Believe
I will not allow people
To let me down
I want people
To treat me
The same way
I treat them
I just want to be
Respected by
You guys
I don’t think that is
Too much to ask
What about you
I wish you would believe
In something
But you don't
Yes money is your God
Also you say that money
Grows on tree
That is wrong
You say you can buy people
With money
To be your friends
You can't
A human life
is given free
and taken
without payment
The times
between
to lend and borrow
— till fate reclaims your soul
(Dreamsleep: September, 2026)
What is this push for an AI world?
Is it better research or reimagined
Youtube music videos?
Is it better medical diagnostics
Or access to yummy recipes
And shopping suggestions?
Is it better drone or
Propaganda psychological warfare?
It will provide all of that and more,
But its main purpose is to finally
At long last, establish what every government
Has ever dreamed of having;
A complete totalitarian surveillance state.
Everything will be watched, everything noted
Like a great God or Santa in the cloud
Everything will checked twice
And judged naughty or nice.
Nice will be nice, with all the perks
While naughty will simply cease to be.
Such an ideal world is not cheap or easy
It takes great effort and sacrifice
Freedom after all only matters when its an option
In a world of total control
We will all have nothing and be happy
We will all want nothing and be happy
And if you’re at all like me,
We will be nothing and at last be happy.
(9/16/26)
Stanford University
Greatness at the Helm
Alum has come and gone
Knowledge was their insurance
Philosophy at its best
Education a high mark
Principles with a concept
Resolutions with an idea
Dignity with self-respect
Assuring and fulfilling
Techniques with logic of its own
Theories to come by
No more doubt
Intellect is what education is all about
Picture yourself
Above all
Conqueror of one’s destiny
Standards aligned
Through pages of trials and errors
Education speaks
Believe in yourself and let it repeat
Educational now and well into tomorrow
Let your tomorrow start today
One step away
Let education become your triumph
Classified and Qualified
No one would deny
Follow your footsteps through the education portal
Open Door
Don’t ignore
Let education show your potential
Become the commodity of essential
Stanford spoke
Now enter
(“Something From Nothing”, 2024, original encaustic)
In my youth I did my time
Doing strict religious discipline
A whole decade dedicated to mindfulness
And right livelihood.
And in the several decades since I’ve done
All that on and off again, from time to time.
But now my discipline is different
It’s the discipline of do-nothing
The wu wei of effortless action
More like mindlessness
Than effortful mindfulness.
What does it involve? Nothing!
Too simple you say,
And that’s the point exactly!
Like a cloud drifting through an open sky
Neither born nor dying
Simply manifesting into something
From nothing.
(9/16/26)
The Journey
Exploring thy purpose
Understanding testimony
Miracle encountered
Assurance in believe
Heaven’s Vibe
Analyzing capability
Having no Doubt
The world wouldn’t understand
Beyond the world’s conscious
Created through excellence
Faith within
Seas pure and true
Walking in pursue
Distance seen
Miles to gain
Preparation derived
Waters reflect
Destiny a waits
Spoken Voice
Heaven’s words.
Close to this sleeping root, in its flesh of ancient earth,
something struggles silently to become light again, to be born anew from shadow.
And we remain, with our thoughts hanging like a rope torn from the sky,
wondering whether to overlook its gentleness, sweet and annihilating.
A tumbling of black waters follows, over the forehead of my memory,
a shaken clarity, like a lightning bolt that lies, falsifies, and forgets.
Then I barely recognize the electric grace of the men from long ago,
whom I had seen carrying their rusted shirts through the swamp that scorched them,
planting themselves in the ground with arms outstretched like a cross, a condor on each shoulder,
men who wanted to die beautifully, shattering their bones like ancient bells,
their eyes extinguished like burnt amber, silent as icons forgotten by prayer —
and I feel them smoldering within me, like a root that refuses to sleep.
And I walk out into this magical, phosphorescent rain, mystical and cold,
to untie the rope that binds me across centuries and dreams,
to roll myself back into the root from which all that I am has struggled to become again.
