- (finger snapping) Abracadabra,
translation, to speak into existence.
The first act of a magic trick is called the pledge.
The magician shows you something ordinary,
like a deck of cards,
a bird, his palm,
ask you to inspect it
to see if it is indeed real, normal, alive even,
are you watching closely?
The second act of a magic trick is called, the turn.
The magician takes the ordinary thing
and makes it do something extraordinary.
(finger snapping) abracadabra,
watch me disappear in a room full of people.
Functional depression is deterred you never see coming.
A performance of swallowing swords
in order to spit out flames,
I learned to turn trauma into metaphors,
but pretty words don't do much
when the applause does not come home with you.
My brain turns my body into a water tank coffin
for all of the moments I despise having to be on stage
because it means that everyone looks at pages
but no one ever sees me breaking into a confetti of grief.
My therapist says, I am a great escapist,
but on most days I just want to be a run-on-sentence
something without breath.
For all of the times, it gets so hard to
pull myself out like a dove from my own bed when life
deals another misdirect of
you just had a breakdown this morning,
but I still gotta go to work,
pay these bills,
show up for everybody.
I can't afford not to smile, smile, smile, smile
but this smile is the trapped door.
To be in this skin is to be a transported man.
When a traffic stop can easily transmute into 1863
where you can surrender and they still believe it
a slight of hand,
where home is a heart that has been cut in half.
What they've been telling you, your whole life,
that the trauma inside of your own black body
is not indeed real.
So the church was my country, was my mother,
was my hood, was everything beautiful and broken about me.
They taught me magic is a fancy word for survival.
Pray harder, man up, abracadabra.
I drank so much, I became addicted to the fire
for proof that I could not burn.
I made meals out of prayers
when had to decide between eating today
or keeping a roof over my head.
When I was raped as a child
my mother found out from a poetry slam video.
And so I revealed my secret, but it didn't matter.
She did not want to believe, she wanted to be fooled.
She asked, are you still real, man?
Are you sure you are normal?
See, how the metaphor turns back into trauma.
The third act is called the prestige.
You can't just make it disappear.
You have to bring the ordinary thing back.
I am the prestige,
because today I told the demons,
no, there is no more room for you here.
I pledge to cry,
to let go,
to forgive myself,
to heal one day at a time
because every day may not turn a great day,
but today is a good day because I am still alive.
And ain't that extraordinary to speak myself
into existence and say, I have to come back.
You have to come back.
I will always come, abracadabra,
translation, to speak into existence.
The first act of a magic trick
has always been you.
(audience applauding)