They did not ask if you were whole,
only where the other lived in your soul.
A black man in the dreaming spires.
A walking myth for their late-night wires.
A creature of strange design.
A boundary line.
And I know that look.
The measuring gaze.
The parts that fit.
The parts they won't.
A Roma woman with Irish blood,
standing in mud they call pure.
I know the weight of a name
that is not your own,
a history you carry
in your bones,
alone.
Did you feel the púca's breath?
The whisper:
You don't belong.
You are the chorus.
Never the song.
Every achievement, a raven's cry.
The Badb circling.
They want to know if you're really real,
if your struggle is holy,
or just a deal.
They'd follow you to the Otherworld gate,
to photograph the bruise,
to print the grey.
And the pressure, brother,
is a dolmen
balanced on a bed of bone.
To be the best.
To be the first.
To be the proof.
The example.
The single seed.
The Tuatha Dé Danann taught us to fight.
But they also taught us the loneliness
of being too brilliant,
too much,
too blessed.
Cast out when the war is won.
A god forgotten
beneath a setting sun.
And still they pick at the stitching of your name.
You are not allowed to simply be.
You are a thesis.
A debate.
A plea.
Every word weighed.
Every silence a plot.
They want you grateful for the air,
as if your lungs are borrowed,
as if you thieve
the oxygen from their rightful air.
As if your blackness is a debt.
A prayer.
And if you stumble,
if you show the strain,
they'll say,
You see?
He was not worth the pain.
They'll strip you down to bone and sinew,
and call your brokenness a flaw,
not born of pressure,
not of endless night,
but of your nature.
Your lesser light.
And I know this.
I know the toll.
The fingers digging in your soul.
Until your body is a question mark.
A flickering candle
in the endless dark.
They'll open you up on the evening news,
gloved hands in your chest cavity,
pulling out your history like entrails,
holding them up to the studio lights:
Look, here's the council estate.
Here's the absent father.
Here's the diagnosis.
Here's the doubt.
They'll weigh your organs on a scale of worth,
measure the distance between your birth
and your achievement,
and call the gap a miracle,
or a lie,
depending on the readership.
They'll stitch you back up with headlines,
leave the scars visible,
so every time you walk into a room,
they can point and say,
We made him.
We found him out.
We know what's inside.
So let the hounds bay.
Let the cameras flash.
The Morrígan knows
the ravens will feast
on the lies of the media,
the manufactured beast.
But still we walk,
you with your crane bag slung,
me with my bloodlines,
my strange, mixed tongue.
The road is long.
The weather is cold.
The story they tell is bought and sold.
But the bag is heavy
with what they can't see—
the work,
the grief,
the stubborn, buried sea.
We carry it on
through the fading light,
not as victors,
but as those who still fight.
The hounds will follow.
They always do.
But they cannot carry
the weight for you.
So we walk,
and we walk,
and the years turn to bone,
and we carry our treasure,
and we carry it alone.
And when it's over,
when the hounds are called off,
when the ink is dry and the clicks are counted,
they'll keep a piece of you in a glass case,
a relic of the time they made you,
broke you,
sold you.
And the people will file past,
and they'll say,
What a shame.
What a waste.
What a talent.
And none of them will say,
I held the rope.
I lit the match.
I turned the page.
And the case will gather dust,
and the years will turn to dust,
and you will be a story told to children,
a warning,
a whisper,
a ghost.
But here is the truth
they cannot package,
cannot frame,
cannot hang in a gallery of grief:
You are not in the glass case.
You are not in the headline.
Not in the think-piece.
Not in the apology written too late,
in the column inches of regret,
in the sad, slow shake of heads
on morning television.
You are not there.
You are in the boy who read your name
and felt his spine straighten.
You are in the girl who saw you stand
and thought, then I can stand too.
You are in the quiet rooms,
the libraries,
the late-night study sessions,
the moment someone said,
If he could, I can.
You are in the work.
The words.
The stubborn, unkillable proof
that you were here,
that you climbed,
that you stood,
that you bled,
that you burned,
and that the burning was not the end.
They wanted a story.
They got one.
But the story is not theirs.
It never was.
You are not walking anymore.
The hounds have gone home,
their bellies full,
their pages filled,
their consciences clean.
But the road is still there.
And we are still on it.
Me with my bloodlines,
my strange, mixed tongue.
And all the others who saw you,
who knew you,
who carried a piece of you
in the crane bag of their own chests.
We are still walking.
Not past you.
Not away from you.
With you.
Because the dead do not leave us.
They become the road itself.
The ground beneath our feet.
The stubborn, unkillable beat
beneath the noise.
And the hounds?
They will follow.
They always do.
But they cannot follow you now.
You are beyond their reach.
Beyond their flashbulbs.
Beyond their questions.
Beyond their appetites.
You are the silence
after the headline.
And that silence
is the only victory
they cannot take.
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