After a decade of working as a digital creator craving to move, become, exist beyond my many screens, I’ve become a live poet. I define this as how, like an eighteenth-century Romantic, I sit in public spaces with a vintage typewriter and create poems on the spot, in real time, based on a single spark someone offers me, whether it's a word, a memory, or something elusive tugging at the edges of their consciousness.

This requires listening closely, slowing down despite a world and nature that would rather see us rush. The typewriter, in all of its analog-ness, imperfection, and honesty, provides no delete key, no algorithm, not even a thesaurus. I navigate along, against, assisted by attention, intuition, and presence. Each poem is born once, for one person, and goes on to live a life beyond my hands.

I’m inspired by strangers, and how even in not knowing can so much be known. By how much people are carrying, and how little space we’re given to be witnessed without fixing, branding, or optimizing. I’m inspired by the way a few lines of language can surface something someone had no idea they were ready to see, or that they were craving to have reflected.

I hope for this to be a small antidote, for those I write for. From ourselves, from each other, from meaning. People come to me curious, sometimes skeptical, and sometimes leave holding a poem with tears in their eyes simply because I met them where they were, for a moment, without distraction, and showed us both how much we all, always, have in common.

How powerful it is to create something slowly, by hand, in public. To know that we are more legible, more tender, and more understood than we think.