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Every slam is a finality.
Every slam is the end.
And tonight there's no other way
to end this slam, but to bring up here
one of the true heroes of poetry.
Do y'all remember
when Lauren started out here?
Yeah.
Let's please bring Lauren up here
to make it happen for us right now.
There's nothing else that can happen in the word
but to make the word be the word itself.
Something that you've heard before.
Come on, Lauren.
This is, um, a poem that I found when I was drowning one day.
This is, um, for a friend of mine who's um,
goin' through a hard time right now.
I feel like my back is against a brick wall,
and I've got a Mac truck two inches from my face.
Every cell in my body is screaming run.
But I can't.
I'm kicking and stomping and running and jumping,
wreaking all kinds of havoc, creating a bloody mess
and I'm going nowhere.
Somewhere in my mind I think I am moving.
Somewhere in reality I am running.
Somewhere inside myself I am oh-so-still.
Quiet, dead.
My soul is not rising. My spirit is not lifting.
My life is not living. But I am running.
Moving through the universe, a whirling dervish with no end,
no purpose, no means, no life left to live.
And yet still I want to go to that place where I can run.
Run free my mind tells me.
But those two words cannot occupy the same space in reality.
Run, free.
My back is against a brick wall. I got a Mac truck two inches from my face!
Well run free, baby. Run now.
It just looks hard, but it's so easy.
Just turn around and go. Clip all the wires,
hookups and hangups, and then you're home free.
You can give birth to an excuse so easily,
you'll believe it's always been there.
Part of the natural order, made to order by your forever clever mind.
Constantly protecting you against things you no longer need to be protected from.
And I believe. I believe like a Holy Roller,
singing, sweating, preaching, go tell it on the mountain,
while speaking in twenty different tongues,
while diving in ten thousand feet of baptismal water without a life preserver.
I believe like my bullet-ridden brother out there somewhere
right now gurgling blood through his last breath,
spitting out a red ripe prayer so new, so sweet, so baby fresh,
so full of truth, he thinks it can save his life.
God does not exist in desperation
and hope is lying dead somewhere in the sewer down the street,
around the corner, in the alley, underneath the feet of somebody,
itching, scratching, trembling, jonesing for their next hit
and sucking somebody's ***.
I got two minutes, ya'll. I got two *** minutes
before I run free or die, ya'll.
Two minutes before I smash my face into the grill of a Mac truck.
Before I get ten thousand bricks shoved up my ***.
Before I run free or die.
Lauren Bell. Lauren Bell.
Get her back up here. I need an encore.
I need an encore.