The most precise instrument for describing what cannot otherwise be said.

Most people think poetry is decoration. Beautiful words arranged to sound profound. Something you read in school, did not understand, were told was important, and quietly forgot. What I want to tell you is that real poetry — the kind that arrives at 3 AM without warning, the kind that comes from somewhere beneath the thinking mind — is the most precise instrument available to a human being for describing what cannot otherwise be said.

There are experiences in a human life that prose cannot hold. The specific quality of grief at 2 AM. The feeling of standing at Kedarnath when the cold reaches something inside you that has no name. The exact texture of the moment before a losing trade when some part of you already knows but the rest of you is still hoping. These experiences exist. They are real. They matter. And ordinary language, with its subject-verb-object insistence on clarity and linearity, simply cannot contain them. Poetry can.

I write from three worlds simultaneously — the inner world of Shiva and silence and seeking, the outer world of markets and systems and discipline, and the human world of feeling and observation and the specific loneliness of being someone who thinks too much and feels too deeply to ever be fully comfortable in ordinary conversation. All three worlds appear in the poetry here. Sometimes separately. Sometimes woven together in ways that surprised even me when I wrote them.