Ladies and gentlemen, he/she, they/them,
children of dirt, children of light,
gather around this cracked concrete and
Picture this:
The man who balanced a ladder on his chin for nine hours,
each minute a lifetime spent holding the world steady.
He said he dreamt of Saturn that night,
its rings spinning like a carousel,
its sound was of galloping horses.
Picture the woman who broke another record
she ate the most hot dogs
in one sitting;
wasn’t hungry—
she just didn’t know how to stop.
Her record-breaking burp,
a thunderclap in the Guinness Hall of Fame,
scared the pigeons from the rafters
and left her dreaming of open fields,
where she could run without ever chewing again.
Then there was the man who walked on his hands
up Mount Everest, a circus act for the gods.
His palms froze to the stone,
but he reached the summit and shouted,
“I was born upside-down
and I’ll die the same way!”
The woman with fingernails
curling like ancient scrolls,
each twist a forgotten year:
a kiss in ’83, a slap in ’96,
the year she stopped cutting anything
but the people in her life.
The couple who kissed for 58 hours,
their lips raw as swollen petals.
Did they unlock a portal to forever,
or just grow bored of silence?
Their hearts beat like time bombs,
if the kiss should end
to a clock no one can read.
The world’s loudest clap—
an explosion in the chest cavity of a man
who wanted to be remembered for something,
he clapped louder than storms,
each strike revenge
for a life spent unheard.
The woman who sat in a bathtub of scorpions
for 24 hours and laughed the whole time.
“Each sting,” she said, “felt like a universe
trying to remember my name.”
Her scars now hum under full moons,
a choir of welted hymns.
A man stacked 12 chairs on his chin
and said he was just practicing
for holding the weight of his failure.
The chairs toppled over—
his dreams
fell quietly
like napkins in the eternal abyss.
A boy hopped on one leg
for three days straight,
his foot bouncing like an elastic band.
“I wanted to know how long
I could stay in one place
while pretending to move.”
Now he walks with a limp,
but says he’s never been happier.
The man who memorized 200,000 digits of pi—
a monk of mathematics,
chanting his devotion into the void.
What did he see
when he closed his eyes that night?
A circle? A spiral?
Or the face of his mother in those
early forlorn days in a yellow kitchen?
The world’s largest rubber band ball—
a monument to boredom and persistence,
rolled down a hill once,
crushing the mind of a child
who thought it was candy.
A woman sang a single note
for ten minutes straight—
her lungs a cathedral,
her voice a bell.
By the end, her throat was raw,
but she swore she’d glimpsed heaven
in the blank faces of everyone who listened.
Yet not all records are so generous.
Some cut, crush,
some grind us thin,
beneath the weight of lifetimes
measured in lines and numbers,
etched in stone or scribbled in sand,
depending on the weather.
Scholastic record,
broken as it spins
each grade a crack,
a tattoo of the things we lack.
Driving records entombed
in the DMV altar of doom
a tally of scores and scars,
points on your identification card.
Records of compliance, records of defiance—
Voting, jury duty, taxes,
Employment record, criminal record,
Stamps in your passport—
a road that mimics and
vanishes in the maze of digits
the line between detour
and destination extinguished.
A footprint in wet cement,
hard as rock before you’ve learned to walk
and forget about it, you can’t run from your file.
Campaign donations set records
by increments of millions
each one sorted like spare change:
heads for food and shelter,
tails for bombs and napalm.
Records of bad words muttered under breath,
of smiles cracked open like eggs—
moments catalogued,
stacked high in a library of fire.
These records are hell,
each one burning like sizzling fat.
Fuck that.
Today, we sing:
The man who balanced a ladder on his chin,
dreaming of Saturn’s carousel.
The woman who ate hot dogs without hunger,
her thunderous burp scattering pigeons.
The man who walked on his hands up Mount Everest,
his frozen palms shouting defiance to the gods.
The woman with nails curling like scrolls,
The couple who kissed time into oblivion,
The man who clapped storms into existence.
The mathematician who whispered gospels of pi
into the abyss, his voice a hymn
The boy who hopped on one leg for days.
The world’s largest rubber band ball,
And the woman who sang one note for ten minutes,
her lungs a cathedral, her voice a bell
ringing into heaven’s indifference.
We—he/she, they/them—
we are just molecules,
simple records etched
In the vinyl of the universe
in sweat and scars,
Saxophone solos like echoes
That ripple across time.
We are poetry,
no records, no trophies.
The only thing broken today
is time’s eternal coil,
and the hollow promises
we are too fragile to hold.
We crack this space open:
chaos and shellac and vinyl,
spray paint cans rolling like marbles
reflections of ourselves scattered
halfway down a superhighway
of one lane roads.
Each of us a record,
spinning on a cosmic turntable
Each breath keeping the rhythm,
your heart lays the beat,
and the scratches in the surface—
they are jazz in heaven.
Just as the sky breaks records every day—
the hottest, the boldest, the oldest,
burning through the endless ledger of time-
So do you.
You break the record of being again and again,
with each fleeting sound of your horn.
Today we’ve set a new record together:
the longest moment of broken sound,
the heaviest silence before another breath,
the brightest pinpoint of light ignited
from a single cymbal crash—
a heartbeat groove turned
from wood to ash and back
at last
to
eternal diamonds.