PREFACE I haven’t published written work since 2022. That was the last time I remember writing effortlessly, and with ease. Everything that followed that year consumed me from the inside out - instantaneously, my new life brought overwhelming experiences I couldn’t articulate on paper. I did not know anything about the people or things I thought I knew. what to say or do, how to feel. I had always somehow turned to the literature part of myself, in writing, to guide me in figuring it out, but this time, I just didn’t, and I felt entirely on my own because of it. A small part of me did believe that the words would somehow find their way back to me with unforced time, maybe as I grew older - I did not imagine that they would come rushing back to me in a completely different direction and sequence. The last few months of my life have at times felt like isolation in a room with 4 metal walls, and writing became the only escape of a porthole I could see out of for light and familiar stories. I see these stories so vibrantly visual in my mind, and I hear every word with a melody, carefully crafted as a song derived from intentional lyricism. these poems are conceptually bonded to songwriting. Words became more natural when I wrote with music attached, and very important artists to me and their releases in music greatly informed my writing process. Though I view this project as genre-less, I hear alternative and country instrumentals present throughout. In each of these carefully curated and selected poems, there is so much of me in a way that I have not previously shared. I simply began to write poems and songs, as one, and over the last 6 months, that process has become what what you are about to read. P.S. Play your favorite records, let them serve as your sonic score reading every word.