E. D. Alexander Jr

It’s quite ironic that for the first four and half years of my life I was basically mute. With the exception of hunger grunts, I had shown no real progress towards speaking. It didn’t help that my older sister was formulating sentences before her first birthday. My family was convinced something was wrong.

The speech pathologists disagreed. She assured my family that I was physically able to talk, but chose not to speak up. I guess I had nothing to say. I enjoyed those early years as a spectator, a drooling bystander, watching life go by like one would watch Disney.

Then stuff started happening to me. My sister shaved my eyebrows clean off and I just watched. I didn’t get a say over what movie we watched. The daycare woke me up during every nap time to go on a “special” field trip.

One day I had enough and it clicked: I think I’m in the movie. I can be the actor. I can do stuff and not have it done to me - a concept! I was so eager to start talking that I’ve more than made up for my years of silence. I was so eager to talk that I had a terrible stammer. So many words in my mouth!

So now I put my words into more productive forms: I host my podcast variety show “The Spoken Word with Edward,” I perform spoken word poetry as Black Shakespeare, I rap over dope beats as KingTakeover, I indulge my crude humor as “Edward of Mouth,” while writing a quarterly publication entitled “Palace Thoughts.” This is my story and now I must do the thing that comes hardest to me: shut-up!

Truly,

E. D. Alexander Jr