So like, when my girlfriends parents ask me what I “do for a living”,

I pull a 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 a straight razor out of my back pocket.

And like, I could lie, right?

I could 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 could open,

Or the exotic locales that have crawled up my nose,

Or the blinding awesomeness of my resume paper.

I could give them joyful heart attacks, I could Santa Claus their systems, but I don’t.

I pull a 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 of the past 10,000 years have constructed this moment.

Too busy imagining the soundtrack to my life,

Dominated by smiling, adult, contemporary, alterna-rockers,

And saying no.

Give me hip-hop dressed in leather, knuckles cracking.

Because yo,

We could 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 into our own carry-on luggage.

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 you’re a barber?”

I slice my little finger off!

And they jump back instantly like characters in a poorly-edited student film,

Their lines caught between their teeth,

Their eyes staring directly into the camera.

Levitating with pain, I pick my discarded figit up from off the Olive Garden floor,

And with the black Sharpie I reached from 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, witnessed 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 background of my iconography.

It’s only $10.

Tell my bones they’re doing a good job keeping me upright.

Tell yourself that this day did not blur by,

That this journal entry would be more than an absentminded doodle.

For $10 I will carve my initials into your brain stem.

What do I do for a living?

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 magicians 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

~small talk by Kyle ‘Guante’ Tran Myre