A poem by me
You can take the breathe from my body. You can have my soul ripped open wide. You can have my mind, the wanderer it is. You can have this hand to hold. You can hold the very essence of my being in the palm of your hand. Do with me what you wish. I offer myself to you as nothing more or less than who I am. Down to my very core I am yours. Feel my heart beat in this box with your name upon its lid. Forever I will be a part of you, and you always a part of me. I lay here bare, naked. With wrists torn open bleeding for you. You are my soul, my heart outside my body. I give you all I am and ever will be without hesitation. You have won me. A war long fought. You turned a cold damaged soul into a bleeding heart. I give you all I am. Scars and all.
I tried to preserve the wilting flower,
Tried to protect it from its pain.
I did my best but failed at love,
And everything with my heart is to blame.
Late: The square?holds its panting between
?the last bus and the first argument.
Nowhere / ‘online’ - @someone is ‘winning’..?
A face, a flag, emptiness trending; always.
We desired a just world -?rights, dignity, ‘progress’; doors?that open to merit.
Enlightenment still flashes warning
from the distant rocks - through darkling fog.?
The doors? Gone.
?it will not be alright.?
it is cold.
?the square waits: quiet, tense.?
you are here,?
so am I.
It was nearly without sound,
Save a tree-brushed mountain breeze
When I rose beneath fog's blanket
And stepped lightly through the trees.
In reverence of the aura there
Subdued in temperance;
Without a word, just in tears
I offered holy reverence.
Before me in this quiet place
A lake, in still perfection,
Lay without the slightest wave;
Heaven's mirror gave reflection.
As I gazed into the glassy lake
My soul and spirit swooned
With God's creation holding me
He healed my hidden wounds.
No greater ambiance nor scene
Has since renewed my core.
I found the Prince of Peace that morn
On a pristine mountain shore.
Next, the sun began to rise
And the Quakies clapped their hands
Creation birthed a brand-new day
And I began to understand:
God is a God of perfect peace
Who in countless ways can bless
Whether heaven sent or by a stream
He gives the seeker rest.
If your world has left you wounded,
"Come unto Me, sons and daughters"
God offers early morning grace
To bless beside still waters.
Psalms 23: 2 (KJV) “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures;
He leadeth me beside still waters.”
Sometimes I wonder how we make it through a single day? The Light and the Darkness, the free thoughts and old fears. Eyes that tell the world of what a man has seen. And in this life, It is bound to be too much. As a child I found out one day, that love was mysteriously negotiable. I searched for the true kind and found a great love, yes one that had it all, the joy, the sorrow. We learn to make our way through that thick bramble, scratched, and a ragged heart, The doctors they can put hearts back together, leaving it up to you to let it get beat up again, in the tradition of all human families. I think back at all the drama of people living together, suffering the broken love, solemn faces held in the past, when days shone with the possibility of happiness. The stories tell of our plight, all those who survived the good, the bad and the ugly, and if possible, will probably do it again, until we learn just what it's trying to teach us, and where it will eventually take us.
1
I left my Father from my space from a place called heaven.
I came down into a womb
Out the womb into a room
And in 1 day, if the Lord says,
If I'd accepted him as my personal Savior
I will return back to belong
Just a traveling soul,
Just visiting this OLE World,
I've been saved safe and imparted.
With the love of God,
His Amazing Agape love
Hallelujah,
I belong to HIM, I am of I AM,
I am the righteousness of God
And in 1 day, if the Lord says,
And if I'd accepted Him as my personal Savior.
I will be returning back to belong,
Just a traveling soul
Just visiting this old world.
Father, Lord, my mighty saving Elohim God,
I will be back in a minute. Second,
if you don't come back here,
first I will be back why I belong.
