Joshua Bennett – Levi [Video]

By Button Poetry

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Joshua Bennett, performing at the Striver’s Row.

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Transcript provided by YouTube (unedited)

0:03
in 1851
0:05
a physician named dr samuel cartwright
0:08
coined the term
0:09
drapetomania a disease characterized by
0:13
the following symptoms
0:15
it creates within the negro an
0:17
uncontrollable desire to escape
0:19
it is a sickness firmly bound to freedom
0:24
when i read about dr cartwright my mind
0:26
sets sail towards the face of my younger
0:28
brother ten years ago
0:31
a neurologist cast the word autism like
0:33
a giant fishing net over his brain
0:35
and took my entire family under the tide
0:37
with it the doctors
0:39
never used the word gift never thought
0:42
to suggest that
0:43
maybe levi’s words aren’t rusty anchors
0:45
like the rest of ours
0:47
they’re jellyfish you think you can see
0:50
right through them
0:50
but it’s only because you’re too fixated
0:52
on the surface they keep telling him
0:54
to think like an assembly line but his
0:56
mind is more like the world’s most
0:58
extravagant circus
0:59
all trapeze and lion teeth drumbeat and
1:02
riotous laughter
1:03
that could shake the moon out of its
1:04
skin every sentence a staccato him
1:07
sung in the midst of a world that has
1:08
forgotten how to value silence
1:10
when did the brain become an appliance
1:14
when did we when did we start doing dr
1:17
cartwright’s work for him
1:19
turning our children into chattel in our
1:21
schools into asylums where we medicate
1:23
based on myth this
1:24
is not just about my younger brother it
1:26
is about our obsession with normalcy
1:28
and the wars we have waged in its name
1:30
for christopher baker a 13 year old boy
1:32
from lexington kentucky whose teacher
1:34
stuffed them in a duffel bag
1:35
and just left them there for 20 minutes
1:37
a flailing albatross
1:39
desperate for sky when his mother burst
1:41
through the classroom doors
1:43
i can just picture his name falling like
1:45
a tiny revolution from her mouth
1:47
and overturning the silence that had
1:49
conquered the room levi
1:52
they will come for you too they will
1:54
tell you to
1:55
laugh and lift and work on cue if you
1:58
can’t muster the emotion
1:59
then just fake it like all the other
2:01
good robots do be human
2:03
be like me be a social butterfly with
2:05
gender normative wings smile big
2:07
smile pretty be quarterback point guard
2:09
cat call courageous be bicep
2:11
and jackhammer spark call the pretty
2:13
girls ugly and mean it with all of your
2:15
heart your scribbles or just scribbles
2:17
levi
2:17
don’t dare call them art don’t dare be
2:19
an enigma
2:22
there is no space for your kind of
2:24
beautiful here
2:27
no room for those harriet tubman nat
2:29
turner type visions
2:31
that can spin shackles into vapor we
2:33
have seen
2:34
what can happen when a mind goes
2:36
unchained we have built
2:38
entire industries around keeping our
2:40
modern day michelangelo’s in check
2:42
how many children how many masterfully
2:46
written lives must be dashed into the
2:47
ground
2:48
before we can call this a genocide on
2:50
creativity please
2:53
[Applause]
2:56
stop calling my little brother diseased
2:59
he’s not sick his mind is just an
3:02
unmapped archipelago
3:04
where every idea is a former slave gone
3:06
free
3:07
so the next time they tell you that your
3:10
neurons are a crime little brother
3:13
you tell them this for me tell them that
3:16
levi
3:16
is just shorthand for levitate
3:20
that your calling is to the clouds and
3:22
you would pay them a lot more attention
3:24
but you are simply too busy having a
3:26
conversation with god right now
3:29
then smile for them smile big
3:33
smile pretty teach their wounded souls
3:36
how to fly
3:37
because you were made that way a genius
3:40
with jellyfish for words a divine poem
3:45
destined for the sky

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This post was previously published on YouTube.

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