heat shimmers on stone
holding stillness of noon
The Demon Sabotatge told the Demon Camouflage
And I heard him very clear
"If there's a known premonition of death than it's very near"
Camouflage replied back
"Seriously you can't put the blame on someone else for not listening to the voice reasoning"
“God is not tempted by any man nor does he tempt any”
And the Demon Deception responded in a rare kinda way
"hell, they say a penny for your thoughts sometimes is not worth a penny at all"
"I'm called Deceptcion I'm the Demon of Disappointments"
"And I'm The Demon Deceit, I'm the Demon of Difficulties"
'And I give you to these Three'
"We are the Demons called The Legions "Mother Mary we will give our life for thee, for we are many!"
Sit with it till peace reigns while distance dissolves pain.
In whispers, wind tells tales of days past,
Of paths forgotten, and of gales that blew.
Leaves rustle like pages, turning fast,
Stories hidden, lessons whispered true.
In empty streets, echoes dance and play,
Footsteps fade, but memories still sway.
Shadows move beneath the moon's pale ray,
Dreams linger, in the night's soft gray.
The wind whispers secrets of love and loss,
Of dreams reborn, like threads in woven cross.
In fleeting moments, hidden truths unfold,
Like autumn leaves, our mortal stories told.
And in the wind's sigh, our hearts behold.
In Kyoto's gardens, cherry blossoms fall ??
Like delicate snowflakes, ethereal, beyond all
Sakura's pink, a fleeting sigh, pure delight ??
Beauty born, lost in morning's golden, radiant light
From Tuscany's hills, cypress trees ascend ??
To Santorini's sea, waves whisper, secrets send
Golden light, a moment's ecstasy, heart's refrain ??
Wind whispers truths, echoes of timeless, sweet strain
In Marrakez's medina, gold threads weave fine ??
Weaving stories, whispers, mystic, scented vine
Muezzin's call slows heartbeats, soul's true, inner pace ???
Impermanence reveals life's hidden, precious space
In Rio's samba, hearts beat fast, joyful fire ??
Carnival's moment, fleeting, pure desire
Fleur de rêve blooms, fades, yet leaves a trace ??
In goodbye, new dawn gleams, with promise, love's warm, gentle face
Moments linger, like autumn's last, golden kiss ??
Echoes of what was, whispers of what is
In impermanence, beauty's subtle, secret might ??
A fleeting dream, a memory, a whispered, heartfelt night.
Hunger not satisfied, materialism fried
unending search in depths, philosophies sketched
Psyche gardened terrain, sovereignty a sweet cane
ancient cultures in cells, memory can be hell
indigenous wisdoms, all achetypes are prisms
suffering is fresh springs, inner calm it duly brings
knowing that all storms pass, grounding ascension class
when planet leaps the cusp, old souls jump in trust thrust
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
NARCISSIST
THE RAPIST OF THE SOUL
I PUT HIS NAME IN THE BLACK BOOK,
WITH THE BLACK INK.
THAT BLACK DAY WHEN I INTERACT,
THAT BLACK SOUL GOT SO ATTRACT.
HE BLACK & BLUE MY SOUL,
THAT BLACK FACE WAS SO COLD.
I BLACK SHEEP TRIED BLACK AND WHITE,
THOU BLACK OUT ME BETWEEN WRONG OR RIGHT.
THOU DEVIL SHOWED ME HIS REAL COLOUR,
HE PROVED ME THAT HE IS MOTHER FUC*ER.
SWINE AND SWAN CANNOT BE FRIEND,
ONE WHO ENJOYS CANNOT LIKE SACROSCENT.
I is in love
Wiff you
All those
Silly things
You do
Ain't no guessing
No send glancing
Ah fool like me
Undermined
With recognizing
Can't remember
The time
I was undermined
Guess you know
What U know what i
wanna say to you
You hear the applause
The second pulse
What's for me to do
They say I am ready
Gal are we steady
Ah man like
Me to do
Gather your words
It's what I heard
Complexed : me and you
We know how it goes
And I suppose what's
Tween me and you
Ripe then ready
Gal we go steady
What's. Ah man to do
Eye-catching gamut space and time of shelved encase
restrained lookout scrutinize scheme, advanced karma
My soul cries out for shores I cannot reach,
My fragile body bars me from the beach.
I dream of London's chimes from Big Ben's face,
And Rome's old Colosseum, lost to time and space.
The world's a book I yearn to read, my dear,
But all its pages are locked away in fear.
I am broken
that is my simplest form.
Not in shards,
but in folded faults
like paper creased too many times
it becomes soft,
almost sacred.
They called me whole
when I was quiet.
They mistook my silence
for resolution.
But silence
was just the breath I held
between scream
and surrender.