Today it's been 16 months
16 months since I have seen your face
16 months since I felt your embrace
16 months since I heard your laugh
16 months since I knew you were in the world
even when I didn't see or hear from you
It's also been 16 months since I have seen
the pain in your eyes
FELT the pain of you words, go straight to my heart
Seen the effects of your illness on your whole being
Seen that you were a shadow of who you were before
mental illness took over your life
I MISS all of you, but I am not sorry you found peace
and I am trying to make you proud by screaming hard
and loud that Mental Health is crucial and our resources
are inadequate.
I love you, my son and I miss you!
I remember I fell through that wooden floorboard.
I was careless where I stepped, and the weight of my mistake made me fall right through.
I remember the embarrassment I felt... it nearly broke my self-esteem.
I can hear them use their traitorous tongues.
I remember I walked carefully over those wooden floorboards.
I see their eyes glare and hear the whispers of people who judge me for treading so cautiously.
I am wary of what they are saying. ..of what they may think.
I walk confidently around that wooden floor.
I am aware of their judgements and their hateful glares.
I don't care what they think.
I no longer have to tread so carefully.
I can run free.
I remember...
I have two mirrors.
One images the exterior.
One images the interior.
I use both of the mirrors.
The first mirror is of the type
That most of us commonly share.
The second mirror is mine to choose.
For me, that choice is the Bible.
If I'm not pleased with what I see,
I have the option of alteration.
Alterations with the first mirror
Are easier to master than the second.
The mirror of the Bible is much more
Revealing and exposes the inner me.
It also offers me a recipe for change.
Some recipes are less tasty than others.
It makes no allowances for choosing my
Own recipes. The recipes of the Bible are
Designed with me in mind and has no additives Nor man- made ingrediences. It is perfect.
The woman hadn’t slept for days.
Blood-curdling screams
Crawling from under the door,
Lurking down the stairs,
Seeping into her eardrums,
Turning her stomach
At the mere thought
Of her baby in distress.
She made her way
To the nursery.
Just as the tips of her fingers
Grasped the cold shock
Of the doorknob,
A silence fell.
The woman opened the door.
A draft of icy air
Sending shivers through her skin,
Only to be swallowed
By the frozen emptiness
The nursery had wrapped around her.
The silence lingered
As she approached the crib,
Only to be broken
By the creaking of the mobile.
She reached
For her bundle of joy,
Laying peacefully in its slumber,
But her arms sank
As the blanket collapsed;
She cradled her sorrows instead.
Secrets remain hidden,
A story stays untold.
Walls grow taller,
And the padlock keeps it closed.
Keys are given
To all who reside within
And to the few who earn my trust.
Because what lies inside
Was meant to be hid.
The outside,
A perfect dreamhouse,
White-picket fence and all.
How ironic,
The same colour of drywall
In which I watched a crater form.
Few visitors ever see
What goes on
Behind closed doors.
Once I give them a spare key,
Nothing is hidden anymore.
The doorknob beckons for your hand
Before it’s too late.
Now you see inside the house,
And I know
What happens next.
Now you know my secrets,
My deepest, darkest fears,
And that shatters your lens,
Because I am now real.
But the windows are now smashed,
The story’s been told,
Walls are still crumbling,
And a new padlock now holds.
Mental Illness is not a violation.
It's a human experience.
One many carry unspokenly.
The real harm is uncovered
How others respond:
The quick labels, the cold
Stares, the whispered verdicts.
A mind in toil needs support, not punishment,
Compassion, not condemnation.
Because the truth is straightforward:
The crime is in the person
Who sees the hurt and chooses to
Judge it.
I wrote when I was a young girl
and each entry ended with
“It was a good day”
because it was
and tomorrow was a present
wrapped in ribbon
I dreamt again
that I was swamped by customers
ordering drinks I cannot make
and food I cannot translate
while trying to keep everyone happy
while sneaking away to read
the diary of eight-year-old me
to puzzle together why she became
the lost waitress
My diaries had dainty locks
and charming keys
for little hands
They are in a box
with yearbooks
in an attic
full of cheap nostalgia
I wrote my sentences
in pencil
I cannot feed and care
for all the caged animals
(there are too many per cage)
The floor never promised
to hold me
I once collected pencils too
and grouped them based on
popularity
I didn’t have friends,
I had unsharpened pencils
and erasers that came
from vending machines
I learned to fill the quiet
and danced in negligee
to David Bowie’s ‘China Girl’
When his voice broke,
I felt his falling
and stretched my fingertips
high to a popcorn ceiling
“It’s in the way of my eyes!”
