I always had a keen interest for a picture that stood slanted on the mantel of my childhood home. It was a centerpiece, so it was difficult to not do just that, but there was a deeper connection that took place; maybe it was the art of the way its purpose was to be hung on the wall, but there it stood in defiance of that certain standard. Or maybe it was the way it was so intricately drawn: the way that every time you were to look, it revealed another line that you hadn’t noticed before. The one fact I knew for certain is that the caption incessantly repeated in my mind every day of my life: “A Heap of Livin’”. At the time, I didn’t quite know the definition, or rather the significance, but it came to me one day, as I reflected upon it with open eyes and experience, wondering what new thing I would come to discover that day. That is when I decided that my poetry was the very embodiment of a painting I held so close to my heart and the sanguine idea of this book was borne.