dirt & human

introduction/author's note

Thank you for your interest in dirt & human.

(Unfortunately this collection is not for everyone, it does have adult themes. If you are under the age of 18 do not read dirt and human. Thank you)

This collection has been the hardest to write because I've put my entire being into every single piece. I normally distance myself from what I write because I don't want to be bigger than my work. I want my poems to speak for themselves without my emotions getting in the way, ruining them. But I have completely ruined 'dirt & human' with my heart and my mind. It is filled with contradictions and just being wrong. It is truly dirt and human. The collection is speaking for itself even with me in the way because it's me through and through. It isn't about self-preservation or being unattached, for me, this collection is about being anything but simple.

The beginning:
The biggest problem that I had is I never took writing seriously, not my writing anyway. I started writing poetry over 10 years ago. A lot of reading, a lot of studying, and a lot of time went in to my passion, but I never made it important enough to understand what I was actually doing and who I was as a writer. I had thousands of poems in notebooks, loose papers, binders, folders that I kept since I was 13 till a few years ago. I threw them all away, except what I have on here. I threw away every thought, every growth, and every minute I've spent writing....I threw it away because it just wasn't important enough to me. I couldn't find a reason to keep any of them. I quit writing. I couldn't hold onto an idea and make it last.

I had this thought to start over, and for once tell the truth in my writing.

'dirt & human' was this sort of idea that I had floating around for awhile but I wasn't really ready to actually make it work. I knew I had to go from a mindless hobby of just throwing together words and making it poetic to an actual struggle because I wanted to challenge myself to be a better writer for you. To take every word I put out seriously. To think and to feel until it means something. I wanted this collection to be better than I am, to fill in the gaps that my own imperfections couldn't, and to actually step out of my head into something real.

Facts about the collection:
I first got the idea for the title after grieving over a loss that I couldn't get out of. I remember thinking of dirt as this sort of chaotic religious painting that I couldn't make sense of. A religion that isn't based on faith or God, but something entirely different because it creates and it buries. I saw dirt as death in a more figurative way.
The idea for human was to put God and faith into it to turn something that I couldn't understand and make it human. With faith, love, mistakes, anger, and flaws. I wanted dirt and human to come together to make one bigger than the other. The poems came much later than the title because I wanted to be honest and I wanted to put myself in my work.

The first poem for this collection was actually 'body' then 'and,' I edited them completely because when I wrote them the loss was still too raw, I destroyed the poems with too many emotions, not enough words to balance it all out. I kept the emotions but added tangible things. 'dirt & human' poem took forever to get right, I worked on it for months. It's a poem that simply explains the title. I had to get that one right since it's the basis of what I'm trying to accomplish with this collection. Some poems are more "human" than "dirt" or more "dirt" than "human," my focus shifts a lot from people to ghosts, ghosts to people, or both. There's no real way to organize that because I'm trying to fit so much in, while still focusing on the title as whole. My writing might go from one extreme to another because my goal is to introduce entirely different topics to keep things original and not boring. I don't want to focus too much on one idea, and use it up until I'm beating a dead horse. I will have topics that I write about numerous times from a different angle but I don't want to put them all together, so that's why I like to jump from this to that.

As far as my writing schedule and adding to this collection, I tend to hoard my poems before I actually share any of them. I might publish them sporadically or all at once. Most of these poems I've written months ago, even a couple or a few years ago. Some of the poems are more recent that I actually wrote the same day I published but most are older. I like to hold on to things, reread them several times, and edit them or rewrite them or just "recycle" it for another idea. I write pretty much every day even if it's just a word or a line, I just hoard them all first until I'm happy with them all....just my method.

Some of the poems are connected to one another. It's hard to notice which poems are connected but I use similar wording or the titles are connected. That was intentional because since I'm being honest my thoughts and feelings change, so I make a poem about it, and also, there are different sides to every emotion so I try to capture them all using the same theme or tone. Some of them are just a continuation going from one poem to the next.
There are few pieces from this collection that aren't poems, just writing from my journals that I thought were necessary to add. Poetry titles are completely uncapitalized if you want to skip the journal writing.

*I will be adding a lot of my older pieces to this collection because a lot of connections are from my earlier work. Most of these poems are over a decade old or written in my early 20s so they will be edited.*

Readers,
Now that you are familiar with the beginning and the why, I understand you're not going to like every single piece or even none of them, that's okay, I don't expect you to. I don't expect your praises when I haven't earned them from you. This is a new beginning for me and I'll make mistakes. None of this is going to be perfect or maybe some of the poems won't even be good but take what you will from it, it's the entire point. Read, critique, like, hate, and comment because....

This is dirt & human, my best attempt to be a writer:

[do not steal other people's work, it's wrong]