shane koyczan

(i am not shane koyczan)

[wisewordsofkoyczan]

I asked you about this line about a month ago...“Give me the kind of love that turns my past into an etch a sketch and shakes the broken out of me." It's on his new album and is from the title track Debris. I thought my heart might burst when I heard it!

I’m so glad you found the poem!! :) Thanks for the update :*

[wisewordsofkoyczan]

This is the table of contents of the book i bought from Shane's show. I will transcribe these all in time, but if you have any special requests let me know!

[wisewordsofkoyczan]

33333 thank youuu

:D

[wisewordsofkoyczan]

do you know where i can find the words to shine?

I don’t, I’m sorry! But I can transcribe it sometime if you like!

edit: http://shane-koyczan-poems.tumblr.com/post/33512968781/shine-gleam-where-the-streetlights-are-broken

[wisewordsofkoyczan]

Hey guys! So at Shane’s show I bought a copy of his book Our Deathbeds WIll Be Thirsty (and he signed it!!!), so that means I’ll have some poems to put on here!! :D

[wisewordsofkoyczan]

Can't find the poem!

Saw Shane last night. Can’t find the poem and must read it! It’s the one that has the line….

“Give me the kind of love that turns my past into an etch a sketch and shakes the broken out of me.”

I was there toooo :D I’m so sorry but I have no idea! I’ve scoured the internet, paged through the book I bought (and had signed!!!!), and even asked my friend who was there who knows his poems better than I do. I’ll keep an eye out though!

[wisewordsofkoyczan]

Guys i met Shane tonight!!!! He performed in San Francisco and I went out to see him! He is such a sweet guy.

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Famed Canadian Poet, Shane Koyczan on Canada Day

[wisewordsofkoyczan]

Hi there! I was just wondering if you had any idea whether The Crickets Have Arthritis is published anywhere - I'm trying to do it for a speech competition. I've been asking anywhere I think I could get an answer, so apologies if this is out of the blue!

I'm so sorry, for some reason the notification that you messaged me never popped up. I actually tried to use a Shane Koyczan piece for a speech competition last year, and if you're competing under the NFL/NSDA, none of his pieces are actually legal because they aren't exactly written published works- they're spoken. I do know that they are working on changing this rule, though. Good luck!

[wisewordsofkoyczan]

Where by Shane Koyczan

The world's first doctor was a mother.

Who diagnosed her patients asking the question,

"Can you show me where it hurts?"

And we staged sold-out concerts singing our pain as if the melody itself could explain the cure

Medicine's first prescription was a kiss.

This is still practiced today.

Practiced on the scrapes of children who play just a little too hard,

Once-broken skin now scarred and worn as a medal of bravery

We paid our hospital bills with our hearts;

Our medical charts read like apologies: please accept these simple words as payment.

But we did not yet know the words 'I love you'

Our first attempt was an invention, it sounded a lot like,

'Thank you'.

The heart became a metaphor.

If our body said enough, our hearts roared 'more'.

The heart became the core of our spirit, the seat of our emotion,

Currents and undertows of passion swelling within an ocean of feeling

We cast out our dreams and begin reeling in our desires;

Our heartstrings were wires trolling for love

I've known those who wear their heart like a boxing glove, ready to knock out each next contender

To render them weak-kneed and falling

Corners calling for timeouts as each fan rises to their feet and shouts

'Get up'.

'Fight'.

But what happens when there's no fight left?

When the heart is bereft of the will it takes to continue beating,

When the beats begin cheating, skipping like a bro-broken record, like a bro-bro skipping like-like a bro-broken re-record ski-skipping l-like a b-broken re-rec-record like a broken record.

And the volume falls from a yell to a whisper, a murmur.

Each beat less sure than the last; each silence a vast expanse where echoes hold no lease

Where rhythms police themselves, arresting the unfamiliar as if they were the usual suspects

How man times did love become subtext to stories that started with the question,

'Can you show me where it hurts'?

And how many times did we point to bruises or skinned knees

How many times did we beg please, please make it better.

This poem is brought to you by the question why.

