I Asked for My Humanity Back.

It’s here.

At 12:22 this morning, digestible. took its first breath.

For months, this poem belonged only to me.

It lived as ink pressed into notebook paper. Voice memos recorded after midnight. Margins filled with arrows and rewritten endings. Quiet little rituals of making something before anyone else knew it existed.

This morning...

it crossed a threshold.

It stopped belonging only to my body.

Now it belongs to the air between us.

Before you read another word, I’d love to ask something of you.

Find digestible. on your preferred streaming platform, or press play below.

Put your headphones on.

(I promise it matters.)

Take one slow breath.

Then another.

Don’t multitask.

Don’t scroll.

Don’t analyze.

Just let your body arrive before your thoughts do.

When the last breath leaves my lungs...

come back.

I’ll meet you here.

---

You just heard one of the most vulnerable things I have ever released into the world.

Here’s what you couldn’t hear.

When we finished recording, I was asked whether I wanted to remove the breaths.

The swallows.

The tiny hesitations.

The places where my voice catches on a word before deciding it is still willing to carry it.

Every small piece of evidence that this poem came from a body.

Not just an idea.

A body.

One sitting in a room.

One with dry lips and trembling hands.

One deciding, in real time, whether honesty was worth surviving.

I listened to the polished version first.

It was beautiful.

Smooth the way river stone becomes beautiful. Every rough edge softened. Every interruption erased. Nothing left that could catch the light wrong.

I understood why someone would choose it.

Then I asked for my humanity back.

For years, paper was enough.

I loved the weight of a notebook in my hands. The books stacked beside my bed. The coffee stains. The bent corners. The pages that grew soft from being opened too many times. The margins filled with arrows and stars because I could never quite leave a poem alone.

Paper asked nothing of me except honesty.

I thought that was where my poems belonged.

Then something strange happened.

They stopped behaving.

They kept pressing against the edges of the page, the way roots eventually press against the edges of the pot that once held them comfortably.

They wanted breath.

Not because breath is prettier than ink.

Because breath can fail.

Ink never has to wonder whether it is brave enough to finish the sentence.

A body does.

So I found a microphone and sat down in front of it.

I want you to know how unglamorous that actually was.

The awkward first takes.

The constant starting over.

Laughing at how strange my own voice sounded played back to me.

The moment I cried.

And it wasn’t because the poem was sad.

But because I had never heard myself tell it out loud before.

There is something about speaking a truth that rearranges it.

And there came the moment that changed everything.

The moment I understood this wasn’t asking to become spoken word.

It wasn’t asking to become music.

It wasn’t even asking to become performance.

It was asking...

to become a body.

I still don’t know how to explain why those words rearranged me.

Maybe because bodies can’t hide the way pages can.

Bodies breathe.

Bodies tremble.

Bodies swallow.

Bodies tell the truth long before language catches up.

A producer built me a version with the imperfections gone.

No catches.

No swallows.

No tiny half second where you can hear me deciding whether to keep going.

It sounded gorgeous.

It also sounded like someone had taken a love letter and washed the fingerprints off it.

Clean paper.

No proof anyone had ever held it.

Folded it.

Carried it in a coat pocket through the rain.

A love letter with the fingerprints washed off isn’t a love letter anymore.

It’s a museum piece.

Beautiful.

Protected.

Untouchable.

And some things were never meant to live behind glass.

Some things deserve to keep the hand that made them.

So I left the breaths in.

For years, I believed poems belonged to paper.

Paper can hold language.

It cannot hold hesitation.

It cannot hold the inhale before courage.

It cannot hold the tiny silence where a human being decides whether to keep telling the truth.

Only a body can do that.

That is the philosophy living underneath Poems with a Pulse.

Not poetry read aloud with music underneath it.

Something stranger than that.

Something more intimate.

What happens when a poem becomes too alive to keep behaving like ink on a page...

and starts insisting on a heartbeat instead.

digestible. is the first heartbeat.

Not the first poem.

The first heartbeat.

Because this isn’t a project I finished.

It’s a conversation I finally stopped having only with myself.

And it sits beside The Frequencies of Eden the way a second language sits beside a first.

Not competing with it.

Not replacing it.

Simply another way the same truths have learned to travel.

My novels are stories that needed entire worlds built around them.

My essays are questions that finally found readers willing to sit beside them.

And now...

Poems with a Pulse.

Poems that wanted breath.

I don’t know yet where this series will take us.

I only know that somewhere along the way...

my poems stopped asking for paper.

They asked for breath.

I finally said yes.

If you listened closely...

you already heard mine…

Thank you for listening with yours.

xx 💋

Nikyla Maria