The Gospel According to Thieves

There is a peculiar kind of family
that learns to smile with borrowed teeth,
that can bury a child beneath a dinner table
and still ask God to bless the meal.

They call betrayal wisdom.
They call silence honor.
They call theft inheritance
so long as the right hands are holding the keys.

Somewhere my grandparents
left behind more than trinkets and paper.
They left proof that love
was never meant to be rationed
by the loudest liar in the room.

Yet watch how quickly vultures
discover religion
when gold begins to glitter.

They speak of righteousness
while measuring another man's future
with a knife hidden beneath the Bible.
Their prayers sound suspiciously
like inventory.

"Take what is his."
"Convince the witnesses."
"Starve him long enough
and he'll forget he was ever fed."

It is remarkable
how many people can be purchased
with the promise of belonging.
How strangers become relatives
the moment deceit pays dividends.
How entire circles gather
to tighten the walls around one soul,
calling persecution
"keeping the peace."

They hope survival
will become my only ambition.

That every sunrise
will be spent calculating bills
instead of remembering names.

That hunger
will erase memory.

That exhaustion
will silence testimony.

That truth,
left outside long enough,
will freeze.

But memory has a pulse
that cannot be confiscated.

And there are wounds
that refuse to become polite.

I remember the hands
that mistook power for affection.

The voices
that taught domination
and named it love.

The mirrors
where every accusation
was somehow my reflection,
while narcissism stood behind me
wearing another face.

Now I speak.

Not because it is easy.

Because silence
was always the inheritance
they wanted most.

See how panic spreads
when one voice refuses
to carry the family myth.

Every whispered alliance.
Every convenient lie.
Every carefully orchestrated hardship.
Every closed door.
Every stranger enlisted
to help build another prison.

They believe enough pressure
can turn a human being
into a ghost.

But ghosts
have a habit of haunting
the houses that created them.

If stealing is holiness,
their heaven
must have very empty pews.

If lying is devotion,
their hymns
are sung through clenched teeth.

If cruelty is the language
they believe God speaks,
then they have mistaken
their own echo
for the voice of eternity.

I have no desire
to inherit their bitterness.

Only what was meant
to reach my hands.

Only what truth
has carried all this way.

The rest—

they may clutch until their knuckles whiten,
until every lock rusts,
until every false witness
forgets the script.

Because there is one thing
no thief has ever mastered:

the impossible labor
of burying a truth
that has already learned
to breathe.