By Button Poetry
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A new performance of “Just Yesterday” by Michael Lee.
Transcript provided by YouTube:
00:02
your pain
00:03
or any pain isn’t worth any more than
00:06
the words we can dig up to describe it
00:09
tell me of the knife but make it pretty
00:11
tell me if the collarbone reach you out
00:13
of the skin like a branch but
00:14
make it soft everyone wants us to spill
00:17
poetically
00:19
in a way that goes down easy they want
00:21
us to speak of maps by referring to
00:23
their border and not by what’s inside of
00:24
them i dreamt you still
00:26
named i dreamt you naked i jumped you
00:29
leaking from the knife’s advances
00:31
i jumped you siphoning out your own life
00:33
through the needle i jumped your spine
00:34
crumbling like a palace of cards i
00:36
dreamt every dead person i know was the
00:39
same
00:39
and lived in the same cramped alley of
00:42
my skull
00:43
i will tell you these stories until the
00:45
words materialize
00:46
i can stop up a wound i know i might as
00:50
well try to gather
00:50
rain with a sieve but god damn it i need
00:53
to try
00:54
i’ve been walking around with a fist
00:55
full of consonants believing the dead
00:57
are like windows this poem and other
00:59
poems a handful of rocks i want to
01:01
shatter
01:02
each of your faces or family oh friends
01:05
like you might walk out from behind
01:06
those gaps in your smiles
01:08
sometimes i hold a word to my ear like a
01:10
conch shell
01:11
sometimes i curse the ocean for what it
01:13
cannot or will not say
01:15
i surround these bodies with sentence
01:16
after sentence in the words
01:18
begin to chant like a crowd the words
01:20
become music
01:21
the words become an orchestra of flies i
01:23
almost believe you will wake up all of
01:26
you
01:26
together i almost believe your name will
01:28
slither its way back into your body and
01:30
you will kick back to life like a
01:31
junkyard cutlass and walk
01:32
out of your own funerals laughing how
01:35
absurd
01:36
this choir of weeping these caskets
01:38
planted in the dirt like seeds
01:40
it is so cold in this winter’s lexicon
01:43
this language of nothing
01:44
of once was or never will be again
01:47
sometimes
01:48
i want to kill my uncle for being a more
01:50
miserable drunk than i was
01:52
sometimes i want him to die already so i
01:54
can just write about it
01:56
sometimes i too want to be a poem i
01:58
don’t want to be
01:59
this pain but the language used to
02:02
unearth it
02:03
sometimes i curse archaeologists for
02:06
their basic tools
02:07
telling us basic things sometimes i
02:10
think
02:10
scientists are lazy i too could dig a
02:13
heart out of a chest
02:15
but do any of you know about removing
02:17
the history from a body
02:18
without killing it just yesterday
02:22
scientists discovered a new ligament in
02:24
the human knee
02:25
just yesterday i found out i can’t sleep
02:27
for a whole new set of reasons
02:29
just yesterday i wrote and i wrote and i
02:32
wrote
02:32
and i wrote and i wrote and i kept
02:35
writing because i’ve committed to not
02:36
killing
02:37
anyone especially myself
02:40
just yesterday i found new ways to say i
02:43
miss you
02:44
my god how i miss you all
02:52
thanks y’all i love y’all keep writing
02:53
i’m gonna be out there uh
02:55
signing books selling books
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This post was previously published on YouTube.
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Photo credit: Screenshot from video