Since I was a teen, writing stories has been the overarching goal of my life. Whether I'm ever successful at it is a question that stopped being relevant to me a while ago. I just knew that whatever I ended up doing with my life, it was all just to keep the lights on to continue telling stories.

Were they good stories? I'm not sure. But they were stories that I had to tell. Over the past few years, I self-published two books in my home country, and I was even able to get them in local bookstores.

I got the sales reports, and I am, by the most basic metric, a professional writer.

I've written more than two books, of course, and I intend to write many more before my time is done. It's what I believe to be my purpose, the only thing I mean to do for the rest of my life.

So, what does any of that have to do with the following collection?

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I'm not really a poet. But sometimes I get these flashes of inspiration, far too short and contained to turn into a larger story. If the stories I want to tell are like bonfires, then the poems are sparks, brief flashes flickering from the flames.

Over the course of the last year or so, I've written dozens of poems, each inspired by the stories I found myself working on. Maybe they were excerpts that I found did not fit in the story. Maybe they were epigraphs. Sometimes they simply manifested, apropos of nothing, and I found myself either jotting it down in a notebook, or even just saving it as a message draft in my phone to be extrapolated upon later.

There's no particular theme, or rhyme or reason to where some of them came from, but over time, I had compiled a fair few of them.

The problem was in how I was saving them. I had no compilation, no collection, no set order, basically saved haphazardly in virtually every folder on my PC. It was... messy. So the reason for this is to get all the poems I've written in one place, in an anthology of sorts, after hunting down each one in every errant location I've saved them to...

I intend to compile them as a collection of the poems I've written in 2023 and 2024.

Most of these poems are free-verse; very few are written with rhyme and meter in mind. I know that some people might not consider them poems at all; that's fair. Like I said, I'm not really a poet. That said, I do hope someone enjoys them, somewhere out in the wide world.