By Button Poetry
.
.
T. Miller, performing at Icehouse in Minneapolis, MN.
Transcript provided by YouTube:
00:02
You are not a firearm in the hands of an unlicensed carrier.
00:07
You are not 20 miles over the speed limit, not under-aged drinking or vandalism,
00:11
neither theft nor robbery.
00:14
You are not illegal.
00:15
You are human. You are a soul connected to a source.
00:19
Skin, connected to bones that are weary from working ten times harder
00:22
while getting paid 90 percent less.
00:24
You are your grandmother’s favorite child,
00:26
your lover’s favorite kiss to suicide note
00:28
that your parents carried across the borders on their backs.
00:31
You are in coffins in Arlington’s National Cemetery.
00:34
You are running into burning buildings,
00:36
risking your life to save people who want you dead.
00:39
You are the true definition of grace.
00:41
You are making below minimum wage barely surviving
00:43
yet still sending money back home to your famiily.
00:46
You are a healer. You are a provider.
00:48
You are coming home every night with tired hands, achy feet
00:51
and still reading your children bedtime stories in a language
00:54
that you’ve been hiding in your throat all day.
00:56
You are the great in America.
00:58
You are more American than the American president.
01:01
You are not a job or a status, or a service or a resident.
01:04
You are not a bill being passed on the House floor
01:06
in the middle of the night.
01:08
You are flesh. You are bones. You are feelings.
01:11
You are more than America’s housekeepers.
01:13
You are the house, you are the structure.
01:15
And if you are forced to leave, you’ll be the flames,
01:17
you burn it down, you burn it down,
01:20
and you write your family’s name in the ashes.
01:22
Thank you.
01:24
(audience cheering)
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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