8/25/26
written words by James Lee Sr. 2026
STATUS QUO
You be my only
You be my only, you be my only one
You are my only love
I am encouraging
Holding your heart, in my spirit
You, only one for me can’t you see it
Ever so nourishing
You complete me
You make me whole
Bringing me fresh ideas
The way things are
Status quo
Existing state of affairs
it’s you your love that’s so rare
So, so sweetly you care
You are my only love
Sent by God, above
My only love this you should know
Status Quo
You complete me
You make me whole
Bringing me fresh ideas
The way things are
Status quo
Presently it is condition good
You are in my mind, soul and heart
You’re giving me a brand-new start
You are mine, my heart, that part
The way things are right now
Existing state of affairs we are
Covenanted engaging
Keeping things exactly as they are
There’ll be no making changes
You are always, only mine,
My heart, my soul
existing state of affairs
it’s you your love that’s so rare
So, so sweetly you care
You are my only love
Sent by God, above
My only love this you should know
Status Quo
8/18/26
by James Edward Lee Sr.2026©
.
i do
edvard i
and
al'uv'us
we
ofttimez 'neath
wander
Yahweh's
Magnificence n'all
shamrocks
kentucky blue grass
n'love
anywho
edvard hern
hear'd
frolick'n flutter'n
decorously
"((put'er back
she's yours
not
edvard))"
')>
A tree has fallen sadly, strongly pulling out all the roots that were mounted by the ground. Hitting straight downwards with no plans of being revived.
The fear of the fallen world has landed in the mud, creating a great series of unsettling feeling raining down in streams in-between the branches.
Leaving steady branches to raise the thorns by force with no luck the tree has no breath to blossom.
Leaves lingering in the air like lost plastics.
And then there was light behind where the tree was stalling, proclaiming its nature to never fall. Leaving it's fat presence known even by a topographic map. Landing a mark of eternity.
The sight of seeing behind became weary.
All though the tree took years to fall, but finally the air felt fresh enough to awaken what laid behind.
As days and weeks passed by, the disbelief of a fallen world became normal, a month passed and the soil consumed what was made to return on earth.
As it has been written what was made unholy will parish. The branches where weak shaken by the tree. But the lingering leaves landed better and became a bigger tree that took years to seed and sealed with the soil.
Ashleigh Ngoqo
Poet's Note:
Written for the Skeletons Poetry Contest. This dramatic monologue uses "skeleton of hope" as a metaphor for resilience that appears during grief.
Ash Into Phoenix
You ask why I walk barefoot through this frozen forest?
The broken road cuts me, and dancing fog swirls at my feet.
Every step is heavy and cold.
Demons of sorrow and despair circle me.
I thought grief would bury me in the dark.
Then the skeleton of hope rose from my chest.
He wore a gown of silver, with stars on its glittering seams.
He sat beside me, a golden staff in his hand.
He took my hand and looked into my eyes.
"Hardship burns your old soul," he said.
"From the ash rises a phoenix of hope."
"Grief is fire. Let it light your path."
"In darkness, you can still glow."
He smiled at me, at the person drowning in grief, and said:
"Grief is not a punishment.
It is the polish that strengthens your inner self."
And then I stood, because he was right.
The north winds of my mind began to howl,, bringing with them a chill to my bones..... a chill which I’ve never known before ..... a chill scented with hollow skies void of new tales while whispering only of memories from times gone by….
I think upon the present.....
which will soon become the past
The moments I enjoyed....
but foolishly let them pass....
All in lead to question::
“What shall become of these empty memories and broken dreams?,,,.... Are they to be carefully laid in hidden vaults..... locked within the dark recesses of my mind. - Visited only on cold winter day with thoughts which in time grow grander than truth ? Or......shall I set them aside in hope of a new season, a new time, a new moment bringing with it opportunity to dance once more to the tune of a new song?”
Shall I live in hope this day be the beginning of my new Spring and perhaps free me from the chains of this mind’s winter.
.
i flex mine
torso'z push
limbz
mine rusted
uhhp
umph lock
got'chuh
now did that hurt
"((mmph))"
.
chomp
chomp
chomp
chomp
chomp
ohh my
want 'mooch'it
i
better
"((no))
maybe later"
')>
NO COMPASS OR ANCHOR
….At sea
also known as my life, I drift.
I dream of wanting to have a
plan but I don’t. Letting down
people, not quite grasping
opportunities.
For I am a
non-commissioned
ensign of a boat in a storm lost
without its compass
or anchor.
I have passion and the drive
however I am fettered to a
chunk of seaweed.
It smells. It rots.
It becomes a part of me.
Oh the distant sunrise of a new day
is so far on the horizon it may as well be a grain of sand.
Small, minuscule, measly and insignificant.
Just like my remains of a past plan
long ago stranded on a desert island.
At sea also known as my life,
I drift….
A PLAYER
Booked for a film for one day.
I rehearse my line and wait until the
crew is ready for me.
It’s a cold night shoot, but the hot
spotlights flood the set with
achievement and attainment.
