to live like poetry

a journey through soft mornings & the art of living slowly

Feb 12, 2025

There’s a kind of magic in the world, a pulse thrumming beneath the static—subtle, raw, waiting. It lingers, tepid-soft. You can find it in the sunlight that drags its lips over your skin, in the hush of dusk as it gradates from amaranthine bruise to the deep ache of midnight. It purrs in the spaces between—between the inhale and exhale, between the clink of a spoon against porcelain, between now and what comes next.

But too often, we rush past these moments. We grind our teeth through the weekdays, chasing deadlines, chasing freedom, chasing rescinded rights as fascism digs its talons into the cracks of America’s ribs.

The world is on fire, and we’re running barefoot.

There is much to do in these turbulent times—systems to dismantle, rights to protect—but what if we did more? What if we did less? What if, in the midst of resistance, we also allowed ourselves the space to live—with intention, with hunger, with a kind of reckless reverence? To live like poetry.

In this piece, to live like poetry is to savor the sweetness of life’s fleeting moments, to drape the dull parts of life in gold leaf and call them precious. To let the soft things matter: the way honey dissolves on your tongue, the way the wind slips fingers through your hair, and the way the world still sings, even when it feels like an ending. It’s about gathering these moments like sacred trinkets we’ll someday pass on to our children and allowing them to breathe a life of their own.

Here’s how I’ve been trying to catch the magic before it slips through my fingers—how I’ve been turning the ordinary into something worth celebrating.

i. Romanticizing Mornings

Mornings are the manuscript of our day, holding the potential to shape the hours that follow. They’re a mouthful of berry-sweet seconds, ripe for devouring—yet we slice them thin, spread them across to-do lists, allow them to wither beneath the weight of urgency. But what if we didn’t? What if our mornings were meant to be a work of art, a blank canvas waiting to be touched with intention?

I’ve started waking before the sun stretches its limbs, slipping into the quiet before the rest of the world remembers itself. The air is cool, the apartment still, time untouched. In these hours, I sip a warm drink, letting the steam kiss my face, the heat sliding down my throat like an elixir meant only for me. These first few moments of solitude are sacred—a pause before the day’s weight settles on my shoulders.

Each morning, I try to write a single line of poetry as well. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It doesn’t have to be profound. It just has to be mine. Some words will find their way into something bigger—like this piece—while others will dissolve into the air like a spell half-cast. It doesn’t matter. And that’s the beauty of it. This isn’t about productivity. This is about seduction—letting the morning touch me before the world does, stepping into the day as if it were a lover I intend to take my time with.

ii. Collect Beauty in the Everyday

I collect beauty the way some collect sins—reckless, hungry, desperate to hold proof that something delicate ever touched me. The world hands it over in fragments: a smear of gold spilling through trees, a flower curling at the edges like an aging love letter, the ghost of children’s laughter carrying on the wind. We’ve been taught that beauty must arrive by trumpets, but it doesn’t have to. Not really. Not real beauty. It slinks through the branches, hides in the calm, and waits to be noticed.

When I slow down enough to truly see, the world reveals itself. I walk with empty pockets to return with proof that the world whispered to me: a feather on the ground, an odd-shaped stone, a book from the little free library, crunchy leaves, and flowers—I want to start pressing petals between pages, hoard them like stolen kisses. These small acts of collecting serve as reminders that beauty doesn’t need to be manufactured; it’s already here. And it always has been.

And then, there’s the sky—oh, the sky. Every night, it dies in color, bleeding out in violets and fire, an open wound stretching across the horizon. Another reminder of the impermanence of everything. No film, no poem, no desperate attempt to trap it will ever be enough. But I try anyway. I let the lens of my cell phone pretend it can stop time, knowing full well it’s a lie.

Maybe that’s all part of the game. Maybe beauty is just another name for that which we cannot ever truly keep.

iii. Create a Sanctuary

Your environment has a way of reflecting your inner world. A room isn’t just a room—it’s an incantation, a slow-burning spell for the kind of life we want to step towards. If I’m to build a world that breathes in sync with my own lungs, it must be curated like a fever dream—stitched in silk and candle wax, humming in the low light of something about to bloom.

I long for a space cradled in softness—pillows, blankets, a constellation of fairy lights blinking like distant planets. Dried lavender tucked into jars, relics of a long-forgotten summer. Books stacked like shrines to the minds I ache to devour. Each object a ghost of something I once loved, of something that maybe—just maybe—loved me back.

A vision board rests on my bookshelf—half prophecy, half confession. Scraps of longing pressed between Pinterest daydreams. A place to breathe my wants into existence. To remember who I was before I let the world tell me otherwise.

This space is not just where I exist—it’s where I dream, where I conjure, where I set fire to old skins and shape new ones from ash. It’s an altar to my own becoming, a quiet rebellion against a world with eyes sewn shut.

iv. Nurture Creativity

Creativity needn’t always be some fickle muse, lost in the wind one moment and swelling grand orchestral inspirations in the next. She is in the dirt, the mess, the charcoal-stained fingertips and half-wrecked thoughts sprawled across a napkin at 2 a.m. It is a practice—a gentle, ever-unfolding expression of who we are.

I write poetry the way I breathe—without thinking, without asking if the air is clean. Fragments. Half-formed thoughts. The bones of an idea hemorrhaging all over the page, raw and unpolished.

But words are not the only medium. Drag watercolor across a page and let blues and pinks riot, refusing to control where they go. Let them spill. Let them stain.

I’m not here to tame the art—I’m here to let it take me whole.

We’ve been taught that creation must have a purpose, that it must be displayed, that it must be worth something. But let it be ugly. Let it be nonsense. Let it be yours. The best things always are.

So create like you’re starved for it. Like it’s the last thing you’ll ever touch. Like you’ll never get another chance. Because, what if we don’t? Make something wild and unspeakable and completely, utterly yours.

v. End the Day Like a Poem

The night doesn’t just descend—it cascades, rolling over the day like ink spilled slow, like velvet across skin. How you step into it matters. You can crash into it, fists clenched around the wreckage of daylight, or you can meet it tenderly—unguarded, lips parted for whatever it has to offer.

I’ve learned to let the night undress me. Strip the static from my veins. It holds a quiet, reflective energy, shaping the rhythm of our slumber, the texture of our dreams, the weight of our thoughts come morning.

I like to write down a moment that made me feel something. Not to learn. Not to win. Just to lose myself so I can find her all over again.

And then, there are the stars. Walking in the brisk winter air, I tilt my head back and let them swallow me whole. Their cold fire stirs something in my pulse, spiking my pace without permission, and when my gaze finally drops back to the earth, everything is a little hazy. A little dizzy. For just a moment, I forget myself. And in that forgetting, I remember—I am nothing and everything all at once. A wisp of a dream. A flicker in an ocean of dark. The universe doesn’t beg for my urgency the way modernity does, so I breathe a little slower, stretch out the ache, let my body remember that it is so fucking alive.

The evening is a final stanza whispered against the spine of the day. The exhale before the unknown. A place to press your lips against the impermanence of everything—and to love it anyway.

To surrender, bare-skinned, to the dark. To the beauty of what has passed. And the fragile, feverish promise of tomorrow.