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Andrea Gibson, performing in Longmont, CO.
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Button Poetry is committed to developing a coherent and effective system of production, distribution, promotion and fundraising for spoken word and performance poetry.
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Transcript provided by YouTube (unedited)
0:02
– Neighbors.
0:05
Debbie O’Doyle hated me.
0:09
She couldn’t help it.
0:11
The dreadlocked white boys who’d rented
0:13
the house before me, spend their tuition money,
0:16
turning the basement into a psychedelic farm
0:18
and retirees with plastic deer lawn ornaments
0:21
rarely enjoy being woken up at 3:00 AM,
0:25
by flower crown sorority girls riding their plastic fawn
0:29
to the center of a previously respectable street.
0:33
After to three years of pressing binoculars to her window,
0:37
writing down the license plate numbers
0:39
of every Jeep Wrangler with an aim
0:41
of fungi bumper sticker,
0:43
Debbie finally convinced the cops to bust the door down
0:46
and harvest the fungus, which was bountiful for me,
0:49
only because the lock wasn’t properly fixed
0:51
and the landlord was forced
0:53
to knock $100 off my first month’s rent
0:57
and Debbie O’Doyle didn’t see me as an upgrade
1:00
to the neighborhood.
1:01
I suspect because I had nothing
1:04
to show for myself on moving day,
1:06
except a box of tattered books, an old bicycle
1:09
and a couch I’d found on the curb, a block away,
1:12
which she’d see me roll on two skateboards
1:14
to the front door, tattooed and shoeless,
1:17
singing a folk song with the F-word in the chorus.
1:21
“Here’s another one come to grow mushrooms
1:23
and a turd pile under the house,” she must have thought.
1:27
Having no way of knowing,
1:29
I wouldn’t dream of growing psychedelics in my home.
1:32
I do what everyone else does
1:33
and buy them from a friend who grows them in his home.
1:35
And I certainly wouldn’t stoop to eating the god buttons
1:38
and the concrete hell of the city,
1:40
when there were real live deer waiting for me
1:44
to ride them in the forest, just two miles away.
1:47
For an entire year,
1:49
Debbie O’Doyle watched me like a detective Hawk,
1:53
screeching as if I were the one with the claws
1:56
and she were the one with the puncture wounds
1:59
and the ever bleeding skull of her solitude, “Andrea,
2:04
that BBQ of yours better be over by 9:00 PM sharp.
2:08
Andrea, your dandelions aren’t going to weed themselves.
2:11
Andrea, if you try to pretend that roof is a party deck,
2:16
one more time…
2:18
Andrea!
2:19
Andrea!
2:20
Andrea!”
2:22
I had no idea how she knew my name.
2:24
Introductions don’t happen from opposite sides of a street
2:28
and Debbie refused to cross the road,
2:30
spent the entirety of her days,
2:32
pacing the end of her driveway,
2:34
begging me to take one step out of the house,
2:37
so she could belt, “Andrea,
2:39
your theater friends stole my ornamental toad.”
2:43
The only thing I ever remember speaking
2:46
to Debbie O’Doyle was, “They aren’t my theater friends.
2:49
They are poet friends,
2:50
and they would never in a million years
2:52
steal your plastic lawn toad.”
2:56
But I knew they stole her toad of course
2:59
and this is where our relationship was
3:01
and where I knew it would remain
3:04
when I woke up that September morning
3:06
to my landline ringing like a siren,
3:09
my friend to the wire crying, “Turn on the TV!
3:13
Turn on the TV.”
3:14
It was 2001.
3:16
Not only did I not have a TV, I didn’t have the internet,
3:20
a cell phone or a car.
3:21
So, shoeless and still in my pajamas,
3:23
I did the unthinkable and ran across the street
3:26
to pound on Debbie’s door.
3:28
She was so unsurprised to see me.
3:30
I knew the world had changed.
3:33
We sat on opposite ends of her sofa,
3:35
as a cloud of black smoke screamed
3:38
from the top of the north tower.
3:40
I wanted to turn my eyes from the screen,
3:43
but knew what I couldn’t see was worse.
3:46
The people on the floors, above the ones on fire,
3:50
calling home and getting a machine,
3:52
and then what it is for a mother to stare down a plane,
3:57
nose to nose.
3:59
The news caster spotted something that stole his capacity
4:04
to speak and Debbie and I moved closer on the couch.
4:08
Was it right then,
4:09
that she understood the neighbors before me
4:12
and their desperation to grow another world?
4:16
Was it right then, that I asked her her name?
4:22
(Andrea clears throat) (audience clapping)
—
This post was previously published on YouTube.
***
You may also like these posts on The Good Men Project:
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