Andrea Gibson – ‘When the Bough Breaks’ [Video]

By Button Poetry
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Andrea Gibson, performing at Syracuse, NY.
Transcript provided by YouTube:
The emergency room psychiatrist looks up from his clipboard
and asks me if I see people who aren’t really there.
How the hell am I supposed to know if they’re really there or not?”
He doesn’t laugh; neither do I.
The math’s not on my side. Ten stitches and one lie.
I swear I wasn’t trying to die.
I just wanted to see what my pulse looked like from the inside.
I’m standing in an auditorium behind a microphone,
reading a poem to 400 Latino high school kids
who live with a breath of ice crawling up their mother’s backbones,
and I am frantically hiding my scars.
Because the last thing I want these kids to know
is that I ever thought my life was too hard.
I’ve never seen a bomb drop.
I’ve also never seen lightning strike, but we’ve all heard thunder,
and it doesn’t need a good genius to tell something’s burning.
The smoke rises between us,
forming walls so high they split the sky like slit wrists,
and when the stars fall like blood, we are all left with nothing
She said, “Call me by my true name.”
I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bone.
Do you remember the rest? How about this one, America,
But look at your eyes, dry as a desert sand,
dusting the edges of your soldiers’ wedding bands.
Look at your soul playing dead because your rib cage is Abu Ghraib,
is San Quentin, is Guantanamo Bay,
and your heart has beaten them so many times,
Do you know children in Palestine fly kites to prove they’re still free?
Can you imagine how that string must feel between their fingers
as they kneel in the cinders of US-made missile heads?
You can count the dead by the colors in the sky.
Right now, a six-year-old girl is crutched in a ditch in Syria,
wishing on falling bombs.
Right now, our government is recording the test scores
of black and Latino fourth-graders
to see how many prison beds will be needed in the year 2029.
Right now, there’s a man on the street outside my door with outstretched hands,
full of heartbeats no one can hear.
He had cheeks like torn sheet music–
every tear, a broken crescendo falling on closed ears.
At his side, there was a girl with eyes like an anthem
Doctor, our insanity is not that we see people who aren’t there;
it’s that we ignore the ones who are,
till we find ourselves scarred and ashamed
walking to emergency rooms at 3 a.m.,
flooded with a pain we could not name or explain,
bleeding from the outside in.
Our skin is not impervious.
Cultures built on greed and destruction do not pick and choose who they kill.
Do we really believe our need for Prozac
has nothing to do with Baghdad, with Kabul, with Ferguson,
with the thousands of US school kids bleeding budget cuts
that will never heal to fuel war tanks?
Thank God we can afford the makeup to pile upon the face of it all.
Look at the pretty world.
Look at all the smiling people
and the sky with a missile between her teeth
and a steeple through her heart, and not a single star left to hold her.
And the voices of a thousand broken nations saying,
“Wake me. Wake me when the American Dream is over.”
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This post was previously published on YouTube.
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—Photo credit: Screenshot from videoread more