These are poems born from the same work I do on stages and in rooms with leaders: the quiet, careful act of finding the exact right words for what it means to be human right now.

Pull up a chair. Open your ears and mind wide.

And trust that you don't need a PhD in Shakespearean verse to appreciate what's here — studies show that the parts of your brain that light up when you listen to music light up when you listen to poetry.

You're hardwired for this.

Lauren didn't just close our full-day offsite—she ignited it. The final session had 130 people heads-down writing, then six volunteers sharing poems that ranged from vulnerable to hilarious. The room left buzzing. She has a rare gift for making humanists and creatives feel essential, not obsolete.

- Pauline Noel, Creative Strategist, Meta

Whatever you do this January, don't

By Lauren Ducrey

Don’t jump straight in.

Don’t get straight down to business.

And please, whatever you do,

don’t hit the ground running.

At the very least

graze the ground running,

maybe bounce or

drop and roll on the ground running.

Better yet moonwalk across the ground running,

play footsie with the ground running

stroke the ground’s cheek running

cup its winter chilled chin

in your hand running

pat its back

and squeeze its arm to say

"it’ll be better this time around,

maybe even stunning?"

blow its nose and throw

a heavy blanket

over its shoulders;

the weight of the world

can wait.

Open the tap

and get a hot bath running,

let the colors of your cringiest

shower thoughts start running,

watch the cracks in the ceiling

of your beliefs start running,

let the clock run itself raw

when you thaw

there'll be no stopping

the ink at the tip of your fingers

from running.

Take your pleasures seriously

By Lauren Ducrey 

Call a board meeting at seven in the morning to brew your cup of coffee
And invest in stocks of journals to index your dreams.

Diversify the risk of being delighted by a single ray of sunrise
and circle back to the ring your mug left by the kitchen sink:
it's proposing that you get engaged with everything you do today.

Take your pleasures seriously.

Deep dive into the suds of your shower thoughts
Before making your bed as tight as a pitch deck.

Break down the information architecture of a seven-minute voice note
Your friend sent about her newest start-up idea and healing heartbreak.

Design frameworks for doodles on dog-eared post-its
And track the impact of your mid-afternoon nap.

Take your pleasure seriously.

Prioritize bandwidth for long walks going nowhere
And consistently drive innovation and your car with the music loud and the windows down,

Always scale smiling at strangers
And hard launch conversations with dog owners and deli guys.

Benchmark bumping into friends on your way back home,
And sprint into the steam that belly dances from the surface of your evening bath,

Take your pleasures seriously.

Provide actionable feedback on lighting a campaign of candles
Spreadsheets woven from a thousand thread count
Draft a proposal for slipping into sleep while reading a book of really bad fantasy.

And value the proposition of investing
in the company of yourself.

When I hear AI

Spoken word piece by Lauren Ducrey

When I hear AI 

I don't hear a noun.

I hear a question.

A question older than the internet and binary code, 

Older than numbers even, the ones and the zeroes, 

Older than Da Vinci, the Greeks and the Pharaohs, 

I hear a question that was inked in grottos 

Painted in the shape of a hand 

The cavewoman's “hello”

When i hear AI I hear the question: 

Who am I?

Who am I when i sit down to the black mirror on my desk 

or whip out the palm-sized God that lives in my pocket and ask 

Give me three ideas for dinner recipes 

Or explain quantum physics like I'm fifteen 

Or how do I know if someone likes me? 

Am I cheating by asking, am I melting my brain by delegating tasking, am I losing myself, dimming my lightning? 

Am I… Am I…  Am AI? 

Who am I? 

Ok when I ask for recipes I'm probably just hungry, and quantum physics fill me curiosity but am I also maybe quietly, timidly, shamefully lonely? 

Who am I? 

Am I twelve years old trying to understand why Sarah won't sit with me and a boy called Kai won't stop calling me names like “tiny”? 

Am I twenty frantically trying to get a job in this economy? 

Am I 54 sitting on the floor wondering when exactly between the kids, the job and the divorce, my life walked out the door?

I don't know

I don't know 

I don't know 

Precisely. 

That's precisely the answer that tells you you've arrived. 

When you say the only three words 

no large language model has ever tried to contrive: 

I don't know. 

These three words set down the impossibly heavy crown 

Of cogito ergo sum - I think therefore I am 

Instead they ruffles your hair 

offers another axiom 

That tastes sweet like fresh air 

Nescio ergo sum:

I don't know, therefore I am. 

I don't know, therefore I am. 

This sentence isn’t an accusation of your incompetence 

but the verdict of your humanity. 

A sentence that frees you from the prison of performed certainty, 

A key that unlocks the original AIs 

The ones we've buried under productivity: 

AI like your animal instinct 

Like your artistic intuition 

Like your ancestral imagination 

Like you abundant inspiration 

These AIs Are Absolutely Irreplaceable.  

You are Absolutely Irreplaceable. 

if only because 

you can ask questions 

That are sky wide 

Because the part of you that is asking 

Is an intelligence that isn't of the mind 

It's one that we can no longer deny

It's the intelligence of your heart 

The kind that beats with maybes 

What ifs and let's just see 

The intelligence of your heart 

is the largest of language models 

Because it speaks fluently in art 

It doesn't really care about being smart 

Knows that the real gift is that it can translate 

That feeling of being quietly, timidly, shamefully lonely

Into color, song or dance 

Into a piece of you that I can see 

So that we can learn to understand 

The grief, the the anger, the jealousy even if it's not pretty. 

You see, AI is like this massive mirror 

That amplifies who are we collectively.

So when I hear AI 

I hear a loud cry for us to look at ourselves

Honestly, carefully, caringly 

And reclaim the wild intelligence 

That's always been at the heart

in the art, from the very start.