I thought I had lost this, and I’d like to share it with my friends here on the boards, because it has great meaning to me, and I am so glad I found it.
After my brother died of cancer several years ago, I wrote a poem and put it on my website as a tribute to him. I left it up a few months and then took it down.
A couple of years ago I had a major computer crash and I thought I had lost this forever.
Tonight I’m unpacking from our move, and I found a printout of it. 
This was written before I met my wife, who has labored mightily to chance some of my less-respectable living habits.
Still, for what it’s worth, here is that poem:
“Legacy”
When I was young, I had three brothers,
A sister,
And a friend. He loved to come
To see my parents and me
In our little, crowded, messed-up house.
His own house, large, and roomy,
Clean,
Where all the angles are right angles
And all the lines are straight
And everything is in its place
Because there weren’t that many things
And there were many many spaces.
To my parents, his kind of home
Was an unreachable paradise
Of cleanliness and comfort and space—
The grass really is always greener
In the other guy’s yard—
But Michael liked to come to us
Because in all our clutter and strangeness
There was mystery. If you looked
You really never knew what you could find.
Under our beds, you’d not find monsters—
There wasn’t room—
But you could find memories,
Treasures of another age—
Or simply things you had forgotten you had
For the lack of seeing them.
Like a dusty Christmas morning, it could be—
And years later, when my eldest brother
Was dying, he told my mother
That he hated his house, his nice clean two-storey
House that was never quite his home,
Where all the lines were very straight
And neither mouse, nor dream of starlight
Had ever had a home.
The forests are not clean, are cluttered,
So we pave them over into parking lots
And call it good. The terrible pity
Is that we think we do good
To limit ourselves and cleanse away our dreams.
In our mean little existences,
Where all the lines are straight
And all corners squared, we do ourselves
A great injustice, for we forget
The wonder of newfound treasure
The majesty of plundering another person’s memories.
In my home where I grew up—
And it was a home, not just a house,
I have seen tears in my mother’s eyes
From something as simple
As a brother’s forgotten shoes,
Far back under the bed, in the dust.
Now I am grown, and part of growing up
Is growing old, and knowing you’ll someday die,
And my apartment is a cluttered mess,
Where some people would be ashamed to live.
I offer no defense, save only to say
With head help high, a captain in my little ship
Of entropy,
None of my lines are straight;
Not one of my corners is square.
Perhaps I am a poor housekeeper—
In truth, I have no time—
But perhaps I know the value
Of a little mystery.
Now Bill is in the earth, in his small house
Where all the lines are straight
And all the coffin corners nicely squared.
He never came to my apartment—
I would not have dared—
He would have shamed me with a glance
Over tumbled books. My crystal ball,
My many flutes and whistles,
My dust and my clutter
Would have squirmed, withering,
Beneath his righteous gaze.
I wish I had invited him anyway—
He would not have come—
But it hurts that I didn’t invite him.
I always told myself
I would clean the old place up
And have them all over.
But if my clutter is so terrible,
Why am I always so relieved just
To shut out the world
When I come home in the evening?
And amid my clutter, I say a quiet
Prayer, to who or what may listen
To a prayer from such as me—
Thanks, briefly given—
That all my lines are curved
And all the bruising hardness
Of the corners of my walls
Are all nicely rounded.
–James Peeples