Outside a bank on Long Beach’s 2nd Street, a woman is crying.
Nico Patino, a street poet sitting at an antique table, takes in her turmoil. “Proud of you,” he says before turning back to his old Olympia typewriter and beginning to pound away at the keys.
In a video posted to Instagram, an unnamed woman off-camera has just offered him a prompt for a poem. “Starting over late. I’m 57, got divorced, struggling a little,” she says. “I left almost five years ago, and I’m still kind of floundering. It’s weird to feel so untethered.”
“I can only imagine,” Patino says. A few minutes later, he produces the poem, a narrative meditation on time and age with lines including, “When I was five, I imagined living to 100, but I never thought about 57. I couldn’t count that high,” and “I may count the years, but the years can’t count. I’m so much more than them, than men.”
The Instagram video of their exchange has surpassed a million views.
Patino, 28, knows a thing or two about loss, reinvention and feeling untethered. The street poet, who has spent time as a pro stunt pogostick performer, life coach and Crypto trader, is dead set on never working a “real job.” He plans to write poetry for strangers until he becomes a published poet or winds up homeless.
“I came to a point where it was either time for me to get a real job or to double down,” Patino says during a recent interview.
If you spot him on the streets of Long Beach, there’s a good chance he’ll have a cigarette perched in his mouth, and his relaxed shirt will have at least three buttons undone. His Instagram bio reads, “Impossible love child of Rumi & Bukowski,” referencing the 13th-century Sufi mystic poet and gritty L.A. author and poet Charles Bukowski.
“There’s some quote — I don’t know where it comes from — but if you would rather die than go the rest of your life without writing, then that’s it. You’re trapped. You’re a writer.”
Street poet Nico Patino offers passerbys original poems on 2nd St. in Belmont Shore on Wednesday, December 3, 2025. (Photo by Drew A. Kelley, Press-Telegram/SCNG)
Street poet Nico Patino offers passerbys original poems on 2nd St. in Belmont Shore on Wednesday, December 3, 2025. (Photo by Drew A. Kelley, Press-Telegram/SCNG)
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Street poet Nico Patino offers passerbys original poems on 2nd St. in Belmont Shore on Wednesday, December 3, 2025. (Photo by Drew A. Kelley, Press-Telegram/SCNG)
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This wasn’t always the poet’s mentality, though. In 2020, he graduated from Temple University in Philadelphia with a bachelor’s degree in business. “I did management information systems, so I literally Googled ‘most lucrative business major’ in 2016, and I just went with that one,” he says.
“I was so disenchanted immediately, because every professor and guest speaker came in and said the same thing as a preface to their lecture – ‘By the time you graduate, everything I teach you today will be obsolete because of the rate at which technology is advancing.’ And so there was nothing to listen to, and for four years I spent that time doodling and writing poetry in the margins.”
When he graduated, the world had shut down due to the pandemic, and job prospects for a recent graduate were bleak. Stuck in limbo, he threw himself into reading about spirituality, existentialism and philosophy, and even completed an eight-day, nine-night darkness retreat in Lake Atitlán in Guatemala.
“I spent nine days in complete darkness in this half submerged stone room that you have to enter through a trap door, and in that room is nothing but a tile floor, stone walls and ceiling, a compost toilet, cold shower, sink and bed with some meditation mats,” he says, holding up a notepad he brought with him to the retreat. Haphazard lines are scribbled at varying angles.
“It was the most difficult thing I’ve ever done, but it was incredibly profound. That was when I realized my inner being speaks in poems.”
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Pivoting from googling the most lucrative degree to dedicating himself to the life of a street poet, a gig not exactly known for raking in the big bucks, has shifted Patino’s perception of success. He’s spent much of his twenties rewriting the contract he’d drafted for himself in the wake of his father’s death.
“My dad was killed in a motorcycle accident a month before my 13th birthday,” he says. “At the death day party, as I call it, where everybody descends upon the family that’s grieving to comfort them, somebody put their hand on my shoulder and said, ‘You’re the man of the house now. You have to be strong for your mother and your siblings and take care of them.’ And that really possessed me.”
