My Confessions – Part 3 (video by Joel McKerrow)

The fleshing out of the poem ‘My Confessions’ was inspired by one particular moment but the heart of it has stemmed from a lifetime brought up in Middle-Class Evangelical Christianity and the last 10 years of discovering the world outside this fishbowl. The individual moment was at a spoken word poetry event when a good friend of mine who isn’t a Christian and who is gay stood up and performed a piece that mourned the rejection he has felt from his Christian parents and what were his Christian friends since he has chosen to live this lifestyle. He spoke through tears and I crumbled on the inside during the entire performance. The next day I took the feelings that had been building up for a long time around all the ways that my community (White, Rich, Christian and Male), past and present, has alienated and perpetuated this broken world- and out of my lament came the poem – ‘My Confessions.’
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Joel McKerrow is a performance poet, writer, educator, youth worker, thinker and activist. He is an active spoken word poet, featuring at many different poetry nights around Melbourne. He is also the founder of the ‘Centre for Poetics and Justice’, a not-for-profit organisation focussed on literary education and Social Awareness for marginalised teenagers (www.cpj.org.au), and you can learn more about him at www.joelmckerrow.com.