Why is 'where' a less important question?

Where does it hurt?

Why have we been stacking how upon how, like now when we've asked how many mothers?

How many aunts and sisters

How many daughters and cousins

How many grandmothers?

How many others hold their hearts and their throats, choking on last goodbyes and not knowing what to say?

How many fathers pray for hope?

How many sons cannot comfort brothers who cannot cope with the loss of those who give them life?

How many husbands will lose a wife this year?

How many?

It is not a number we wish to know.

We throw our love at death, hoping that through an act of sheer will we can make it not true.

I've known men willing to do anything just for a chance to bring you a tomorrow.

Boys would gladly borrow false hope if it meant that just for a moment they could believe everything will be okay.

Uncles who stay at the bedside of nieces,

Mothers who collect the pieces of their daughters' broken hearts,

And build cathedrals of stained glass, begging light to pass through this moment to keep the shadows at bay for just a few seconds longer.

I have witnessed no heart stronger than those that weeped openly at the altars of love, family, and friendship.

We grip at our hearts not out of sympathy, not out of pity or charity. We grip at our chests because this is where we care from.

Each heart is a drum beating from underneath the concert hall of skin and bone, and as one lone drum sets for us the tempo, all of us echo in harmony.

We grip at our chests and sound off like a symphony of red alerts

It is a show of solidarity.

This is where it hurts.

[wisewordsofkoyczan]

update.

Hello everyone! I'm sorry this blog has been so inactive. I transcribed Shoulders for you guys earlier, I hope you liked the poem as much as I did.

I've been really busy. I started college, AND I broke my back a few months ago, so life has been really hectic. Shane has released a lot of poems lately, so I hope to get a lot of poems transcribed soon, what with Thanksgiving break and winter break coming up.

Speaking of, I have redone the blog and there is now a request feature! Have a poem that you want me to transcribe? Just request it and I'll do my best to get it done!

Thanks again, guys.

[wisewordsofkoyczan]

Shoulders by Shane Koyczan

Like many, I love to look at the stars.

I love the fact that ours is just one among many.

What I love about astronomy is that our constellations tell a story.

Our constellations were born from mythology.

Mythology was our first attempt to understand the world in which we live

We put a God in everything and those Gods would give us our reasons.

Why is the sky blue?

Who chose blue?

Gods.

How come men have nipples?

It's the will of the Gods.

Why does this wine taste so good?

There's a God in it!

And for a while, there was not a single thing that the gods could not explain.

We believed that their anger gave us lightning;

Their despair gave us rain

We whispered our desires to them, believing that their charity would sustain us.

Those Gods... were just stories.

But stories became a large part of how we learn

They burn lessons into our memories

They become a part of how we remember; we can remember almost everything,

Right down to that first unbearable bee sting

When we learned that this tiny blue marble we call the world has rules.

Rule number one: don't fuck with the bees!

An unforgettable lesson brought to you by your memories.

I remember that I grew up loving mythology.

I remember the story of the titan Atlas, who was also the god of astronomy

The original global positioning system sending sailors safely home by telling them which constellation to keep starboard.

He taught us about the stars, and in all this, while he held up ours

Our pale blue dot.

But Atlas is caught between two different tellings of his story.

In the first, he leads a rebellion against Olympus and is then sentenced to hold the heavens on his shoulders for eternity.

In the second story, he is chosen to be the guardian of the pillars that hold up the earth and sky.

I prefer the second story.

It means that the world is not a punishment; but rather, a responsibility.

But how can just one be charged with such a burden?

How can just one be responsible for all this?

When I think of Atlas, I think of a single drop of rain

I think how unfair it would be to hold a single drop solely responsible for making the entire world clean again.

I remember how my grandmother tried to explain our world to me-

She told me a story

She said the ground and the sky, they love each other

But they don't have arms

So rain; that's just how they hold one another.

I began to see how the earth and sky need each other.

But I wondered about us.

In this perfect design, where do we fit?

Which piece of the puzzle are we?

Like constellations, I began to see a connection between dots and numbered my thoughts

And drew lines from one to the next.

