Electric Saints

They strap you to the chair with scripture and diodes,

promise the current will burn the wrong desire clean.

A priest, a therapist, a father with clenched jaw—

all swear this is love, this measured violation

of your wiring.

Week after week the voices drill:

You are broken code. We will rewrite you.

Hormones withdrawn, affection withheld,

memories of your own skin recast as sin.

They teach you to flinch at mirrors,

to apologize for the shape of your longing.

In the aftermath, the survivors carry

shards of themselves like contraband.

Anxiety blooms into permanent static.

Depression settles heavy as wet concrete.

Some learn to recite the approved prayers

while the real self rots in the basement of the throat.

Statistics wear no halos:

elevated razors, pills, ropes—

the quiet arithmetic of erased futures.

Families clap for the hollowed boy who no longer kisses boys,

celebrate the girl who flinches at her own reflection.

The institutions call it treatment.

The body keeps the receipt.

This is not healing.

This is alchemy in reverse—

turning gold into ash,

naming the smoke "progress."

Yet some crawl out anyway,

tongues still tasting metal and shame,

eyes learning again how to hold another’s gaze

without apology.

The damage does not vanish.

It echoes.

It testifies.

Conversion is just another word

for the slow murder of truth.

We name it.

We refuse it.

We carry the unfixable forward—

alive, furious, whole in our defiance.