehog, the kid liked the echidna.

But because I learned how to game obedience for freedom,
I know a shadow, to its sadness, can’t achieve autonomy;
living in shadow has him punching walls like an echidna,
but recall Knuckles wasn’t a real villain, just an anti-Sonic.

Is my shadow the reason he couldn’t achieve autonomy?
When folks say we favor, are they calling him a shadow?
Trust me, he’s not a bad seed, just acting like an anti-Sonic
and as I’m known by my speed to straitlace, we knuckle.

Being told we favor must feel like getting called a shadow,
like getting pressured to shape your life in another’s image:
the boy known by his speed to straitlace. So we knuckle,
but we skip out on fists: they’re proxied by clashing pixels.

To relieve pressure, I say shape your life in another image,
but struggle when it’s not an image I think he should own,
and that fight can never be proxied by a clashing of pixels,
so we glitch, our laughter frozen in 16-bits. We hit reset.

I watch him struggle with what images he should disown;
in this way, I become a ghost of my father in fatherhood.
Blood is glitch-prone, so sometimes our eyes will be reset:
why looking through my feelings, Sonic’s energy is red.