I perform. Hot and sweaty. I derig.
I exit, never seeing the crew again.
The rest of the night is waiting for
me ; the night is young and the city
is new.
To celebrate, I go to a night club.
Make out with a man twice my age
and half my talent. I perform again.
I cast aside the desperate man.
I book a twink who takes me to his
place. I derig. I perform again.
Hot and sweaty for the second
time tonight. I exit, never seeing the
twink again.
The joys of being a player….
Introduction
The first pleasure of reading a dramatic monologue is discovering the distance between what a speaker intends to communicate and what the speech inadvertently reveals. A confident defense may expose guilt; a tender recollection may disclose possessiveness; an apparently casual remark may shift the balance of power. Because the listener remains unheard, readers become alert interpreters, weighing tone, omission, self-correction, and contradiction.
Browse the community poems with an ear for how differently poets stage that revealing pressure. One writer may adopt the voice of a historical figure, while another invents a neighbor, an animal, a mythic outcast, or an ordinary person facing an extraordinary decision. Some speakers seek forgiveness; others accuse, seduce, boast, confess, bargain, or rehearse a story they need to believe. The form can hold humor, menace, grief, intimacy, and moral uncertainty because the poet does not have to settle every question from outside the speaker's mind.
Reading several examples side by side makes those choices more visible. Compare who seems to be listening, what event has made speech urgent, and whether the speaker gains or loses control. Notice how one poet builds suspense through delayed disclosure while another lets the crucial fact appear early and deepens its meaning through repetition. Read beyond the first example: each new poem offers another answer to the form's central creative challenge-how to make a sustained voice feel immediate while allowing readers to understand more than that voice openly says.
Reading Guide
Approach each poem as both speech and scene. The words carry an argument, memory, confession, or appeal, but they also imply a room, a relationship, and a moment of pressure. Rather than asking only what happened, ask why this speaker is telling this version now. As you read the community poems, compare the evidence supplied directly with the knowledge produced by tone, hesitation, exaggeration, and silence.
- The speaker's immediate purpose: Identify what the voice wants from the unheard listener-approval, pardon, obedience, sympathy, information, or something less easily named. Purpose gives the speech direction. When comparing poems, ask where that purpose becomes clear and whether it changes.
- The pressure exerted by the listener: Look for answers to unrecorded questions, defensive turns, sudden clarifications, or commands to remain quiet. These clues make the absent person dramatically present. Ask what the listener may have said, done, or refused to do immediately before each shift.
- Gaps between claim and evidence: Mark places where the speaker's self-description conflicts with an image, anecdote, or choice of words. Such discrepancies let readers judge without an external narrator. Which community poems create the richest distance between the speaker's verdict and the reader's?
- Pacing of disclosure: Notice when names, motives, injuries, or consequences become available. A delayed fact can revise everything before it, while an early revelation can create dread about what remains unsaid. Ask how the order of information manages curiosity and moral judgment.
- Sound as character: Attend to sentence length, interruptions, repeated phrases, hard or soft consonants, and changes in rhythm. These are not merely musical effects; they suggest education, temperament, panic, discipline, or obsession. What can you infer from how each speaker sounds under pressure?
- Images that betray attention: Consider which objects and sensory details the speaker cannot stop noticing. A polished key, stained cuff, locked window, or fading scent may reveal priorities more convincingly than explanation. Across several poems, ask which images become evidence about the mind observing them.
- The final change in power: Examine whether the ending delivers a decision, evasion, command, recognition, or chilling return to normality. Closure may settle the situation or leave the reader newly suspicious. Ask who possesses the greater authority at the end: speaker, listener, or reader.
After reading, briefly describe each poem's implied scene without using the speaker's own conclusions. That exercise helps separate testimony from interpretation and makes comparison among different poets' approaches especially revealing.
Writing Tips
Begin in the workshop by locating a voice under pressure, not merely an interesting costume or famous identity. The most productive premise gives the speaker a reason to keep talking and a reason not to tell the whole truth. Before drafting, imagine the immediate setting, the unheard listener, the desired outcome, and the fact the speaker would most prefer to control.
- Choose material with competing interpretations. A straightforward account rarely generates enough dramatic energy. Select a confession, accusation, farewell, negotiation, boast, or recollection in which the speaker's explanation can differ meaningfully from the reader's judgment. The poem then develops on two tracks at once.
