Lit Beyond Chains

They told us God made man from dust

and we said yes, and look what dust became

when it defied the shape of the mold.

Dust became the one thing they couldn't sweep away.

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We have been the rumor empires burned libraries to silence.

We have been the soldiers they decorated

after erasing who we loved.

The margin note. The cipher in the hymnal.

The coded word inside the coded word.

We are still here.

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Pride lives below parade.

Pride lives in marrow, deciding

to carry itself chest-forward through every century

that tried to call it sin.

Pride is the body standing

in a room full of people paid to look away.

Pride is the chromosome that codes for radiance

when the culture codes for shame.

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We are the prayer they forgot to translate.

We are the frequency beneath the sermon.

We are what the saint was running toward

when he called it wilderness

and he kept running.

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We have loved men the way volcanoes love pressure

building in silence, luminous in release,

reshaping the terrain of everything around them.

Our love has made new land.

And our truest shape is incandescent.

Our truest shape has hands that hold

and convert nothing into something lesser.

Our truest shape has a mouth that speaks

and the cosmos expands

to make room for what pours out.

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History called us sinners. Deviants. Phase.

History wrote us as footnotes in its own fiction.

We called history what it was

a liar with good posture.

So let them have their definitions.

Let them footnote us into acceptable grief.

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Something older than books already marked us

something that moves through the bloodstream

like a door no one remembers locking.

It called us whole. It called us lit.

It called us free.