Spoken Word: “the return”
Another rescued piece that’s been haunting me for years
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…
