Hey, it's Major.

Today's episode is hosted by our very own Micah Keelbaum.

Hang tight, and I'll be back on November 25th.

I'm Micah Keelban, and this is the slowdown.

Thank you. Kielbond. And this is the slowdown. I'm writing this just after getting off the phone with my best friend of 23 years.

I'm in one of those moments where I need my oldest friend to sit on the

couch next to me while I feel. So we bought her a plane ticket for this weekend. She bought the one to come

here and I got the one to send her home. It felt a little ridiculous. I worried my request was a bit overreactive.

But we both agreed, this is why we work, to do stuff like this.

Today's poem excavates the hard route to self-love.

But it also shows us the trick.

That self-love doesn't happen all alone.

Forgiveness Rock Record by Tawanda Malalu.

And where should I find myself, if not in my mother's eyes or my father's hands or my sisters care for the world.

And if I should die, I should die because that is the way the world was designed.

And what was the thing that drew me up from myself as if a river flowed upwards towards the pole of the moon?

And would you not want me to be a tide song, called for constantly by the mere fact of rock, large, white, above, asking you to be real

by virtue of movement, of its heaviness regarding movement, and to be seen as a

slow tragedy of the sun's shadow. I am asking for this life to call for me. I am asking myself to

call for the acceptance of this skin, its predispositions, navigated keenly

by eyes which aren't my own, by histories pieced and unpeased together by various arguments

of human, sometimes even of love. Like watching those that were born before me, decide they were this thing called

...