Best Freeverse Poems
'Love Story' Poetry Contest.
Sponsor: Regina Mcintosh
1st Place.
“I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”
- John Green, "The Fault in our Stars."
"Love is selfless. Love is respect. Love is infatuation. Love is more than all three combined."
- the poet
your lashes flutter when you open your eyes
chocolate orbs, blown wide
my favourite flavour
it starts like that
two souls – a little bit broken, a little forlorn
raven locks to hide behind and skin moonlit parchment
I think I must be a little bit gone
lost in nose scrunches and cheeks all bunched up
a healthy blush spread all over and those shy plunges
my poor heart clenches
it’s pouring outside and your clothes are drenched
your body is shivering and your teeth are chattering
yet the umbrella you hold is over my head
eyebrows strewn together, worried I’ll catch a cold
it’s not just the wind ruffling your hair, I think I love your heart
and everything’s pure, this feeling blueberry snow
you love without asking something in return
it’s not just your heart, I think I love your soul
I touch its beauty and I find a lover.
i never wanted to be a god—
just someone you cried in front of.
that was enough divinity for me.
your grief tasted like pomegranate seeds,
sweet and bitter
and buried in the soft ruin of you.
i held your sobs in my palms
like something holy.
like juice from a fruit
i didn’t deserve.
i didn’t cause your sadness.
but i didn’t stop it either.
sometimes,
i fed it slow
just to watch it bloom—
a bruise unfolding beneath your skin
like pressed violets.
they say love is patient,
but i was ravenous.
i drank from your breakdowns
like they were wine
offered by trembling hands.
i told myself
i was comforting you,
but i think
i just loved the way
you needed me most
when you were breaking.
your tears were my ambrosia—
your pain,
a feast
i never earned.
and now that you’ve stopped crying,
now that your eyes have turned to stone
and your voice no longer quivers,
i sit at an empty table
with shaking hands
and no more hunger.
i miss your ache
the way gods miss prayer—
not because they deserve it,
but because silence
is a kind of death
when you’re used to worship.
in the desolate
solitary hours
when fear trickles down my spine
time is my jailor
closing me behind its doors
isolating my heartbeats
distant from yours
drips following a storm
ping a pattern of rubies
upon my flesh
heat carved runes
tell of lovers set aside
long ago
riddles on the wind
answers unfound
my present twists
into a knotted conflagration
higher
hotter than before
voices from the past rise
and resonate:
‘your heart-pain
bleeds from your words
that love is the umbrella
under which these wounds fester
is that much worse
untangle your heart-threads
from their prison bars
the landscape of your life
must evolve
immerse yourself
and know freedom’
my quest begins now
seeking elusive violets
in shadowy patches
beneath jacaranda trees
a window of sunlight fell upon you
desiring your favor
despite rapidly descending sky mists
our eyes connected momentarily
my caramel riveted to your mountain pine
misted veil dropping quickly
my carnal plans subverted
by humidity’s mood
rendering song
unto that which moves air
eddies, curls and swirls
soon swept the fog like curtain afar
gathering buttercream yellow anemones
coupled with heather thick ferns and leaves
a bouquet of forest wealth gathered for you
requesting you spend the season’s breath
with me
we summered and beyond
a petite blushing hand held mine
swimming lost in your windswept sea
blood in my veins surged
at a savory full smile
chest leaping when your lips
formed the name I carry
meadow green vision sipping of my affections
greedy for every pearl of my wine
Spirit didn’t knock.
It entered through the back door—
a sliver of wind in my kitchen,
on a Tuesday so ordinary
I thought the sacred had forgotten me.
The sky was the color of old bruises,
and my hands were inside a basin of water
that had cooled too quickly.
The air held nothing.
And then it held everything.
No angel descended.
No flame spoke.
Just a silence so full it trembled,
and I trembled with it.
I looked up,
but nothing had changed—
except the way my breath hung in the room,
like it knew something I didn’t.
Spirit came dressed as memory,
but not mine—
the kind that belongs to stone,
to salt,
to wombs that never stopped singing.
It wasn’t ecstasy.
It was ache.
A blooming pressure behind my ribs,
as if I had swallowed a name
I was never supposed to say aloud.
I heard a voice that was not a voice,
say:
“Be still. You are already the altar.”
And suddenly,
the spoon I held in my palm
felt like a relic.
The dust on the windowsill
felt like the remains of prayer.
Even the fridge hummed
in the key of reverence.
No one else saw it.
