“A Bullet Led Epiphany”

This story begins where most stories stop-in the quiet after surviving yourself. Structured in three sweeping acts, this poetry collection traces the journey of a life rebuilt from fracture, memory, and resilience. Moving through time, identity, and survival, these poems speak to anyone who has stood at the edge of an ending and found the courage to begin again. Act I: Man & Time confronts the ways time reshapes wounds, anger, memory, and the self. These poems explore manhood as a landscape of contradictions-strength and vulnerability, harm and tenderness, accountability and the shadows we carry. Act II: Identity enters the uncertain terrain of becoming. Here, the poems examine the roots we inherit, the identities we outgrow, and the moments that force us to confront who we are beneath everything we were taught to be. It is a journey of unlearning, rebuilding, and discovering a self that remains constantly in motion. Act III: Survival gives voice to the invisible work of enduring hardship while carrying hope like a flicker beneath the ribs. These poems illuminate a truth often overlooked: survival is rarely loud. It is daily, private, exhausting, and frequently misunderstood. It is the work we do when no one is watching. Threaded between these acts is "Peace of an Ending," a meditation on the stillness that arrives before transformation. It is neither triumph nor closure, but the fragile pause that follows a long night-the moment when exhaustion finally makes room for breath. The afterword reframes endings not as final destinations, but as thresholds: spaces where the past begins to loosen its grip and the future becomes writable again. Shaped by lived experience, including homelessness, violence, perseverance, and encounters with systems that both fail and save, this collection carries deep gratitude for the people and programs that helped rebuild a foundation where there was once only survival.