I walked the corridors of other people's love
like a thief in borrowed shoes,
returning everything
except myself.
I am the ink smeared by rain
on the envelope no one opened.
The left-behind syntax
of someone who once
meant something
to someone
but no longer fits their grammar.
I am broken
and so I echo better.
So I resonate truer.
So I bleed in rhythm
when no one watches.
This is not weakness.
It is symmetry,
rediscovered in collapse.
I am broken
and that is my simplest form.
That is how I slip into yours
without splinters.
Thunder, sound above. Found.
Do we need intellect?
O inner heart, resound!
Grill, gain, and genuflect!
Words of the prophet writ.
The serpent deeply bit...
Life's loveless hand scraped me
Blood poured on dry cement
The sun heated it up
Boiling on the ground
But a stain remains there
And a scar on my skin
A reminder of then
A warning for later
Memento on the Moon, our demise that’s too soon—
since ancient moral laws, our reasoning had flaws.
The Ten Commandments bold, the wisdom of old told,
its light spread in a rush, but now collective hush.
Man’s creation will bloom, like destructive mushroom
casts the atomic streams over our shattered dreams.
Echoes of progress vast – tyranny’s shadow cast,
encapsulated whim in firmament now swim.
The paradox of Man of should he if he can,
or must he heed balance between greed and lost glance?
Elina is my idol,
She didn't even need a title,
She rides a bus shuttle,
People think it is brittle,
Her fragile heart is in Seattle,
Where her home is in the settlement,
For a more like cathedral,
Someone who is so dearly yet a rival,
But that's not how I see myself in a reveal,
For something so civil,
Just let my drink chill,
I know how it feels,
My movie is in the reel,
Cameras action rolling,
The eggs are boiling,
I am in healing,
I am picking,
Something that is sinking,
My sleep is lulling,
I make myself cuddle,
I am setting a pudding,
No one is judging,
For what I am wearing,
For the fish that I am searing,
Let myself go on styling,
I didn't know that he was staring,
I keep myself remembering,
I didn't know I was the one who keeps on forgetting,
The moment that I am thriving.
Introduction
An Alexandrine line gives thought enough room to advance, then asks it to negotiate an internal threshold. That combination of breadth and division creates a special reading pleasure: the voice can make a claim, hesitate, reverse direction, or widen its view without leaving the line. As you read the community poems, listen for the moment when an apparently continuous utterance reveals a second emotional or intellectual movement.
Placed side by side, these poems may differ sharply in pace, tone, and scale. One poet might use the line for stately reflection, while another favors conversational tension, satire, intimate address, narrative detail, or concentrated imagery. Some writers make the internal pause conspicuous; others let syntax glide across it. Rhyme can produce ceremonial closure or playful expectation, while unrhymed endings can keep attention on cadence and argument. Even poems built from similar subjects may feel unlike one another because vocal weight, punctuation, diction, and sentence movement reshape the underlying architecture.
Browsing multiple examples also reveals what an isolated model cannot: a form lives through interpretation rather than mechanical replication. Read beyond the first example and consider which poems make the long line feel spacious, which make it feel pressured, and which turn its inner balance into conflict. Not every submission will approach convention in the same way, and that variation is part of the collection's value. Comparison helps readers hear the difference between merely occupying the shape and making its proportions serve a distinct imaginative purpose.
Reading Guide
Read an Alexandrine poem first as an unfolding voice, not as an object to audit. Let each line carry you through its statement, image, or action before returning to examine how its inner balance was made. The revealing question is rarely whether a pause can be marked on paper; it is what changes as the voice crosses that pause. When comparing community poems, attend to the relationship between audible rhythm and visible punctuation, between the breadth of the line and the precision of its language, and between recurring expectations and moments of surprise.
- The interior hinge: Notice whether the latter movement answers, contradicts, qualifies, or intensifies the earlier one. This relationship gives the line dramatic energy. Ask: what becomes possible after the hinge that was not possible before it?
- Heard pause versus printed pause: A comma can announce the division, but syntax, breath, or a change in image may create it without obvious punctuation. Compare where you naturally pause aloud. Does the poet guide the ear subtly or insist on a conspicuous break?
- Distribution of vocal weight: Listen for the words that receive emphasis on each side of the line. Balanced weight can sound assured or ceremonial; uneven weight can create urgency or instability. Which words become memorable because the cadence places pressure on them?
- Sentence and line relationship: Some sentences settle within a line, while others reach beyond the boundary. Continuation can resist the line's composure and accelerate the poem. Ask whether each ending completes a thought, suspends it, or redirects it into the next line.
- Sound at a distance: End rhyme, internal echo, consonance, and repeated vowels must travel across a relatively broad verbal span. Notice which sounds remain in the ear long enough to connect separated phrases. Do the echoes deepen meaning or merely announce the pattern?