Not the flicker in my hands,
not the thinning veil between
what is and what almost is.
I didn’t sleep that night.
My body buzzed with some remembering
older than language.
I cried,
but not from sadness.
It was the weeping of a house
that finally hears its own name spoken
after centuries of silence.
To be touched by spirit
is not to be lifted—
but lowered,
into the temple of yourself.
It is to feel your skin become a doorway.
It is to breathe with the moon’s pulse.
It is to carry stillness like a storm
just barely contained.
They will say
it was imagination,
a trick of emotion,
a moment of fatigue.
Let them.
But I know what the dust told me.
I know the shape my shadow made.
I know the voice that never left.
And every time I pour water
or touch a leaf,
or weep for no reason,
I remember:
Spirit doesn’t knock.
It enters
when you’ve forgotten how to ask.
And stays
in everything you cannot explain.
she does not walk—
she ignites.
in the dark cathedral of ash and echoes,
she spins,
a silhouette carved from the mouth of a flame,
hips swaying like the last breath of a phoenix.
her dress—
not cloth, but the wind of burning wings,
each thread crackling with a story
that refused to be extinguished.
arms flung skyward—
not surrender,
but invocation.
the fire does not consume her.
it listens.
it bows.
around her, shadows rise—
not to haunt,
but to bear witness
to a woman who does not flee the blaze,
but becomes it.
she is every scorched past
that refused to stay buried.
every no that grew teeth.
every silence that shattered into song.
they said:
"let her be careful—
she plays too close to the edge."
but they did not see—
the edge was her altar.
and she?
the prayer set alight.
she is not burning.
she is the match.
the myth.
the revolution in a red dress.
and when the world asks
how she survived the inferno,
tell them—
she did not survive it.
she danced it into dust.
This leaf an arm from its tree
Which reached out for
But wasn’t freed
It fell, like she fell
Down two more floors
Then the one where she was supposed to stand
Wind raked through a blush of veins
And spread like hair on her face
A hand like her had fallen short
Of holding on and holding fort
Eyes that look upon blurry face
witness it fall
With sunflower grace of movement
Forever slow
She witnesses as host of all
This loss of glow
Finally, a pull of gaunt
Dragging vestige pulled her forth
She had fallen she had fell
Now she stands among herself
Hand in her own hair she pulls it to her own
And eye of tree which does not see witnesses
The hand which held it had been long gone
And forgotten pulse had forsworn host
So ghostly death of amber leaf
Looked down upon its image
And dragged its hands through dying veins
As rotting wood and greying hands
Took visage of a rotting home
From eye of wood detached from hand
And so therefore detached from soul
Witness grace from separate brains
And witness that grace die
i text dead people for advice.
not because they answer—
they don’t—
but because they never interrupt.
i tell my grandfather
about the boy who left mid-winter
and how my ribcage still
clicks shut like a locket
when someone new gets close.
he was buried in silk,
but i like to imagine
he’d wear combat boots now
and tell me to run before love
swallowed me whole.
i ask Sylvia
what to do
with the hurt that has no name,
the ache that sits like a houseguest
i never invited.
i send her my poems at 3 a.m.—
the ones with too much blood
and not enough metaphor.
she doesn’t reply.
but somehow, i feel seen.
sometimes i text
my childhood self.
she’s dead too,
in a way.
i ask her if the monster
was really under the bed
or if it slept in a room that never unlocked.
she sends back
a drawing of a girl
with no mouth.
i know what she means.
my inbox is a graveyard.
a collection of ghosts
who hold more kindness
than most living hands.
they never leave me on read.
they never ask me
to explain my sadness
in bullet points.
i text dead people for advice
because the living
tend to offer solutions
when all i want
is for someone
to hold the question.
it did not knock.
it poured through the cracks—
in dreams,
in fever,
in the silence between my inhale
and forgetting.
i didn’t summon it.
didn’t pray.
didn’t kneel beside any sacred thing.
but something sacred knelt inside me.
without warning.
without language.
without mercy.
it came wrapped in ash and static.
my ears rang for three days.
my limbs forgot gravity.
my mouth opened
and nothing human came out.
i thought it was madness.
who else speaks in a language made of shadow and silver?
who else writes their name across your spine
in molten syllables that blister
and bless you at the same time?
i told no one.
not when the wind called me by my name,
or when clocks began to stutter
at my every glance.
i saw feathers in my soup,
salt forming symbols on my thighs,
eyes in mirrors that blinked when i did not.
my heartbeat no longer belonged to my body.
it belonged to something older.