There’s a kind of power in my failure.
Like a bell that always rings inside me.
Not too loud, but at the same time,
its echo feels like a song teaching me
that failure is but a phase.
It makes the world unpredictable.
It rings when I fall,
as if it's a sign I will rise.
It rings when I cry.
Yet when I hold a pen and paper
and write my pain out,
it barely makes a sound ,
like a bell too shy to ring.
So, I let it ring in its own time,
like it always gives me a chance to be me.
Yet on those days it rang,
it showed me that I was here,
and made me turn failure into a song,
a melody that lingers, uninvited yet welcomed.
Introduction
The first pleasure of reading free verse side by side is discovering where each poet locates necessity. One writer may build momentum through long, breath-driven lines; another may isolate a single word until it carries the emotional weight of a stanza. Syntax may flow beyond the line ending, stop abruptly, fragment, circle back, or leave a silence the reader must interpret. Because these choices are made locally, every poem asks for a fresh kind of attention.
As you browse the community poems, expect differences in scale, voice, and movement. A poem may unfold as a compressed image, a dramatic address, an intimate confession, a narrative scene, a meditation, or a sequence of sharply juxtaposed perceptions. Some poets create cohesion through recurring sounds or phrases; others rely on image patterns, tonal shifts, accumulating details, or a distinctive speaking presence. The interest lies not in measuring every poem against one visible template, but in asking what internal pattern holds each individual work together.
Reading beyond the first example makes those patterns easier to perceive. Compare how several poets handle pauses, transitions, white space, sentence length, and closure. Notice when a line break intensifies a word, delays information, or allows two meanings to coexist for a moment. A single poem can demonstrate one successful approach; a broad community collection reveals the range of possible decisions. It also sharpens judgment: the more interpretations you encounter, the more clearly you can distinguish purposeful freedom from arbitrariness and hear the crafted music beneath conversational language.
Reading Guide
Reading free verse closely means listening for an order that may not announce itself immediately. Rather than searching for one repeated template, observe how the poem teaches you to hear and see it. Its lineation, syntax, sounds, images, and silences establish expectations; later choices may fulfill, complicate, or break those expectations. As you compare community poems, ask not simply whether a passage feels free, but what each freedom accomplishes.
- Line endings: Notice which words occupy the ends and beginnings of lines. A break can emphasize, suspend, divide, or briefly misdirect meaning. Ask: what changes if this sentence is read continuously rather than as arranged?
- Sentence and line: Watch whether syntax cooperates with the line or pushes across it. Alignment can produce calm and clarity, while friction can create urgency or uncertainty. Which poets use that relationship most expressively?
- Sound architecture: Listen for consonants, vowels, internal echoes, repeated stresses, and subtle rhyme. These local patterns give memory and coherence to language that may sound conversational. What sounds return, and what mood or connection do they create?
- Pace and silence: Compare short lines, extended lines, stanza gaps, punctuation, and unpunctuated transitions. Each affects breath and reading speed. Where does the poem make you hurry, hesitate, or remain in silence?
- Images and associations: Track recurring objects, colors, settings, or sensory details. Free verse often develops through association rather than explicit explanation. How does one image prepare for, revise, or challenge another?
- Voice and register: Attend to shifts between speech, reflection, description, slang, formality, and direct address. Such changes can reveal conflict within the speaker. Does the voice remain consistent, or does its transformation become part of the poem?
- Turns and closure: Identify where the poem changes direction and how the ending relates to its opening. An ending may resolve, widen, echo, or deliberately leave pressure unsettled. What has changed by the final line?
Read several poems twice: first for experience, then for construction. Comparison reveals not only what different writers choose, but how those choices shape attention, emotion, and memory.
Writing Tips
A useful free verse workshop begins with an apparent contradiction: the poet has wide freedom, yet the finished poem must make its choices feel necessary. Start with material whose movement you do not want to predetermine-a memory arriving in fragments, an unstable voice, a scene with competing perceptions, or an emotion that changes as it is spoken. The aim is not to display irregularity. It is to discover a structure responsive enough to follow the poem's actual thinking.