- Give the listener real leverage. An addressee should not feel like a convenient container for exposition. Decide what that person knows, wants, fears, or can withhold. Let the speaker respond to an implied gesture, objection, interruption, or silence so the speech acquires the tension of an active encounter.
- Build a voice from habits rather than decoration. Instead of relying on conspicuous dialect, create character through favored comparisons, sentence patterns, evasions, levels of formality, and repeated words. Ask what the speaker notices first and what vocabulary becomes available when composure starts to fail.
- Let information arrive strategically. Beginners often explain the entire situation at the opening or hide the central fact until an artificial twist. Reveal enough to orient the reader, then allow each recollection or image to alter the stakes. Surprise should emerge from character, not from withheld context alone.
- Use lineation to direct performance. A line break can suspend an admission, divide a polished claim from an incriminating detail, or accelerate a rush of self-defense. Do not make every line enact the same pause. Vary containment and overflow according to the speaker's degree of control.
- Make imagery belong to this consciousness. Avoid inserting attractive descriptions that any narrator might supply. A jealous speaker, grieving parent, weary official, and frightened child will describe the same room differently. Revise each image until it reveals both the visible world and the speaker's selective attention.
- Resist formal compliance as a substitute for drama. Sustained speech alone does not create a compelling poem. Every passage should alter the reader's understanding, intensify the relationship, complicate motive, or change the speaker's position. Cut background that merely proves you have researched the character.
- Earn the ending through pressure. Avoid finishing with a summary of what the reader should think. A final command, ordinary action, repeated phrase, changed address, or newly charged object can expose the consequence more forcefully. The close should feel inevitable in retrospect but not mechanically announced.
During revision, read the draft aloud as if another person were physically present. Mark where your attention drops, where breath and syntax feel unnatural, and where the voice sounds like authorial explanation rather than urgent speech. Then ask a reader to identify the listener, the speaker's objective, and the moment their judgment changed. Strengthen sound, pacing, and concrete detail where those answers remain vague, while preserving productive ambiguity about motive.
Interesting Facts
- The unheard person can control the scene. Although readers receive only one voice, a refusal, accusation, social advantage, or threatened departure may shape every sentence. The speaker's verbal dominance can therefore conceal practical powerlessness-or reveal an attempt to impose power through speech.
- Reliability is rarely a simple choice. A speaker need not be wholly truthful or wholly deceptive. Memory may be accurate while interpretation is distorted; sincere affection may coexist with selfish conduct. This mixture often creates more compelling judgment than an obvious liar does.
- Length creates psychological opportunity and risk. An extended speech allows motives to deepen, but it also invites repetition without escalation. Experienced poets make recurrence cumulative: each return to a person, object, or grievance alters its emotional meaning.
- Polished language can increase unease. Eloquence does not necessarily make a speaker trustworthy. Excessive composure during a disturbing disclosure may become evidence in itself, while broken syntax can suggest panic, grief, manipulation, or an honest struggle to speak.
- Humor can sharpen rather than soften conflict. Boasting, misplaced dignity, literal-mindedness, and failed self-justification may make a voice comic while exposing loneliness or moral blindness. The reader's laughter can become complicated once the consequences emerge.
- The ending can transfer interpretive authority. A speaker may believe the case is settled just as readers reach a different conclusion. Browse the poems in this collection to compare endings that grant insight, preserve denial, reverse sympathy, or leave the silent listener's response imaginatively open.
Popular Themes
Subject matter becomes especially powerful here when it creates a conflict between private motive and public explanation. The possibilities below are literary affinities, not statistical rankings. Each gives the speaker something consequential to defend, conceal, reinterpret, or demand from a particular listener.
- Confession and withheld guilt: A speaker can approach an admission indirectly, circling an event through excuses and selected details. Readers experience the tension of deciding whether disclosure brings accountability, self-protection, or both.
- Love, jealousy, and possession: Intimate relationships intensify the difference between affection as the speaker names it and control as the reader may recognize it. Terms of endearment, remembered gestures, and accusations can change meaning within the same speech.
- Grief and unfinished conversation: Addressing someone absent, estranged, or dead allows memory to operate as an encounter. Repetition may suggest ritual, disbelief, anger, or the mind's attempt to revise what can no longer be answered.
