I Wrote 12 Lines of Code Instead of a Poem — And It Saved My Life

I used to write poetry in notebooks at 3 AM—until I realized my debugger was the only audience left.

My father, a jazz pianist from Brooklyn, taught me that silence speaks louder than noise. My mother, an abstract painter, said art isn’t about perfection—it’s about rhythm. So when I started coding at midnight after another failed API call, I didn’t write words… I wrote patterns.

The First Render Wasn’t Luck—It Was Ritual

In tech, we call it ‘optimization.’ In art, they call it ‘flow.’ When your state updates every time you fix a bug, it’s not a win—it’s a breath. I once spent 47 minutes staring at a React component that refused to render… until it did—and for the first time in months, it felt like Miles Davis playing solo in an empty studio.

AI Didn’t Write My Poems—I Did

They told me AI could generate emotion. It can mimic syntax—but not soul. The real magic? The pause between semicolons. The whitespace after a failed fetch. That moment when you delete one line… and the UI finally listens.

The Algorithm Doesn’t Own Your Rhythm

You don’t chase RNG like roulette wheels—you conduct ceremonies with console.log(). Every line you write is an act of resistance: against noise, against burnout, against the myth that success must be quantified by capital.

Last Tuesday, I deployed my first ‘neon poem’—a React hook with mood-based state management and Node.js-driven feedback loops running through dark apartment windows.

You don’t need more lines. You need one that hums when the screen goes dark. The next verse? It’s already written. You just forgot to press Enter.