The first time North wandered out past the trees
Where the suburbs start pushing up out of your borders
Like nerveless teeth in phantom root canals
A parade of those who feel the holes in their feet from when they stopped mourning you
Shuffled our dearest friend into courthouse square
And stood them up on the front edge of the platform built
For the statue of the soldier with a gun
Looked at them like a savior
Thought they were their holy sun
Those folks didn't realize that just because they're golden
Doesn't make them their golden boy
That not every celestial body is a son
J: "Step right up
And see the messiah fallen from heaven
Here to suffer for our sins
So we don't have to"

I wasn't there,
When that traveler felt for the first time
the last of many things the three of us had in common
Involuntary martyrdom through voicelessness
Mobs that don't know how to listen
Systematically break things without realizing it
My friends the thieves didn't know the difference between loving and stealing
With violent words like "Stay with us" and "We need you"

All the people I had trusted
Called them perfect between coughing parenthesis over every way they wanted to change them
First the grammar
The fibers of their name didn't make sense
If they couldn't be differentiated from the whole of everyone else
They couldn't be called they anymore
If they really didn't want to be called He capitalized they'd have to learn by being called he lowercase
If they didn’t want to be called he lowercase
The only other option was it
Second was their presence
The tall moonshine of their laugh
The thunder of their thought
Those people said they made them feel warmer
so they mortared them into the bricks of their chimneys
With binding glue stolen from the spines of misquoted dictionaries
They were so scared and hungry for the clean air
The ashes of the world they were burning
Fogged up their vision so bad that people started looking like oxygen

I miss them too
But pulling the song from their eyes
And tucking that light deep into your storm
Doesn't make you a savior or a mother
It just makes you another thief
My oldest friend,
Turn your ears away from the din of the tug of war
And listen
They're whispering
Soul and body aren't binary
And when you give yourself a second to breathe
You'll remember there's a human being beneath all the glow and sprout and concrete
There's a human being whispering
Listen
I know you're scared for them and you only want to help but
People only ever hurt each other out of fear and
You're becoming more and more human every time you use us as mirrors
It's not yours to decide this
Listen