Kosal Khiev / Spoken word artist
They kept me in the hole for one and a half years. I almost went crazy. You come to talk to yourself, and you’re forced to confront yourself, all parts of yourself. It made me say – is this it? Is this all your life is going to amount to? Are you going to die in prison?
I wrote everything out, fears, hopes, dreams and nightmares. Whatever I was writing I would talk it out, and people would hear me and say: ‘Let us hear something man’. In a sense it was my first performance – it was dudes just being lonely and bored.
I discovered the power that poetry has to change a person’s perspective and outlook.
Now I’ve come back, I just want to do good. I just want people, when they talk to me, to get the feeling that this guy is doing good. And just continue forward, you know?
I remember someone telling me it takes only a couple of seconds to make a mistake, but it takes a lifetime to correct it. I’m still paying for my mistakes now. I have to serve to this mother earth, and that is my purpose of life.