- Paired or transforming images: The line can place two images in balance, but the strongest pairings are not always symmetrical. One image may reinterpret the other. Compare poems by asking whether the second image decorates, enlarges, or unsettles the first.
- Voice and register: The expansive line can support formal declaration, reflective speech, wit, or intimate confession. Listen for whether the diction feels natural to the speaker. Does the structure strengthen that personality, or can you hear the poet straining to accommodate it?
After reading several poems, return to the ones whose movement you remember without counting anything. Their lasting effect often reveals how cadence, hinge, image, and voice have been made to cooperate.
Writing Tips
Approach the Alexandrine as a workshop in proportion. Begin with an utterance that genuinely needs room to develop, yet contains a point of pressure within it. The aim is not to pour extra language into a spacious container. It is to discover why one part of the thought must stand beside another: assertion and doubt, scene and response, desire and consequence. Structure becomes persuasive when the poem would lose meaning if that relationship were removed.
- Choose material with an inner duality. Subjects involving comparison, reversal, divided loyalties, cause and effect, or perception followed by insight naturally activate the line's two-part energy. A subject with no internal movement may encourage padding rather than discovery.
- Draft the semantic core before adjusting the measure. Write the essential sentence in natural language, then identify its strongest turn. This preserves intention while you reshape cadence. Beginning with empty rhythmic slots often produces filler words, inflated adjectives, or statements the speaker would never make.
- Give the hinge a job. It can operate as rebuttal, delay, disclosure, change of scale, comic timing, or emotional recoil. Avoid making every line divide in exactly the same rhetorical way. Repeated architecture becomes more expressive when the function of the crossing changes.
- Revise cadence with the ear before trusting arithmetic. A line may satisfy a count yet sound stiff because emphasis falls on weak or irrelevant words. Read at a natural speaking pace and mark the words your voice actually stresses. Recast the sentence until rhythmic prominence and semantic importance support each other.
- Protect syntax from formal strain. Beginners sometimes invert ordinary word order, overuse contractions, or add vague modifiers simply to make a line fit. An unusual construction should belong to the speaker's character or the poem's tone, not expose the scaffolding.
- Use rhyme as consequence rather than command. If you rhyme, choose end words central to the poem's thought. Because the line gives echoes time to fade and return, a predictable rhyme can feel especially conspicuous. Slant echoes or carefully prepared full rhymes may preserve surprise without weakening closure.
- Make imagery carry structural weight. Place images in conversation rather than using one half of the line to explain the other. A physical detail before the hinge might become memory, judgment, or metaphor afterward. This transformation allows the form to think through images instead of adding commentary to them.
- Plan how the ending alters earlier balances. A final line need not become louder or more proverbial. It may resolve the poem, expose a false symmetry, or leave one side unanswered. Avoid concluding by restating an insight that the preceding lines have already made clear.
During revision, prepare one marked copy and one clean copy. Use the marked version to inspect measure, emphasis, hinges, repeated sounds, and line endings; use the clean version to test whether the poem still feels like living speech. Read it aloud to someone without explaining the design. Ask where the listener sensed turns, which words carried emphasis, and whether any phrase sounded inserted for compliance. That response will show where technique is audible as meaning and where it remains merely mechanical.
Interesting Facts
- The central pause is more than a place to breathe. It can behave like an edit in film, moving from exterior scene to inward thought, or like a courtroom interruption that changes the force of a statement. Its semantic function matters more than conspicuous punctuation.
- A spacious line does not necessarily move slowly. Rapid syntax, light punctuation, and enjambment can send the reader through it at speed. Conversely, dense consonants, balanced clauses, and carefully weighted nouns can make the same span feel grave and deliberate.
- Balance can portray imbalance. Two apparently matched parts may hold unequal emotional burdens: a calm observation can precede a devastating qualification, or an elaborate promise can collapse into a brief refusal. Formal proportion can make psychological disproportion more visible.
- Pronunciation becomes a creative responsibility. Speakers may treat certain words differently according to dialect, emphasis, or performance. An effective poet tests the line aloud and establishes a convincing vocal pattern rather than relying only on silent visual counting.
- Sound has a longer memory to cross. A rhyme or repeated vowel heard across an expansive line must remain active in the reader's ear. When the echoed words also share or oppose meanings, the sonic return feels structural rather than ornamental.
- Digital display can affect perception. If a long line wraps on a narrow screen, its architecture may become less immediately visible, although its cadence remains audible. Careful punctuation and syntactic clarity can help preserve the intended movement across different reading conditions.
- Variation becomes clearest through comparison. Browse the poems in this collection to hear how different writers handle breath, emphasis, rhyme, and rhetorical turning. Several interpretations reveal the form's range more accurately than any single polished example can.