- Find the governing impulse: Decide what keeps the poem in motion: a question, argument, image chain, recollection, address, or accumulating scene. This underlying pressure can unite very different line lengths and stanza shapes without making them mechanical.
- Separate discovery from arrangement: Draft freely before deciding where every line belongs. You might first write a paragraph, speak the material aloud, or collect sensory fragments. Then shape the lines according to emphasis and breath rather than preserving the draft's accidental layout.
- Make each break earn its place: Avoid the beginner's habit of chopping ordinary prose at convenient margins. Test whether a break creates emphasis, suspense, ambiguity, contrast, or a meaningful pause. If it changes nothing, move it or remove it.
- Create a local sound system: Select a few sounds, rhythms, or phrase shapes that suit the emotional atmosphere. Let them recur with variation. Too little sonic attention can make the poem inert; too much obvious patterning can make language feel forced or decorative.
- Control velocity: Long syntactic sweeps can convey abundance, argument, panic, or intimacy, while brief lines can slow perception or strike sharply. Do not assume short means intense. Read the passage aloud and notice what the breath actually does.
- Let images perform the thinking: Replace broad emotional labels with objects, gestures, textures, and spatial relationships where possible. Then retain only the explanation needed to orient the reader. A vivid image should deepen the poem, not merely illustrate a conclusion already stated.
- Protect the speaker's individuality: Examine diction for words chosen because they sound poetic rather than because this speaker would need them. A credible voice may be plain, ceremonious, comic, fractured, or contradictory, but its tonal changes should respond to the subject.
- Revise the ending without announcing it: Beginners often summarize the lesson, repeat the central feeling, or attach an inflated final statement. Consider ending on an image, altered phrase, unanswered tension, or precise action that allows the reader to complete part of the meaning.
During revision, print or display the poem in several line arrangements and read each version aloud. Mark where your voice naturally accelerates, stresses a word, or resists the page. Then test the visual version silently: do the breaks create productive expectations even before sound confirms them? Cut forced language, strengthen image relationships, and examine every repetition. The final arrangement should not merely look like a poem; it should guide the reader through an experience that prose spacing would change.
Interesting Facts
- A line break can function without punctuation. It may create a pause, but it can also speed the reader forward or suspend a word between two grammatical possibilities. Its effect depends on syntax, not simply on visual placement.
- Irregularity can still create expectation. After a poem repeats a phrase, sound, sentence shape, or spacing choice, readers begin anticipating its return. The poet can then satisfy that expectation or break it at an emotionally important moment.
- White space has several possible meanings. A gap may indicate elapsed time, withheld speech, a change of scene, or a mental leap. Experienced poets provide enough context for the silence to feel charged rather than merely ornamental.
- Repetition becomes a self-created law. Because a recurring element is chosen rather than inherited, readers pay attention to how it changes. An exact return may suggest obsession; a modified return can register growth, damage, doubt, or discovery.
- Length changes the kind of attention required. A brief poem can make every placement conspicuous, while an expansive poem can establish currents of narrative and association. Neither gains intensity automatically; each must manage proportion and momentum.
- The page and the voice can tell different stories. Visual spacing may invite hesitation where performance rushes onward, or a compact stanza may contain a long spoken breath. Browse the community poems and consider how silent reading and reading aloud alter each work.
Popular Themes
Subject and structure continually reshape one another in free verse. Material that arrives through fragments, changing tones, sensory leaps, or uneven emotional pressure can benefit from a form able to follow those movements closely. The themes below are literary possibilities, not statistical rankings of the community collection.
- Memory and aftermath: Recollection rarely arrives in tidy order. Shifts in line length, tense, image, and white space can reproduce the way one detail summons another while leaving important gaps.
- Grief and absence: Silence can become part of the emotional statement. An interrupted sentence, isolated object, or unfilled space may register what the speaker cannot explain without turning loss into abstraction.
- Love and changing relationships: Direct address allows intimacy, accusation, tenderness, and self-correction to coexist. Flexible pacing can follow the speaker as certainty gives way to doubt or remembered speech enters the present.