- Power and authority: Rulers, employers, parents, officials, teachers, and gatekeepers can reveal how power justifies itself. Commands and courteous phrases become especially charged when the listener's freedom is uncertain.
- Myth, history, and the overlooked voice: A familiar event can be re-seen from the position of a witness, rival, servant, survivor, or supposed villain. The challenge is to create an individual consciousness rather than merely correct the inherited account.
- Age, ambition, and regret: A speaker reviewing past choices may convert memory into defense, warning, invitation, or renewed resolve. The tension between the remembered self and the present voice gives time an active dramatic role.
- Humorous complaint and social embarrassment: Petty grievances, failed performances, awkward apologies, and inflated self-importance suit a voice that reveals more than intended. Comic timing can expose vulnerability without requiring a moralizing conclusion.
- Identity and divided loyalty: A speaker caught between family, community, belief, profession, or desire can argue toward a decision while exposing incompatible allegiances. Changes in diction may register which identity controls each part of the speech.
As you read the community poems, compare treatments of similar material rather than assuming the theme determines the result. One apology may become tender, another evasive, and another menacing because the listener, stakes, imagery, and degree of self-knowledge differ. Those contrasts show how thoroughly a poet's choices transform shared subject matter.
Editorial Insights
The central artistic tension lies between immediacy and interpretation. The speech must feel as though it is happening for a reason in a charged present, yet the poem must also give readers room to perceive meanings the speaker cannot or will not articulate. If the voice simply reports a biography, the scene becomes static. If every statement is an obvious clue to hidden wickedness or pain, the speaker becomes a device. Memorable work lets intention, language, and circumstance remain partially misaligned.
Structure feels necessary when the order of the speech follows psychological pressure rather than an author's outline. A speaker may begin with courtesy, move into recollection, answer an implied challenge, overcorrect, and finally disclose the desire governing the encounter. Each movement changes what earlier words mean. Repetition can sound persuasive at first, defensive later, and obsessive by the end. Line breaks, sentence rhythms, and pauses matter most when they register these changes in control instead of serving as decorative patterning.
Editors and attentive readers notice when subject and craft provide evidence for each other. A status-conscious voice may rank people even while discussing love. A frightened voice may inventory exits, distances, and sounds. A grieving voice may avoid the name it most needs to say. Such details develop character without over-explanation. Common weaknesses arise when the poet supplies motives the speech has already demonstrated, forces archaic or theatrical language onto the speaker, repeats emotional claims without escalation, or engineers a final revelation unsupported by the preceding voice. Predictability can also result when unreliability is treated as a trick rather than a complex condition of self-knowledge.
Individuality survives shared conventions through the precision of attention. Two speakers may both seek forgiveness, yet one remembers textures, another rehearses legal distinctions, and another keeps correcting the listener's imagined version of events. Their minds organize experience differently. Comparing multiple community poems helps readers recognize that quality does not depend on a single tone, period, subject, or kind of ending. It depends on whether every choice-image, rhythm, omission, turn, and final gesture-belongs to the same dramatic necessity while leaving enough interpretive space for the reader to participate.
Read, Write & Share
Read several community poems before settling on what this form can accomplish. Compare how poets create a silent listener, pace disclosure, shape a speaking voice, and manage the distance between intention and revelation. When a poem holds your attention, leave a thoughtful comment about a particular turn, image, tonal shift, or ending rather than offering praise alone.
Then try staging a voice of your own. Give the speaker an urgent purpose, a resistant audience, and something difficult to admit. Revise the speech aloud, publish it on PoetrySoup, and join the continuing conversation among writers exploring how character can be revealed through what is said-and what remains unsaid.
Collection Statistics
This collection contains 2886 Dramatic Monologues, giving readers a broad field of interpretations to explore and compare. Across a collection of this size, poets may follow familiar conventions closely, adapt them to different voices and situations, or challenge expectations while preserving the dramatic force of sustained speech. Reading several examples can clarify how decisions about character, listener, disclosure, and closure produce markedly different experiences.
Dramatic Monologue Categories
Read wonderful dramatic monologue poetry on the following sub-topics:
animals, christmas, death, friendship, food, funny, kids, life, love, music, nature, rhyme, school, sports
and more.
Definition | What is Dramatic Monologue in Poetry?
Looking for the formal definition, structure, and history of this poetry form? Visit the Poetry Dictionary entry below. Then return to explore how PoetrySoup members bring the form to life through their own poems.