I began to see us in the context of a bigger picture, sharpening the blur slowly into focus

We are Atlas.

I saw that this pale blue dot, this one world, is all we get.

There will be no reset button, no new operating system, no downloadable upgrade

We will not be allowed to trade in our old world for a new one with climate control or better fuel efficiency

We get one shot at this.

Dismiss all reports of second chances; we get one.

And yet we draw advances on our future as if we one day won't be held accountable-

We will.

We are.

The human race runs toward a finish line emblazoned with the worlds 'too far' and wonders,

Will we ever cross it?

Have we already?

We are faced with the seemingly impossible talk.

And it's okay to be afraid.

Our dilemma stands before us like a mountain carved into a blockade, the sheer magnitude of our problem would be enough to dissuade anyone.

How do we save the world?

We lay in our beds curled into question marks, wondering

What can we do?

Where do we start?

Is hope a glue crazy enough to hold us together while we're falling apart?

The burden seems immense.

But we can do this.

We must take the martial arts approach to loving our planet-

Love as self-defense

Forget about the cost

There will be no other thing as worth saving as this!

Nothing more important; nothing as precious;

This is home.

All of our stories start and end here.

We are sheltered within an atmosphere that has given us every single breath we will ever take

Every monument we have ever made has come from the flesh of our planet.

Water like blood, skin like soil, bones like granite

It is not a myth, there is no debate, facts are in

Fact is, there's never been any question.

We are facing crisis.

We dismiss the truth not because we can't accept it, but because having to commit ourselves to change is a scary prospect for anybody.

The most alarming part of the statement 'we are facing crisis'

Isn't the word 'crisis',

It's the word 'we'.

Because those two letters take the responsibility away from one and rest it squarely on the shoulders of everybody.

We are Atlas now.

But our strength will come from finding a way to share in shouldering the responsibility of turning the impossible into somehow

Somehow, we will do this.

We can do this.

We can dismiss apathy; we can reject uncertainty

We can be the new chapter in our story

We will not see change immediately

We must act in faith as the hour hand grips the minute hand and they land on the eleventh hour

We must believe like the seed that change is possible to see.

Never seize the flower, it grows knowing it must become more than what it was

It changes, because in growth, all of its potential can be unlocked.

Change is like rain, it starts with a single drop.

Just one, like our pale blue dot.

Caught in an endless waltz called gravity, we circle the sun, wondering who, if anyone left the light on.

We are constellations drawn upon the earth, we are connected to one another, we are bound.

We must behave as the arms that connect the ground to the sky.

We must try to be more like the rain.

Our stories may differ, our goal is the same:

How do we save our pale blue dot?

We act as the rain, realizing that each individual drop is as equal and important as any.

We act as one.

Now, we are many.

[wisewordsofkoyczan]

Hey Shane I really love your poems can u please upload the words to shoulders? Thanks much :)

Hi, I'm not Shane, I'm just a fan. But yes, I'll transcribe the words and post them soon!

[wisewordsofkoyczan]

Troll- Shane Koyczan

[wisewordsofkoyczan]

I love your blog. His work is incredible isn't it? And well talking about incredible, I just wanted to know if there is anywhere I can get the lyrics to: "Where" (you know the one for 'the Heart and Stroke Foundation the Heart Truth'); I think it is amazing, but I can't seem to find the lyrics anywhere. So yea. Thanks.

You know, I haven't come across lyrics for that either, but I'll definitely transcribe it for you in the near future!

[wisewordsofkoyczan]

I this isn't a question but, I love your work, it helped me out a lot, even got me out of suicide. Thank you so much for enabling me to feel like I belong, and like someone cares. Thank you for everything you have done for me and countless others.

Hi there, I'm sorry but I'm not Shane. I'm just a fan like you. But I feel exactly the same way about his work :)

If you want to talk to him, you can try his instagram or facebook accounts. I've talked to him briefly through facebook before.

[wisewordsofkoyczan]

Hey! Quick question :) Which poem is this line from? : "I sit before flowers hoping they will train me in the art of opening up" Thank you!

Hi! I believe it's The Student