Schubert

I never knew you but I knew you. Like a son knows a father or a man knows his best friend though its been ages since they've seen each other. I watched as you walked through the dark and struggled with the weight of mutation bursting forth from inside you. A community carried you and now we find ourselves mad at God for removing sweet flowers from our weeds. We will call you rose and by every other circumstance you smell sweeter than any fabrication of truth that we make claim to know to heal our burdens. But all that we know has been uprooted and our world of dirt and decay seems to be drifting away somewhere ethereal. This is not the way that anything was supposed to be and yet here we are. I hope to whatever god you worship that this is all some sick dream of some perverts fantasy that likes to twist the knives in our backs until the hilts are like the heads of owls. Welcome to paradise. But God knows how much you've made us move and I'm so thankful I had a chance to hear you speak and I have made a destination to live and love like you and we've all made the same destination and we prayed every day that you'd be here to see us through and some trickery has been done. The rug is pulled out from under us by a faulty magician but there is magic yet in the air because you live in the hearts you've left behind and for that reason you will never die. And it's so obvious that you've left an impression in our hearts, Mr. Neil Armstrong, because this community has wept for you and prayed for you. We long to burn with you and carry the weight. But they were wrong when they said the good die young. They die when they are aged, like a fine wine, when they share enough of themselves to be a constant and you get so caught up in constantly being by them that when you subtract the constant, you're left with the variable--that's the change. So we roll with the hurricane and pick up the hurts we carried with you and move on to other things that your strength allows us to make it through. And when we forget the things we wish not to, we stop and remember you. Joel, "may angels lead you in, hear you me, my friend. On sleepless roads the sleepless go, may angels lead you in."