There’s a certain kind of writing that doesn’t just tell a story—it opens a vein.
It’s not always clean or careful. Sometimes it stings. Sometimes it stains.
But when I write poetically—when I lean into the rhythm, the silence between words, the ache behind a line—I’m not just crafting sentences. I’m bleeding. This is the art of pouring yourself, unfiltered and raw, into language.
Where prose becomes pulse. Where metaphors become mirrors. Where the pain isn’t dressed up, just dressed differently—elegant in its honesty, devastating in its beauty.
Writing this way is not for spectacle. It’s not for drama. It’s survival. It’s transformation. It’s the sacred process of turning what hurts into something that breathes—something that might even sing.
To write poetically is to give your sorrow shape. To write poetically is to say, this is mine—my grief, my love, my truth—and yet still give it away. It’s an offering. A quiet howl. A soft weapon. A stitched wound. And maybe, if someone reads it and feels seen, then the bleeding wasn’t for nothing.
As much as poetry has influenced the very way I craft my sentences page after page, there is a poet that opened my eyes. The poem “Grasshopper” by E.E. Cummings taught me to also write like a painter, not just a poet.
To me, writing has never been just black ink on white paper. It’s brushstrokes. It’s movement. It’s chaos arranged into beauty.
I see writing the way a painter sees a blank canvas—not as emptiness, but as possibility. Each word is a color. Each line, a gesture. Some days I write in soft pastels, in lullabies of language. Other days, it’s bold oils and jagged strokes, spilling emotion across the page with no apology.
And no one made me see this more clearly than he.
His poem [Grasshopper] didn’t just break the rules—it leapt over them. It scattered letters across the page like seeds caught in wind. It moved, not just in meaning but in form. The poem looked like the very thing it described. The grasshopper jumped, and so did the words.
That was when I understood: Writing isn’t just telling. Writing is showing—not through description, but through design.
Cummings didn’t fear fragmentation. He made the brokenness beautiful. He painted with typewriter keys, made space as meaningful as sound, and trusted the reader to not only read—but to think. That’s what I aspire to when I write. To create motion, texture, light. Most of all, make my readers think and feel. To guide the reader’s eye not just left to right, but deeper—into the shape of feeling, the breath between syllables, the rush or the stillness of what’s unspoken.
Writing like this doesn’t always make sense. But neither does art, at first glance. You feel before you understand. You respond before you analyze. And that, to me, is the purest form of connection.
So when I write, I don’t just think in words. I think in rhythm. In line breaks. In color and curve. I let the poem—or the story—decide its shape. I let the sentence stretch, twist, or scatter if that’s what it needs to come alive.
Because writing is painting. And sometimes the brush just happens to be a pen.
