By Button Poetry
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RJ Wright, performing at IWPS 2019 in San Diego, CA.
Transcript provided by YouTube:
00:01
You know who irritates me from the very trenches of my soul?
00:06
Grammar Nazis,
00:08
you know the people in the abstinence-
00:09
I mean absence of an intelligent argument will stifle-, I mean, sniper every single misspelling and missing capital letter after a period.
00:15
two words
00:17
Con-vict- I mean context clues
00:18
words!
00:20
are really hard!
00:21
Ask any three-year-old or…
00:24
Donald Trump.
00:25
I relate a lot!
00:26
So the three year olds, the first girl that I ever wrote a love letter to told me
00:29
you write like a toddler
00:31
She laughed as she read every spelling and grammar mistake to a chorus of cackling schoolgirls
00:36
and ever since that day.
00:39
I haven’t been able to unwrite the reflection- I mean rejection. I mean
00:43
I have Dyslexia
00:45
a disorder that involves difficulty learning to read and write
00:48
and I hate telling people because of the way that you’re looking at me,
00:50
right now
00:52
look at me like I’m a paragraph without punctuation
00:55
Like maybe you could understand me if you just took the time
00:57
but you see me as something in need of revision, of school
01:00
School is an exercise in ridicule- I mean repetition
01:03
I mean teachers who’d rather throw me a ball then help me understand what was going on inside of a book
01:07
It always felt like I was being trained to fetch
01:09
to sit
01:09
to roll over,
01:10
to good dog.
01:11
Teachers saw me as the runt of the litter
01:12
so they rarely if ever called on me, but my classmates never stopped calling me:
01:16
slow, stupid short bus.
01:17
I hate feeling stupid!
01:19
So I learned to clown class- I mean to class clown
01:21
I mean to make myself a joke before others could, but sometimes sometimes the laughter sounds
01:24
like sit,
01:25
like roll over,
01:26
like bad dog,
01:27
Like you’re still stupid!
01:28
it makes me want to chew on the throats of people that invalidate my
01:30
Intellect because I used the wrong “your” or “you’re” but I can’t cuz I’m black in America
01:37
So I can’t give anyone an excuse to put this dog down
01:41
When is being black in America not an experiment in editing oneself to be dyslexic?
01:46
It is to be a grown man who is still afraid to read out loud to see the read-
01:50
I mean the red, the red and green lines below my words as wounds that I can’t bandage with spellcheck
01:54
and It is to call autocorrect Judas when I know that my mind is the betrayer
01:58
my mind plays tricks on me
02:00
I can read my facebook status 500 times.
02:01
It’s still not to my catched errors- I mean error to my not catch-
02:04
I mean, I need the words to stop crashing into one another.
02:08
It feels like I’m reading in an earthquake
02:09
where nothing says still long enough to make sense.
02:11
What do you do when every classroom is an aftershock?
02:15
When you relive stumbling through “Of Mice and Men” in front of a jury of your adolescent tears –
02:19
I mean adolescent peers- I mean
02:22
School never taught me to feel worthy of love
02:25
So my mother turned her embrace into a classroom
02:28
She would tell me you are blessed.
02:30
You are gifted,
02:31
your mind is anointed
02:33
and I know I am but most days
02:35
Most days y’all my mind feels like a beautiful curse
02:38
Like the ugliest of blessings.
02:40
My mother says, boy regardless of what it is.
02:43
It’s yours
02:44
So speak life into it
02:48
Speaking life has never been my issue.
02:51
It’s reading and writing it that scares me
02:55
audience [applause and cheering]
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This post was previously published on YouTube.
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Photo credit: Screenshot from video
