By Button Poetry
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George Abraham, performing at Honey in Minneapolis.
Transcript provided by YouTube:
00:02
– An ode to fighting over the check
00:04
with my freaking Arabs.
00:05
(audience laughing)
00:07
And blessed are the bamboozled
00:09
for they have inherited brief nourishment.
00:11
Yes, at my expense.
00:13
Come, side eye, hand slap,
00:16
the Allah of Tata’s prayers,
00:18
even though she too was a
00:19
leave a 20 in the car so you have to accept it type.
00:21
(audience laughing)
00:22
Because what parts of us weren’t inherited
00:24
from a light of understandable distance.
00:27
The argila smoke unraveling in violet dust
00:30
trailing to a landscape not smoldering.
00:33
How else to say “alive” than to inhale ash into our lungs?
00:37
Nights that leave us feign bare and golden
00:40
may mistake this laughter for anger, I get it.
00:43
We aren’t digestible alive outside of metaphor.
00:46
Once I wrote a self portrait as a snake,
00:50
and it was a happy poem,
00:51
despite the politician who damned us to that venom.
00:54
In truth, this was my brother’s face
00:56
but after I beat him to the waiter
00:58
and paid for both of our dinners, yes!
01:00
That was me, frowning shaking my head
01:03
after Summer beat me once,
01:04
simply because she was closer to the chip reader.
01:06
And, Newar who leaned his whole body out of the car
01:10
to slap Hazzam’s credit card from the parking lot terminal,
01:13
we’ve been here before.
01:14
Offering the brief inconvenience of ourselves
01:17
because we don’t know when, let alone if
01:19
there will be a next time.
01:20
Because we know apocalypse, well,
01:23
we know the sound of the belching sun
01:25
as it swallows us whole.
01:26
Newar says God is written into every corner
01:29
of the Arabic language, however subconscious,
01:31
so it follows, every time that there are
01:33
two or more of us gathered, it must be an act of divinity.
01:37
We cannot give each other a tomorrow,
01:40
the sun won’t swallow us and so,
01:43
and so we make it.
01:45
Inescapable as the no unspoken
01:47
into our mother’s every Inshallah’s.
01:50
Say this is how we pray, without ever making a sound.
01:55
Thank you all.
01:56
(audience cheering)
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This post was previously published on YouTube.
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Photo credit: Screenshot from video