The Way They Talk
Jeiryung Lee, 2025

First performed at Raum für drastische Maßnahmen for +ONE, curated and organised by Melo Börner and Hanna Steinert, as part of Project Space Festival, Berlin, 2025.


THE WAY THEY TALK

I want to talk to angels
But do angels speak Korean

Have you ever been forbidden
to speak your own language

Does the movement of 
your tongue belong to 
your belief or others

Our otherness makes us visible
For better or worse

Visibility 
is not always a good thing 
To survive

The room is filled with 
dozens of eyes
staring at someone
but not seeing anyone

Someone I will never meet 
again
is taking photographs of me 
today

Joiners decide the volume
of the voice of outsiders

When the crowd decides 
I am a monster
time is no longer wasted

We escape death a lot of times
but those are never recorded

No one celebrates
the afternoon 
they almost disappeared

If tomorrow might not come
I will tell the end of the story 
before bed

If nobody is waiting for us
nobody is leaving us

The majority says yes
However 
I have never been one

They say dream big
But I must wake up

I do not need a king 
I do not need a god

I think of the day 
my mother was pregnant 
with me

‘Become an ordinary person’
The end is built into 
the beginning

I need the fall that frees me
not the hand that saves me

Looking on the bright side 
means
Knowing where it is dark

If I had 
successfully killed myself
I should be alive by now

So I had better know
what it is I am killing

But people do not live
And people do not die 
In the way they want

I would cough a cloud of me
but you would see it only 
in the shape of you

My words sometimes 
betray themselves
Like I sometimes betray myself

Truth that does not change 
how you live
is not yet truth

Reality is a 
revolutionary statement
in a world of dreamers

I still want to talk to angels
but 
do angels speak to others