By Button Poetry
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Andrea Gibson, performing at Syracuse, NY.
Transcript provided by YouTube:
00:02
It’s 3 a.m.
00:04
The emergency room psychiatrist looks up from his clipboard
00:07
with eyes paid to care
00:09
and asks me if I see people who aren’t really there.
00:13
I say, “I see people.
00:15
How the hell am I supposed to know if they’re really there or not?”
00:19
He doesn’t laugh; neither do I.
00:22
The math’s not on my side. Ten stitches and one lie.
00:25
I swear I wasn’t trying to die.
00:27
I just wanted to see what my pulse looked like from the inside.
00:30
Fast-forward one year.
00:32
I’m standing in an auditorium behind a microphone,
00:34
reading a poem to 400 Latino high school kids
00:37
who live with a breath of ice crawling up their mother’s backbones,
00:41
and I am frantically hiding my scars.
00:43
Because the last thing I want these kids to know
00:45
is that I ever thought my life was too hard.
00:48
I’ve never seen a bomb drop.
00:50
I’ve never felt hunger.
00:51
I’ve also never seen lightning strike, but we’ve all heard thunder,
00:54
and it doesn’t need a good genius to tell something’s burning.
00:57
The smoke rises between us,
00:58
forming walls so high they split the sky like slit wrists,
01:01
and when the stars fall like blood, we are all left with nothing
01:05
but a death wish.
01:06
She said, “Call me by my true name.”
01:09
I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bone.
01:11
Do you remember the rest? How about this one, America,
01:14
Jesus wept, Jesus wept.
01:16
But look at your eyes, dry as a desert sand,
01:18
dusting the edges of your soldiers’ wedding bands.
01:21
Look at your soul playing dead because your rib cage is Abu Ghraib,
01:24
is San Quentin, is Guantanamo Bay,
01:27
and your heart has beaten them so many times,
01:29
they bleed the moon.
01:31
Do you know children in Palestine fly kites to prove they’re still free?
01:35
Can you imagine how that string must feel between their fingers
01:38
as they kneel in the cinders of US-made missile heads?
01:41
You can count the dead by the colors in the sky.
01:44
The bough is breaking.
01:46
The cradle is falling.
01:47
Right now, a six-year-old girl is crutched in a ditch in Syria,
01:51
wishing on falling bombs.
01:53
Right now, our government is recording the test scores
01:56
of black and Latino fourth-graders
01:58
to see how many prison beds will be needed in the year 2029.
02:02
Right now, there’s a man on the street outside my door with outstretched hands,
02:05
full of heartbeats no one can hear.
02:08
He had cheeks like torn sheet music–
02:10
every tear, a broken crescendo falling on closed ears.
02:13
At his side, there was a girl with eyes like an anthem
02:16
no one stands up for.
02:17
Doctor, our insanity is not that we see people who aren’t there;
02:22
it’s that we ignore the ones who are,
02:24
till we find ourselves scarred and ashamed
02:26
walking to emergency rooms at 3 a.m.,
02:28
flooded with a pain we could not name or explain,
02:31
bleeding from the outside in.
02:33
Our skin is not impervious.
02:35
Cultures built on greed and destruction do not pick and choose who they kill.
02:39
Do we really believe our need for Prozac
02:41
has nothing to do with Baghdad, with Kabul, with Ferguson,
02:44
with the thousands of US school kids bleeding budget cuts
02:47
that will never heal to fuel war tanks?
02:49
Thank God for denial.
02:51
Thank God we can afford the makeup to pile upon the face of it all.
02:55
Look at the pretty world.
02:56
Look at all the smiling people
02:58
and the sky with a missile between her teeth
03:00
and a steeple through her heart, and not a single star left to hold her.
03:04
And the voices of a thousand broken nations saying,
03:07
“Wake me. Wake me when the American Dream is over.”
03:13
(applause)
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This post was previously published on YouTube.
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Photo credit: Screenshot from video