By Button Poetry
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Dave Harris, performing at Icehouse in Minneapolis, MN.
Transcript provided by YouTube:
00:02
What I didn’t know
00:04
was that while I was being born
00:06
I got stuck inside of my mother.
00:09
The doctor had to use a cone and a tube to vacuum me into the world.
00:15
The pressure from the tool squeezed my soft head
00:17
into the shape of a triangle.
00:20
In the weeks following my birth,
00:22
my father would hold my naked body in the shower
00:25
and gently massage the rough corners of my skull,
00:28
almost managing to right the disfigurement.
00:31
He tells me this story in a letter he writes
00:34
twenty-two years after my mother and her baby fled his home.
00:38
And now I understand
00:41
that the odd head I’ve lived with isn’t the results of genetics,
00:45
it’s a wound.
00:47
How little I knew
00:49
of all my father’s hands could do.
00:53
(applause)
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This post was previously published on YouTube.
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Photo credit: Screenshot from video