Leave Him Alone

He gave them everything:

his body became instrument,

his voice remade what sound could grieve,

his boyhood spent under lights that do not warm,

luminous and consumed,

and called

beloved,

a gift.

He gave

and gave

until giving

was the only language left.

And still.

They came with cameras instead of conscience.

With headlines sharpened like daggers.

With allegations packaged for consumption

aired and re-aired,

monetized,

streamed,

“recommended for you.”

Acquitted.

Does the word mean nothing

when it doesn’t sell?

The dead cannot defend themselves—

This is not an accident.

Wait until the mouth is sealed.

Wait until the hands are still.

Then step into in to poor into the silence whatever the crowd is thirsty for.

I have watched them excavate a man’s name for content.

I have watched grief become a product.

I have watched truth get outbid by narrative.

He was strange, yes—

strange the way a boy

who never got to be a boy

carries childhood

into rooms that have forgotten it.

Strange the way innocence,

when it survives long enough,

starts to look like “suspicious” eccentricity

to the ones who lost theirs early

and call it growing up.

He was too soft for this world.

Too earnest.

Too uncorrupted.

And the world

did what it always does

to what it cannot harden and break.

And I am tired.

Tired of the documentaries

that begin with “we loved him”

and end with a streaming deal.

Tired of the thinkpieces

that use his name

the way you use a match—

briefly,

for light,

then drop it.

Tired of the silence

of everyone who knew

and said nothing

until there was money

in the saying.

He defied gratvity,

Moonwalking while the world gawked and lurched forward

And they,

heavy with greed,

used the only thing they had:

their weight,

to drag him under.

Burying him in headlines and degrading lies

before the ground

ever touched him.

There is a particular violence

in refusing the dead their official verdict.

In choosing, again and again,

the version that sells

over the version

that is true.

He is not here to spread light and fight you anymore.

You know this.

That is why you keep going.