- Place and the natural world: The poem can move between panoramic description and minute sensory detail without forcing both into equal units. Image patterns can connect outer landscape with inner change while preserving their differences.
- Ordinary objects and daily rituals: A cup, doorway, meal, commute, or household task can gather significance through placement and recurrence. Free verse can slow familiar actions until their emotional or symbolic pressure becomes visible.
- Identity and inner conflict: Contradictory registers, fragments, lists, and shifts of perspective can represent a self that is not singular or settled. The poem's changing structure may enact negotiation rather than merely report it.
- Social witness and public life: Documentary details, overheard language, reflection, and argument can be placed in productive tension. Careful lineation helps prevent important material from becoming either a flat report or an overgeneralized declaration.
- Humor, surprise, and the surreal: Abrupt turns and strategic spacing can control comic timing or make an unlikely image arrive with conviction. The key is tonal precision: unpredictability works best when the poem has established what is being disrupted.
As you read the community poems, compare works that approach similar subjects. Notice how one poet compresses an experience while another expands it, or how different voices turn the same broad theme into distinct emotional journeys.
Editorial Insights
The central artistic tension of free verse lies between liberty and necessity. A poem may choose its own line lengths, pauses, repetitions, and proportions, but that freedom increases the burden on each decision. An irregular arrangement is only the visible beginning. A memorable poem develops an internal logic through sound, syntax, image, voice, and movement, allowing readers to sense that its shape belongs to this particular experience rather than having been applied afterward.
Strong work makes structure inseparable from subject. A poem about hesitation might repeatedly approach and interrupt its statements; a poem driven by abundance might rely on long accumulating sentences; a poem of estrangement might place crucial words in visual or grammatical isolation. These choices succeed not because they imitate an emotion in a simple way, but because they control the reader's encounter with it. Editors and attentive readers notice when line breaks alter emphasis, when recurring sounds bind distant images, when a tonal turn changes the meaning of an earlier passage, and when silence contains pressure rather than emptiness.
Weaker drafts often confuse spontaneity with completion. Predictable imagery can make an intimate subject feel borrowed, while forced elevated language distances the speaker from the experience. Mechanical patterning is another risk: once a poet invents a repetition or spacing device, repeating it without development can become as restrictive as any imposed template. Over-explanation removes the reader's opportunity to participate, yet insufficient development leaves images adjacent without a persuasive relationship. The difficult task is to provide enough orientation for association to become meaning while preserving discovery, ambiguity, and emotional depth.
Individuality remains visible in the kind of attention a poet brings to the page: what the speaker notices, what is withheld, how sentences turn, where humor enters, which sounds recur, and what the ending refuses or permits. Two poems can use similarly loose visual shapes and produce entirely different experiences because their inner pressures differ. This is why comparing multiple community poems is so valuable. One example may make a particular strategy seem inevitable; several reveal a field of choices. Reading comparatively develops a more exacting sense of quality-the ability to recognize when freedom has become purposeful form and when a draft still needs a stronger principle of selection.
Read, Write & Share
Read beyond the first poem and let several community voices show how differently free verse can organize breath, image, memory, argument, and silence. Compare where poets place their turns, how they shape endings, and which patterns become visible only after a second reading. When a poem holds your attention, leave a thoughtful comment about the specific choice that affected you.
Then try your own interpretation. Begin with material that needs a flexible path, revise until every break and pause contributes, and publish the finished poem on PoetrySoup. Your choices can extend the conversation while giving other readers another approach to consider.
Collection Statistics
This collection contains 134177 free verse poems, offering many opportunities to compare voices, subjects, lineation choices, pacing, and methods of closure. A collection of this size supports more than one interpretation of what purposeful freedom can accomplish. As you browse, remember that individual poets may follow familiar conventions, adapt them to the needs of a particular subject, or challenge readers with a more experimental approach.
Free Verse Categories
Read wonderful free verse poetry on the following sub-topics:
animals, christmas, death, depression, friendship, food, funny, kids, life, love, middle school, music, nature, rhyme, school, sports
and more.
Definition | What is Free Verse 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.