something watching.
i wept in a supermarket aisle
because the oranges glowed like lost suns.
because the cashier had the voice
of my great-grandmother
even though she was barely twenty.
because i could feel the ache of every fruit
picked too early.
is this what prophets felt?
not holy—
but hunted
by light too wild to hold.
i wanted to run.
to scrape the stars off my skin.
to sleep without dreaming.
but you cannot close the door
once the veil lifts.
i was touched by spirit
not gently—
but like a storm that mistook my bones for a bell.
it rang me until i remembered
i was not flesh alone.
i was veil.
i was vessel.
i was volcano.
i was every scream the earth had swallowed
in women who were burned for hearing too much.
it stripped me of logic,
of maps,
of language.
left me naked in the forest of myself
where no compass worked.
only instinct.
only breath.
only the hum that lived beneath my ribs
and now spoke back.
and whether it was fiction or fact—
i no longer cared.
the stars in my blood said yes.
the moon inside my mouth
said remember.
the fire in my marrow said
that i was never just human.
And that
was enough.
The cold air brushes my cheeks
My fingertips glide on glass
It doesn't feel like anything at first
It feels numb
The lights in my life shine but the moment of warmth
It crawls back through my spine
And my body cries for you
Pick up your old guitar,
find the soothing chords,
plucked notes or rhythmic hum,
voice your lyrics by firelight.
Bard, sing the songs of love,
where none can dance tonight
but don't dare give your heart away,
take your place in destiny.
There is a place tucked away,
in dreams, a land where they'll come true,
my destination, my plan is to wake up one day.
and find that it will be realised,
a land with no borders,
a world where all is one.
and one means together,
everybody having fun and everything is free,
one day, with you I agree,
somewhere a place so far away from here,
Utopia, maybe?
Sitting by the window in the pale moonlight
looking out into the darkness
waiting,
to hear her heartbeat on the breeze.
My eyes searching the shadows,
a glimpse of my love as a snowy owl drifts by,
the sigh in my heart matching the feathered hush
of silently flexed wings.
I hear the vibrating voice by the pond
a frog prince calling his mate
and they rumba across the lily pads and out of sight.
Tears prick beneath eyelids,
my heart begins to cry
then I feel the breeze touch my cheek
I know she has kissed me
and as I whisper 'I love you'
I hear her heart beat touch mine.
"When Silence Speaks" poetry contest.
Sponsor: Craig Cornish
2nd Place.
Date Submitted: 07/05/2024
the air conditioner soothing my heated skin
fire brick curtains with their red dyed orange
bumblebee rays peeking through gaps in between,
they have so much to say
so much to say to me
ghosts of muffled laughter snuggling my ears
crinkled edges of faded eyes and scratchy rugs beneath my feet
labored breaths running after a face resembling my own,
your lingering warmth has so much to say
so much to say to me
a hand in mine and a skip in my step
wandering, marveling at street vendors, the bustling market
lavender dreams blooming under our eyelids,
that quiet understanding has so much to say
so much to say to me
heaving shoulders in a dimly lit bathroom,
tear tracks melding into the glass of a splintered mirror
this lonely silence has howled its piece,
now I have nothing to say
nothing to say to me.
Once a day I would meet a girl named Jasmine,
Who gave me a cup of Jasmine tea
The warm, flowing liquid went down my throat,
A smile dancing upon my cheeks as I enjoyed the taste each day,
Which brought her a million delights
Once a week I met a girl named Jasmine,
Who gave me a cup of Jasmine tea
The warm liquid turn to a lukewarm temperature,
But it was her heart and soul into a cup that I so enjoyed,
The weakest smile spreads across her face,
"No fret" she spoke though ever so softly,
Almost like a lie
Once a year I met a girl named Jasmine,
Who gave me a cup of Jasmine tea,
The tea was a bitter coldness like frostbite had been,
Making me wince a couple of times on the spot with a quiet cough to follow,
Her eyes were the same as the tea this time around,
With eyes telling you she was done with this horrible planet
Once a year I met a woman who was named Jasmine,
Who used to give me Jasmine tea
Ah, I wish we were back in the golden time days,
As I sit and pray along your grave wishing back for our youth as mindless teens,
Would I have saved you if I listened to you instead of the tastes of Jasmine?
I hope for one day to meet you on the Heaven's side holding a cup of Jasmine tea,
To finally listen to you once again
Author Note: Yes, I have posted this on another app called Amino, that's also my account. I just edited it to be a bit better here. Enjoy.