They Call Us “Them”

Inspired by @mortalcesar

(A Manifesto for the Beautiful Damned)

They call us “them,” the ones who would not kneel, the ones who danced where they demanded stillness, the ones who dared to be strange in a world drunk on sameness.

They call us “them,” because we would not wear their borrowed faces, because we would not let our colors be scrubbed away.

We are the rough hands carving new stars, the wild songs stitched between silences, the stubborn blooms that cracked their concrete gardens.

Here, your too-muchness is music. Here, your scars are sacred. Here, your strangeness is not a flaw — it is a flag.

We were never broken. We were never wrong. We are only different — and in that difference, we are together.

They call us “them,” but we are we — the kinship of the beautiful damned, the covenant of the storm-born free.

When one of us stumbles, a thousand hands rise. When one of us weeps, a thousand hearts thunder in answer.

We are the unbent. We are the unwritten. We are the inevitable bloom after the burning.

We are not their mistake. We are our own masterpiece.

And we are coming home — not to their world, but to ours.