By Button Poetry
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George Abraham, performing at New Hampshire Institute of Art.
Transcript provided by YouTube:
00:01
it is the summer after my spleen almost
00:04
ruptured into the stain of a thousand
00:06
sunsets I’m sitting in the therapists
00:08
office and she asked me to start at the
00:11
moment I wanted to die from my own hands
00:14
I could have painted her my body and all
00:17
its failed topologies I have been a home
00:20
that isn’t in love with its flood water
00:22
but instead I decided to give her a
00:25
history lesson 1967 the West Bank is
00:28
annexed by Israel after Napa catastrophe
00:31
my grandparents exiled from their own
00:33
home when I say anxiety stretches
00:35
continents when I say depression is an
00:37
ocean we never wanted to traverse
00:39
fast-forward 1988 my aunt falls in love
00:42
with a woman twice her age finds mother
00:45
in her while her own grieved a stolen
00:47
country decades of abuse from a husband
00:49
with fists for blood when my aunt comes
00:52
out her parents ask if she needs to see
00:55
a therapist a nice person to exorcise
00:58
this devil from her fast forward to
01:00
today my queerness makes a growing
01:02
country of my organs and I cannot love
01:04
myself I cannot disassociate my
01:07
queerness from my self-loathing and I’m
01:09
beginning to think this is inherited or
01:11
perhaps this was all a lesson in
01:14
topology a professor who fails me tells
01:16
the class of exact sequences how
01:18
topological spaces inherit the shape of
01:20
their emptiness from previous
01:22
generations of dimensions an entire
01:24
lineage of singularities in that point I
01:26
too wanted to disappear
01:28
in this office of this therapist who is
01:31
perhaps a topologist who asks so what
01:34
shape does this anxiety take inside you
01:36
I want to say tooth of a mouth eye of a
01:39
hurricane raging in my chest an organ
01:42
with vast chambers haunted by their own
01:45
empty in so much blood it can almost be
01:47
mistaken for a country newfound
01:50
inheritance atheism front of the
01:52
intersection of three merciless gods you
01:55
pray still why have you stopped praying
01:57
the therapists ass and perhaps the
01:59
therapist is my mother the one who found
02:02
God at the bottom of liquor bottles the
02:04
color of bloody oceans the hands who
02:06
prayed for a son who loved her in search
02:09
of home desire
02:11
in Hamlet a ruptured organ Father
02:14
forgive me my drunk inheritance forgive
02:17
the stairs that collapse beneath the
02:19
weight of me forgive the third-floor
02:21
window for almost swallowing me into the
02:23
nights now forgive the bodies I
02:25
swallowed like broken teeth the knees I
02:28
spent trying to summon God and my own
02:30
mouth forgive my DNA for the hair
02:33
sculptors of brief suicides in this body
02:35
I’m trying to love the shattered window
02:38
of myself the hands the rocks the broken
02:44
religion left behind my inheritance this
02:48
body of vandalized cathedrals light me
02:51
on fire strip my God from my breath
02:55
watch as I dance it’s the flames
03:00
[Applause]
03:05
[Music]-
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This post was previously published on YouTube and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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Photo credit: Screenshot from video