"To the artist ... and to those who have forgotten that they are so."

"To the ones who choose to feel
though at times it may tear them apart ..
feel the things that everybody else is afraid to feel.
To those who paint the darkness
so that the darkness
Does not paint them.
To the discarded
and the disregarded
To the Kurt Cobain singer
Van Gough painter
Robin Williams actor
Sylvia Plath poet to the ..
tortured soul.
With the blistered feet.
To the artist.
To those who have never belonged
we say
Welcome home."

Wow.

One of Australia's leading performance poets Joel McKerrow launches his debut album in Melbourne in a few days. What a gift to stumble across his first music video today, he is INCREDIBLE. (I was full-blown weeping by the end.)

“I have heard it said that the best way to destroy a people is to take away their stories. To make them forget. Get lost in the smallness of their own predicament. Like a child who cannot find their way home. It was Milan Kundera who said, ‘The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. To destroy its books, its culture, its history.’ If this is the case, that the first step in the destruction of a people is to take away their stories, then surely it is true that the first step in the restoring of a people is the restoration of their stories. As a poet, this is what I do. This is why I do what I do.” - Joel McKerrow