- So like, when my girlfriend's parents ask me
what I do for a living,
I pull it straight razor out of my back pocket,
and I don't tell them I'm a poet.
I sure as hell don't tell them I'm an MC,
but I pull it straight razor out of my back pocket
and like, I can lie, right?
I can say that I'm a pilot, or a teacher, or a handsome man,
or the change that I want to see in the world,
or a pipe smoking grad student,
I could go on and on about all the locked doors I can open
or the exotic locales that have crawled up my nose
or the blinding glossiness of my resume paper.
I could give them joyful heart attacks.
I could Santa Claus their systems, but I don't.
I pull this straight razor out of my back pocket.
And maybe this is overly dramatic,
but I've never been very good at small talk, right?
I'm always too busy wondering
where interesting scars come from,
too busy wondering how many poorly aimed arrows,
casual brushes of skin drownings, or split seconds
of eye contact over the past 10,000 years have
constructed this moment.
Too busy imagining the soundtrack to my life
dominated by smiling adult contemporary alternate rockers,
and saying no.
Give me, give me hip hop dressed
in leather knuckles cracking because yo,
we can talk about the weather, right?
Like that's easy.
We could deaden our colors and round our jagged corners
so that we may fit more precisely
in our own carry on luggage.
I could- I could rattle off a string of pop culture
references or rap really, really fast.
And we'd all have a good laugh, but I don't.
I pull a straight razor out of my back pocket and
just as her father begins to say
"Okay, so, so you're a barber?"
I sliced my little finger off.
And, um,
they jumped back instantly like characters in a poorly
edited student film.
The lines caught between their teeth, the eyes
staring directly into the camera. Levitating with pain,
I pick my discarded digit up from off the olive garden floor
and with the black sharpie
I always put in my other back pocket.
I write my name on it, and I say,
give me $10, and I will let you keep this.
Not the finger, the moment.
Give me $10 as tribute to the truth that we once stood here,
that I did something worth remembering, that you on this day
when there's something larger than traffic or storm clouds
or time passing for the price of a fancy breakfast.
Press your fingertips to the wet cement of my tombstone.
Stand in the backyard of my iconography.
It's only $10. It's on my bones.
They're doing a good job keeping me upright.
Tell yourself that this day,
this day,
the not blurred by, that this journal entry would be more
than an absent minded doodle.
For $10, I will carve my initials into your brain stem.
What do I do for a living?
I-
I'm an artist, right?
I am a turtle without a shell and I have the scars to
prove it.
I am pulling myself from the magician's hat,
night after night, and I have the scars to prove it.
I am leaving fragments of my body in every dusty
corner of this country.
And I have the scars to prove it.
Give me $10,
and I will show you
everything.
(Cheering and applause)