By Button Poetry
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Adam Falkner, performing at Honey in Minneapolis.
Transcript provided by YouTube:
00:02
– Let’s get one thing halfway straight.
00:06
I have spent my entire life trying on costumes
00:10
because no one told me I couldn’t.
00:12
And the stakes were never that high,
00:15
which I have come to think is mostly what makes
00:17
a white writer, a white writer.
00:20
The last time anyone referred to me
00:22
by that name was exactly never,
00:24
but that there is also the point.
00:26
I am a queer poet,
00:28
child of an addict,
00:29
masquerading white boy.
00:31
My best friend died and it was sad
00:33
and these are the stories I water into bloom.
00:36
Camp counselor, test cheat, choir boy, cipher rapper,
00:39
scratch golfer, honor role, pothead, point guard,
00:41
and Whitman says, very well, you contain multitudes.
00:45
But Whitman was a white writer, too.
00:48
And the not so funny thing about spending a life
00:52
proving you aren’t something is that any story
00:56
that isn’t the story is just survival,
00:59
or more like a brick for laying until the wall
01:01
is high enough that you are safe inside
01:04
and you wake up and you say, whoops,
01:06
whose house is this?
01:07
Who did I hurt to get here?
01:09
And is it too late to ask for help?
01:12
(audience clapping)
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This post was previously published on YouTube and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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Photo credit: Screenshot from video
