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Michael Mlekoday, performing at the Button Studio in Minneapolis, MN.
About Button:
Button Poetry is committed to developing a coherent and effective system of production, distribution, promotion and fundraising for spoken word and performance poetry.
We seek to showcase the power and diversity of voices in our community. By encouraging and broadcasting the best and brightest performance poets of today, we hope to broaden poetry’s audience, to expand its reach and develop a greater level of cultural appreciation for the art form.
Transcript provided by YouTube (unedited)
0:02
the night the murderous cop was not
0:04
charged i lifted a cement block on my
0:07
dark and drunk college town street and
0:09
almost put it through the driver’s side
0:12
window of a parked oldsmobile
0:14
i didn’t know whose it was but this was
0:16
suburban indiana so probably some white
0:19
i reasoned
0:22
then again i too lived in suburban
0:24
indiana and i too was some white
0:29
it took the years and the redwood
0:30
forests it took sage tea
0:33
slow fog and the smell of eucalyptus bay
0:37
and lome it took distance
0:40
the kind afforded me by the state and
0:42
its taxonomies for what it thinks of my
0:44
body and being
0:46
i have wept often
0:48
i have stood in a mass of human
0:50
strangers not wholly unlike an ocean or
0:53
organism a beast or bristle cone we have
0:56
marched like a many-minded star map
0:59
we the breathing bodies
1:02
not the ones ended by the same current
1:04
that keeps us afloat
1:07
i want to know where all this weeping
1:09
and standing has taken us exactly i want
1:12
to know why my white friends are slow at
1:15
evolution
1:16
and me too
1:18
that’s the thing i want to take apart
1:20
with a cement block my own unwillingness
1:23
to throw the block as soon as i know
1:25
where to aim it
1:26
my own intolerance for fire
1:29
for purgation and penance and debt
1:33
does the infinite static of the
1:35
pacific’s evening tide flicker itself
1:38
towards justice
1:39
can the long memories of the pines
1:41
imagine something like restitution for
1:44
all the blades blights and wildfires we
1:47
call history
1:49
my guess is no
1:51
could be wrong
1:53
i choose to believe everything matters i
1:56
don’t understand how we live here we
1:59
hardly do
2:01
but there are four tastes
2:03
we grieve together
2:05
the night the the night the rapist was
2:07
elected
2:08
the morning the unarmed boy was executed
2:11
and half the country couldn’t be
2:12
bothered
2:14
the days of evictions and vengeance the
2:16
days of empire we grieve with our bodies
2:20
on the dance floor i felt my footwork
2:22
was mourning
2:24
on the city bus we grieve poverty
2:26
shoulder to shoulder i am growing
2:28
penance like a garden
2:31
can i tell you what i want with regards
2:33
to whiteness
2:35
do you know how a burned forest
2:37
regenerates
2:38
there are certain kinds of seeds
2:40
apparently that only germinate in fire
2:52
you
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This post was previously published on YouTube.
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