Spoken Word: “the return”
Another rescued piece that’s been haunting me for years
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This is a poem written in two parts: the first part was written in the middle of an awful night after an awful fight while my now-wife and I were not-exactly-vacationing* in a hotel room in Victoria B.C., the second part on the plane back home soon after the incident’s conclusion.
* I was participating in the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word, and my now-wife accompanied me expecting it to be a relaxing vacation. It was neither relaxing, nor a vacation, and while we did have a lot of great moments together, we also experienced a number of unpleasant elements, not least of which were some nasty people and their toxic community politics. Even without this, traveling with a partner tends to expose all sorts of underlying issues and can be a great (or terrible) test of a couple’s relationship…
This is a very raw piece that I both wrote for and dedicate to my wife, and re-experiencing this so many years later, with both its pain and its promise, really provides me with a sense of how much we’ve both been through, of the enormous amount of growth and healing, and also a sense of pride in how we’ve managed to navigate this journey together and continually demonstrate that our whole is so much more than the sum of our parts.
Side Note
This video has taken a lot longer to put together, primarily because Midjourney doesn’t “get” hands, or tiny crystal hearts, and until I could produce an image I was satisfied with I just wasn’t able to bring myself to record the audio.
I even tried using the technique I described in my article Scribble Diffusion Just Blew My Mind, where I sketched the outline of the image I wanted and ran that through…