Popular Themes
Subject matter and Alexandrine movement are most productive when they shape each other. The line's breadth can hold context alongside response, while its inner threshold can dramatize a change in knowledge, feeling, or perspective. The possibilities below are literary affinities, not claims about which subjects occur most often in the collection.
- Argument and self-correction: A speaker can advance a conviction and then qualify or challenge it within the same verbal span. This suits poems about doubt, moral choice, persuasion, and the unstable stories people tell themselves.
- Parting and reconciliation: The inner division can suggest physical distance or emotional separation, while the movement across it can enact either a return or a failure to reconnect. Silence between two phrases may carry as much force as their words.
- Memory and the present: One part of a line can establish a current scene while the other admits the past into it. The resulting proximity lets memory feel less like background information and more like an active pressure on perception.
- Landscape and reflection: The expansive line has room for a concrete horizon, weather event, street, room, or garden alongside the consciousness observing it. The strongest poems allow the setting to alter thought rather than serving as decoration.
- Journeys and thresholds: Departures, crossings, arrivals, and changes of direction correspond naturally with movement through the line's internal boundary. A physical passage can become an ethical, emotional, or imaginative one without requiring lengthy explanation.
- Love and divided address: A speaker may balance what is said to a beloved against what remains concealed, feared, or remembered. The form can stage intimacy as both connection and resistance, especially when the second movement complicates the first.
- Public voice and private countervoice: Ceremonial declaration, social observation, prayer, or protest can be placed beside an inward reservation. This allows confidence and vulnerability to occupy the same line without forcing either into a separate stanza.
As you read the community poems, compare several treatments of a shared subject. Notice how one poet turns memory into a quiet echo while another makes it an interruption, or how similar scenes produce reconciliation in one poem and estrangement in another. Form does not predetermine meaning; it gives each writer a distinctive way to stage meaning's arrival.
Editorial Insights
The central artistic tension of the Alexandrine lies between amplitude and discipline. Its line invites elaboration, yet its internal proportions punish language that merely fills space. A technically recognizable draft may contain the expected audible architecture while offering no compelling reason for thought to occupy that architecture. A memorable poem makes the reader feel that an idea, image, or emotion had to travel this particular distance and encounter resistance along the way.
Strong poems therefore treat structure as an engine of meaning. The first movement may establish a scene whose significance changes after the hinge; a confident statement may meet its hidden doubt; an image may return in altered moral light. In such cases, the internal division is not decoration laid over finished content. It becomes the place where the poem thinks. Editors and attentive readers also notice how important words receive vocal weight, how syntax either honors or resists the line, and how sound binds widely separated phrases. When these choices reinforce the subject, formal control is felt as inevitability rather than display.
Common weaknesses arise when correctness becomes the draft's only ambition. Padding dilutes images. Distorted word order exposes the effort to fit. Mechanical pauses make every line deliver the same predictable before-and-after gesture. Rhyme may pull attention toward an obvious end word, while over-explanation can occupy the latter movement with a paraphrase of what the first has already shown. In longer poems, repeatedly using the same balance can also prevent development: the poem accumulates lines but does not deepen its argument, scene, or emotional stakes. Effective variation preserves the governing cadence while changing the rhetorical purpose of each crossing.
Individuality remains visible in choices the shared convention cannot make for the poet: which details deserve emphasis, how formal or colloquial the speaker sounds, how sharply the hinge turns, how much silence surrounds it, and whether closure feels reconciled, ironic, wounded, or unresolved. One writer may make the line stately; another may make it breathless, conversational, or quietly unstable. Comparing multiple community poems develops judgment because quality appears in relationships, not isolated compliance. Readers begin to distinguish a pause that merely divides language from one that changes it, a rhyme that merely completes a pattern from one that completes an idea, and a long line that contains words from one that carries a living voice.
Read, Write & Share
Read several community poems before settling on a single impression of the form. Compare where each poet places emotional pressure, how the voice crosses the interior pause, and whether sound, image, or argument gives the line its momentum. A thoughtful comment might identify a turn that surprised you, an echo that remained in your ear, or a moment when structure clarified the poem's feeling.
Then try shaping an Alexandrine poem of your own. Let the form challenge your habits without silencing your natural voice, revise it aloud, and publish it on PoetrySoup so other readers can respond to your interpretation.
Collection Statistics
This collection contains 77 poems, providing multiple opportunities to compare how writers interpret the Alexandrine line. Some poets may follow its conventions closely, while others may adapt, loosen, or deliberately challenge expectations in pursuit of a particular voice or effect. Reading across the collection can reveal how differently cadence, internal turning, rhyme, syntax, and subject interact, while also encouraging readers to consider what remains essential when a poet varies the form.
Alexandrine Categories
Definition | What is Alexandrine 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.