Arbitrary Poems | Examples

List of Member Poems

Moderacy

An arbitrary effigy 

Enacts its own soliloquy;

Concocts a taste sensation 

Fit to consternate a nation.

What's an ethical conundrum?

Sinful, existential ho-hum!

Guaranteed to whiten whiter

Never lit one cross on fire...

Yet the sugar pills create

A side effect that won't abate -

You're free to spend more time prostrate 

Than one can ever stay awake.

Now your own somnolent scream

Conducts a constant marching theme;

Reverberates the eight of Rome

As sifting sand toward sunken home...

If as you glance up at the sky

You still sense wonder from on high -

If with every labored breath 

You'll glibly force another step -

Seek some meaning midst these words

Although the cadence is absurd:

NeVeRmInD tHe BuRnInG;

ThAt JuSt MeAnS iT's WoRkInG!

mauled language is arbitrary

(1)
ugly grey banister 
language stung 
all the 
subtle Belgian
bursts of 
grainy blue Gina's 
Bengali grain 
triangles 

   (2)
a high-
strung bus-
y arbiter is 
bustling a-
round in 
search of in-
tegral gris-
ly Istanbul 
bytes and
guilt-free wry 
rung climb-
ers of the 
Liberty Tree

  (3)
singularly rusty 
syringes some-
how re-
main de-
void of dust

Premium Member A Bands Backbone

Arbitrary baseline of creativity. 

Believe in the beats that are felt,
ask a lyric to see where it goes. 
Nearby is that heart on a sleeve,
describe what is dying inside; 
say it with all the courage you can. 

Bang it out let it heal your pain
allow for a release to come.
Captivate yourself,
keep calm if tears start to fall.
Best what you’ve created before,
okay it’s hard but always worth it. 
Never bend find the breakout,
eat the hungry audience up.


Paradoxical

Ignorance and stupidity surround me day to day
Criticism and hypocrites worthless with nothing good to say, 
Gods and totems get on your knees and pray 
Men and women molded from the same clay, 
Angels and demons fight for you and me 
Good guys bad guys contemplate if you will flee, 
Love and hate is there for all to see 
Life and death close to intimacy, 
Fact or fiction can it be false or true 
Start and finish read until you're through, 
Negative or positive working right on cue 
Rational or arbitrary the numbers the dice will do, 
Salt and sugar my love is bittersweet 
Peaceful or violent my passion can't be beat,
Yin or Yang without either it won't complete 
Similar or opposite until we finally meet.

Premium Member No Tooth Fairy

My parents were strict and arbitrary.
I knew no Easter bunny or tooth fairy. 
To get out of the closet at any time, 
I was forced to speak in rhyme.

Premium Member Recondite

  
     arbitrary… random… 
        … deconstructed…
     … holocaust … whatever… 
       …disemboweled… 
           … desiccated


Premium Member How'd It Happen Cap'n

God created all before His face
Fish, cattle and birds on the Earth
Preparing a place for man
Jesus said "I go to prepare a place"
For all of the second birth
As it was promised in the original plan

The Evolution pollution 
Has many creation theories
It is also a worldview 
Full of contradictories, no solutions
So which of the queries
In obscurity do you choose

Evolution is a view of miscues
Relying on the all inclusive mutation
But mutations are a lack, they don't add information
So with the arbitrary excuse
Do your worse with your embolization
The impossibilities contrariness is our cessation

It’s always the same

It’s always the same.
I always get here, to this place of being.
Quiet and confused by simple complexity.
Do you feel A or do you feel B? 
Probably if you ask the question it’s both.
Eco would say it’s based on the rules society gives,
Kristeva would argue it’s based on what society holds back,
Beauvoir would say you have to consistently give it meaning and Camus would say it’s only the means you give it that has weight.
Marvin the paranoid robot would say your evolved mushrooms that get caught up on wanting meaning and many others will continually argue their own points. 
It’s all so arbitrary said Saussure and Pierce said it goes deeper into the intersubjective.
I get tired of trying to juggle the theory but I like the funny moments as they hold me in a better mood. Deb Dana said it’s our nervous system and others say it’s parasites. I am the egg man, I’m a walrus. Hear me roar..

Premium Member ONE POINT OF VIEW

May we all be blessed to one day…
share this point of view
one that those of us who understand love…
have long ago discovered to be true

True love, is not constrained 
by the arbitrary restrictions some of us create….
it can begin at any age…
and once it begins
It has no expiration date.

