Find somewhere quiet and give yourself five minutes for this.
View this video on YouTube
And then another five minutes to recover, probably.
The poem is the work of Shane Koyczan, a spoken word artist from Canada.
Last year, his poem "To This Day" became a huge hit.
After the release of the To This Day video I got a lot of letters from people asking me why I didn't address the online aspects of bullying. I thought that was a great question. The simple reason is that I didn't grow up with it. I had finished high school – blessedly – before that had become a new method of attack. I started to do a little research and it wasn't long before I came across some pretty extreme examples of online abuse. It was hard to walk away without saying something about it.
His animated video for the poem has received over 14 million YouTube views.
View this video on YouTube
I think it's definitely tougher on kids today. There's no more safe haven. People are being attacked in their homes. I never really played baseball growing up, but I always loved the term 'home safe' because I felt it applied to my life...it reinforced the idea that there was somewhere that I was safe from the outside world. I don't think people have that anymore.
He's clearly having a huge burst of creativity.
What I'd like to work on next will hopefully be set in a larger scale. I love working on these videos, but ultimately it all has to lead to something. I'd like to create a feature length piece. We've already recorded the music and I've written all of the poems. What I'd like to do is have a different director working on each piece in a different artistic medium and we've those together with a narrative. Think Pink Floyd's The Wall meets spoken word. Of course this will require much more than a poet's salary!
