Three poems and a parking structure exit

By Jade Earthshaker

Honestly, I did not plan to read. I planned to support a friend, clap at the correct intervals, and leave with my dignity and an oat milk something. Then the host looked at the signup sheet like it had personally disappointed her, and my hand wrote Ariana before my INTJ brain could veto the motion. Three minutes later I was in a Silver Lake courtyard with string lights and a folding chair that squeaked every time someone shifted, holding a notebook that suddenly felt too intimate for outdoor air. I spend my days at Star Insights reading other people's timing. Designing the nature-themed event space taught me how to place plants so a room exhales. None of that prepared me for hearing my own voice bounce off stucco while strangers performed attentive faces. Poetry is not a deliverable. Poetry is standing still while your private metaphors try to become public without dying of exposure. Los

Angeles makes this worse and better at once. Better because there is always a courtyard and someone with a portable speaker. Worse because traffic to get there costs you the exact energy you needed to be charming afterward. I arrived already half spent from a client call about a Saturn return and a vendor email about moss walls that will not stay mossy without a budget nobody has. The poems I almost did not read Poem one was about the farmers market as a weekly negotiation with abundance, which is a fancy way of saying I still overthink tomatoes. Poem two was about the beach yoga class and how the Pacific does not care if your warrior two is aesthetic. Poem three was newer, still wet ink, about wanting commitment and also wanting the next trailhead, which is the explorer shadow wearing nicer shoes. I almost swapped it for something safer. Honestly, safer would have been staying home with

herbal tea and pretending I was purifying something. When I stood up, the courtyard noise did that soft drop rooms do when people decide to be kind. I read too fast on the first piece and forced myself slower on the second. Someone laughed at a line about smog looking like a soft filter for bad decisions, which helped. The third poem made my hands shake in a way charts never do. Consulting has structure. Performance has witnesses. I finished, sat down, and immediately started writing a mental postmortem like I was reviewing a failed product launch. A woman in a denim jacket told me the commitment poem felt like her chart talking back. I thanked her and meant it and also felt my social battery hit the red zone with a little ding only I could hear. That is the part nobody glamorizes: gratitude and escape urgency arriving in the same breath. Why I fled to concrete After the last reader,

people clustered. Networking energy. Compliment energy. The well-meaning question about whether I do events, do private workshops, do whatever comes next when you accidentally show a soft organ in public. I answered two people honestly and then did the classic INTJ vanish: bathroom, then side gate, then the parking structure where the air smelled like hot oil and freedom. I sat in my car with the door cracked and did not meditate so much as stare at a concrete pillar until my pulse remembered arithmetic. Minimalism is not only about objects. Sometimes it is about refusing one more conversation when your nervous system is full. I texted my friend a heart and a rain of star emojis and drove home with the windows down even though the air was not cool. Motion is my reset more than mantras. At home I made the boring tea, not the ceremonial one. I wrote three lines about the parking structure

because it deserved a poem more than the courtyard did. Then I put the notebook under a book so I would not immediately edit myself into someone smoother. Alchemy, for me, is often just not sanding off the true temperature of a night. What I am keeping from the experiment I will not pretend I am now a performance person. I am a consultant who occasionally risks a microphone and then requires a recovery protocol involving silence, stretch, and no group chats. That is not failure. That is design. If I can plan event spaces with breath and shadow, I can plan my own exit ramps. Honestly, the reading also clarified something about work. Clients pay me to translate sky into choices. Poetry forces me to translate myself into language without a client brief. Both matter. One pays rent. One keeps me from becoming a brand-shaped hollow with nice vocabulary. The Venice mural artist I talked to last

week said walls hold stories until someone stops long enough to see them. Maybe notebooks are walls that fit in a bag. Next month I might sign up again. Or I might send a friend in my place with flowers and a lie about a transit. Either way, I am not ashamed of the parking structure. It was the aftercare the night required. Closing Reflection If you saw me leave early, it was not because the poems were bad or the people were. It was because capacity is real and I am done performing endless availability after I already performed. Social energy is not infinite just because Los Angeles is awake at all hours. I will be at the market on Sunday looking at fruit like it holds a secret, and at the beach on a morning when the class is not too crowded, and maybe, carefully, at another mic when the notebook insists. Until then I am restoring the quiet on purpose. Catch you later 🌟