Premium Member Painting Black Tears as Inverted Light

Painting Black Tears as Inverted Light

let us paint with radiant black tears the shadow of white light,
the passions of unconscious consciousness that think without feeling anything,
the somber beings radiate their phosphorescent darkness and full void,
the desires of penumbral shadows transparent opaque paint the heavy air.

to women sighs full of void adorn their necks empty of air,
the leaders of the idea without thought build the cathedrals of destroyed mind,
a man slave free chained in his prisoner emancipation eternally,
to the resurrection of yesterday's tomorrow today that was never present dead.

the arbitrary necessary obliges freedom to choose without wanting something,
what should not have to happen happened unhappened,
still talking I stood silent with words that scream in stillness,
I confessed my holy sins to the deep rock that floats.

the only one to whom I give wrong right is the truth of clear lie,
the love from facts without facts that acts only in inaction,
the old youth ages with each day that makes it younger,
the life without my sadness happy drowns me in its bitter joy!

Premium Member Do You Hate Me Yet?

The root cause of hate is fear
And so if you hate me then you fear me,
Which in some cases would be totally justified.
Such as if I’m a Muslim jihadi without a clue
What jihad actually means
And so wants you dead simply because we disagree,
Or say I’m a trans activist willing to kill
You and your helpless innocent children as they pray,
Because of something so arbitrary as I want to.
Everything we do sends a message
A message out into the infinite sphere of space,
Often called Heaven,
And out to everyone me meet
And these actions flavor us, our words, our looks
And most importantly our impact.
Do we seek to calm and please others
Or disturb and disrupt them?
It all depends on what they are doing.
If you’re in love with blowing yourself up
Or shooting children 
In the name of some narcissistic cause
I can tell you, you should be scared,
Terrified and truly phobic,
Of my sanity, basic decency and normalcy.
Who am I?
I may be six, sixteen or sixty-six but,
“I am Charlie Kirk.”

(9/17/25)

Premium Member Young at heart

Put on a silly face
stay a while to laugh and giggle
~ age is an arbitrary number



Wordku: 5-7-5 words

AP: 1st place 2025

Premium Member Brevity

though long loftier are visited much 
like space empty needed seeing some stars
your wisdom scales twice thrice at least as such
brings peace ends bloody loud proud wicked wars

less more deeply thought seals the sentence fought
upfront counting costs gains what matters most
asides any passions which wrath has wrought
humbly speaking what all others would boast
 
exceptions abound all you only one
heart once longing can no longer endure
when love finds disappears passion's deep fun
or holding true forever fixed and sure

falls victim arbitrary disease death
builds wall thick long tall none can ever climb
memory pain lingers each ev'ry breath
capacity drops words cease out of time

quiets all long-winded pseudo gravity
calms hears soothes sighs sees always brevity

Hitler's Watercolours

This one’s a castle; that’s a customs-house.
They’re stolid, listless, just a little dull.
The sky supports an arbitrary gull.
The languidness of Liszt, the style of Strauss

are wholly absent. Colours are metallic.
The eye sweeps over cornice, turret, steeple,
then it dawns on us – there are no people.
Clock towers, mountains, minarets, all phallic,

are void of human life.  Stark, empty chairs
adorn each arid, motionless interior.
As we apprise, eyes sneeringly superior,
we note acerbically his love of stairs –

A Will to Power, ever pushing up.
One daub there is, however, gives us pause:
it dates long before Enabling Laws,
before he dreamed of Kesselring or Krupp:

a bridge that’s quite impossible to cross,
going nowhere, has never carried traffic.
With a boy sitting on it. Startling, graphic,
without a hint of Schadenfreude or Schloss.

Self-portrait, this? What features may we trace?
What’s here vouchsafed? Incipient racist brute?
Hardly. A disarmingly awful suit,
and most revealingly of all – he has no face.

Luckily, It Stopped Before Q

Arbitrary patterns, be it said,
Behove a poet who has nought to say:
Consider if you will, the holy dread
Descending on him when he has to play

Egregious games of lexicon and sense:
Ferocious is his hunt for weighty meaning:
Garrulousness has no innate value - hence
Hermetic references, frantic gleaning,

Intemperate allusions all too often
Juxtaposed with useful phrases in a
Kulturkampf, with memes supposed to soften
Lacunae like the way we treated Jinna,

Matriculee of Lincoln’s Inn. No joke.
Nehru, Inner Temple. Things you learn!
Our planet is a stellar artichoke,
papaveraceous, as the Medes discern.

Sub Categories

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.

Get a Premium Membership
Turn off ads, get more exposure for your poetry, and get more features with a Premium Membership.
Book: Diverse Voices: The Poetry of Human Rights and the Pursuit of Peace