Gumball Poems Remind Readers: You’re Not A Robot

The Poetry Gumball Machine Project
Museum for Art in Wood
141 N. 3rd St.
Philadelphia
April 27, 2024

“Tough love is being punched until you don’t cry — and crying is the only thing that stops the punching from hurting as much,” Philly Poet and local organizer LindoYes recited softly. His words were resonant enough to reach his audience without relying on a mic as he stood next to a wooden robot designed to dispense his poems — and social service supports — to the city at large.

That functional sculpture, the latest of five other “poetry gumball machines” erected across public spaces in Philly by LindoYes, was presented Saturday during a night of slam poetry, song, and “wellness”-speak at the Museum for Art in Wood.

The museum commissioned the latest machine, which was designed by woodworker Jesse Rinyu, to join the various exhibitions of tree-related art scattered across the small space.

The museum and associated tours are free to the public, so, in theory, anyone can access or otherwise accidentally encounter the object.

“It’s for the people!” LindoYes declared, while simultaneously acknowledging that glassy galleries aren’t always the most comfortable spaces for those not yet acquainted with often costly resources like therapy.

The other machines already established around the city at spots — including community fridges and public parks — similarly dispense a short poem plus pins and merch, all created by LindoYes. It also includes contact information for the city’s 24 – 7 crisis hotline.

“Even the lightest things/ If held for too long/ Can weigh heavy on the heart/ No one should carry that weight alone,” read the short stanza delivered to my hand via robot arm.

For the wood-informed vending iteration, another artist, Jennifer Eckenrode, designed a collection of hinged walnut shells to store the poems, playing into the metaphor of seed, growth and, uh-huh, wood. We fed the nuts back into the machine upon cracking them open to take the poem.

As the night’s live performers made their way to the front of the room and slam poets gestured to the rhythm of their own words, the robot stood frozen in place, the heart carved into his torso bleeding empty space.

Following a virtual voting session, the robot will later be named either Boy Blue, Thumbus, or Sean (standing for “Shall Eliminate Android Neighbor). Those three names were drawn from a hat full of possibilities generated by all those who attended Saturday’s event in a quasi-democratic process that highlighted how the anthropomorphic collage of wood is, just like all of us, a work in progress.

The walnuts kept getting comically stuck inside the robot’s inner pipes, forcing Rinyu to repeatedly return to the role of surgeon while explaining that walnuts, unlike gumballs, are not uniformly shaped and therefore harder to mechanize. That fact only served to further illustrate the point.

I interpreted the robot’s unanticipated constipation as a brilliant piece of performance art itself. It saw people otherwise lined up like cafeteria kids ready for their dose of candy instead tossing around possible solutions for the sculpture’s apparent health woes. It was ironic, generative and interpersonal.

I had a harder time with the explicit framing of the permanent exhibition’s self-care theme. The live event was moderated by a licensed therapist and moonlighting poet who interviewed each performer after their set about their relationship between making art and staying “well” — from “mastering vulnerability” to “developing core values” to finding “community.”

“We’re developing a wellness guide right now,” that therapist, Josh Smith, informed the audience. “I know, I know — you’re all like, ‘We didn’t consent to this.’”

That is exactly what I, a serious therapy skeptic, was thinking. As someone who struggles with *mental illness* myself, I’ve passed through numerous unqualified therapists who’ve caused more unsolicited wreckage than relief in my life. And as someone who is, yes, addicted to TikTok, it’s impossible not to get sick, and altogether disillusioned, by quick spreading psychobabble.

But it’s also clear to me that in a place as systemically fucked as America, it’s the intersection of “wellness” with Big Tech and Big Pharma and Big Money that’s mainly to blame. Most localized care and resource distribution is good — when individuals have the agency to accept or deny it.

LindoYes said he started the Gumball Machine Project following the killing of Walter Wallace, a Black man who was dealing with mental illness when he was shot by Philly police back in 2020 at just 27-years-old.

At that moment, the poet said he realized — like so many others across the country — that “we have to call somebody for help and that call can’t always just be 911.” And, he decided: “I gotta do more than just write poems for people.”

The irony of the art show was this: LindoYes’ live performance of his longer-form poetry was by far the most affecting part of the night.

Though he is the creator of the Gumball Machine Project, LindoYes did not perform until the end of the night’s showcase, when audience members were, as collectively admitted to the therapist who asked us to use our “feeling words,” perhaps a little worn out.

But LindoYes launched into three poems that made me listen — and even, unlike Thumbus or Sean or whatever his name is, feel something.

“I was at the house party, hands waving in the air,” he suddenly sang into the mic, arms bowing up and down to the imagined music. “All I heard them say was, where the real kings at, where the real queens at.”

Moments later, a somber transition: “All we heard was the sirens, all I heard was my irregular heartbeat, and every time I hear my irregular heartbeat I think to myself — when’s the last time I hugged a grown man like a newborn child?”

Fast forward to: “He got new bracelets, you know, handcuffs that fit tight around his wrists… as tight as the unprotected sex he had last night.”

Gasps and sighs emerged from the revived crowd. As LindoYes spoke, people recognized similar moments of violence within their own memories or felt the pang of the poet’s clever words hitting a chord.

“When other people hurt, I feel it,” LindoYes later confessed to the crowd, moving from comedic co-host to heartfelt human with tear-brimmed eyes.

Comparing the process of finding the right therapist to dating today, he remembered a question one “ex-therapist” asked him: “All of your poetry comes out of urgency,” he paraphrased. “What does it mean to have everything you need and not have to fight for it?”

He concluded with a short finale called “Tough Love.” (Watch above.)

“I want to be a Black man held in quiet/ small spoon, soft body… I feel like nobody when somebody/ Kills my softness to be tough/ Call it tough love.”

He offered a definition, a final refrain: “Tough love is/ Being punched until you don’t cry/ And crying is the only thing that stop the punching from hurting as much.”

Before LindoYes took the mic, I had admittedly started to zone out. I was skiing downhill on cynical tracks of association between slam poetry and wellness, two arts that I worry have been inoffensively marketed and maintained by kumbaya dummies, spoiling any genuine good with superficiality or embarrassingly over-sincere but materially empty emotion.

But LindoYes instead corrected a false narrative while independently revitalizing my desire for strong poetry. That is, he stamped down the idea that good art is somehow contingent on suffering, and that artists should have to hurt themselves in order to produce their best work.

The only prerequisite to artistry, as well as connecting with art itself, is thinking, feeling, living.

At the end of the night, I cast a complicated wellness wish: That we hold the robot’s hand … and hang onto our souls.