From right, street poet Nico Patino and Daniel Warren discuss poetry on 2nd St. in Belmont Shore on Wednesday, December 3, 2025. (Photo by Drew A. Kelley, Press-Telegram/SCNG)
From left, Daniel Warren and Nico Patino discuss poetry on 2nd St. in Belmont Shore on Wednesday, December 3, 2025. (Photo by Drew A. Kelley, Press-Telegram/SCNG)
From right, Nico Patino writes a poem for Natalie Dominguez and two-year-old Kortez Vogels on 2nd St. in Belmont Shore on Wednesday, December 3, 2025. (Photo by Drew A. Kelley, Press-Telegram/SCNG)
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From right, street poet Nico Patino and Daniel Warren discuss poetry on 2nd St. in Belmont Shore on Wednesday, December 3, 2025. (Photo by Drew A. Kelley, Press-Telegram/SCNG)
In Philadelphia, he started to realize that his pursuit of business was done at the expense of his inspiration and spiritual depth. He initially tried to balance the two, but has since concluded, “I really am not capable of putting on a tie and marching into an office to analyze their software architecture infrastructure.”
Amidst his soul searching, he noted the way he was able to channel the grief and energy after his dad’s death into pogo-sticking. He was ultimately signed to XPogo, a stunt team agency, and traveled the world performing the extreme sport. “Life has shown me that the less I worry about the outcomes when it comes to success, or defining success in terms of the classic things such as wealth, the more I prosper spiritually,” he says.
He may have a point.
It was only a few months ago that he decided to take his poetry to the streets. He’d remembered a street poet he encountered at Rittenhouse Park when he was studying business. He’d paid a few bucks for a poem, and although he wasn’t blown away by the work, he stored the experience in his back pocket for later use.
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In October, he ordered his Olympia SF typewriter from an antique restorer in Valencia, Spain. It arrived two weeks later, and he hit the pavement and set up his phone to record. His unlikely claim to fame? Writing that poem for a woman crying at the bank. The Instagram reel went viral, and the subsequent invitations from venues around Southern California have flooded his DMs.
As a result, earlier this month, he was the first-ever poet to be featured as a resident artist at Silverlake Jams, a popular backyard series that invites artists from varying mediums to perform (Jack Quaid performed music at a session earlier this year).
But Patino almost didn’t make it there.
“My van, a 1983 Volkswagen Vanagon, broke down. I was on the 710 headed north, and all the lights came on. The van overheated significantly, and it was an Indiana Jones kind of escapade to get to Silverlake Jams,” he says.
Street poet Nico Patino writes a poem on 2nd St. in Belmont Shore on Wednesday, December 3, 2025. (Photo by Drew A. Kelley, Press-Telegram/SCNG)
Street poet Nico Patino writes an original poem on 2nd St. in Belmont Shore on Wednesday, December 3, 2025. (Photo by Drew A. Kelley, Press-Telegram/SCNG)
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Street poet Nico Patino writes a poem on 2nd St. in Belmont Shore on Wednesday, December 3, 2025. (Photo by Drew A. Kelley, Press-Telegram/SCNG)
First, he grabbed his sign, which typically reads “Ask me for a poem,” and refashioned it to read “Need water or coolant.” No one stopped to help, so he rode his skateboard two miles to a gas station, hopping train tracks and falling along the way. When he returned to the van, the water in his tank only got him as far as a liquor store.
“The Uber showed up, and I carted all my things [to Silverlake Jams], covered in grease and blood and sweat, but I f——- made it on time. A little drunk and bloody, but it was just another sort of beautiful test from the universe.
It was Patino’s first time reading his poetry aloud in front of an audience.
“It was like, ‘All right, let’s see how much you really want this,” he continues. “Are you going to have the faith and perseverance and grit to get through?’”
With a skateboard and a cigar box full of poems, it looks like the possibilities are endless.
On Dec. 13, he’ll be crafting custom poems for the Cowboy Poetry L.A. fundraiser in partnership with Sandbar Sanctuary from noon to 5 p.m. in Sun Valley to raise money for rescue horses used in therapy programs for domestic abuse survivors.