I hate the way you make my heart skip a beat each time you smile.
I hate that blue twinkle in your eye when you're about to speak.
I hate how my skin tingles when you gently stroke my hand.
I hate the way you rush to greet me because you say you missed me so.
I hate that music in your voice each time you're saying something sweet.
I hate the slight curl in your lips when you're about to say you love me.
I hate the way you call me sweetheart as the moon's about to rise.
I hate how natural it is for your arms to wrap around my shoulders.
I hate how calmness falls upon us when words are nowhere to be found.
But most of all, I hate the way you make it hard for me not to love you back.
There was a time the world was mine
a world of heroes and battles won
a windowpane with mother’s smile
a cardboard sled on a downhill slide
February wept with me a friend
a cuddly furry blue-eyed cat
mother said take three breaths
smile and call your friends
Grandma I loved I lost at ten
then my friend to an accident
it left a scar within my chest
memory unearths then covers back
And if I lose what I have left
I'll let my sorrow out in breaths
with mother's words reminiscing dad's
God sees and provides he said.
The eyes are the gateway to the soul
But hers was a hell I never expected
A tragedy so deep, I couldn't help but fall
A cut so deep, I couldn't pull the knife
A love story so tragic, it became bestseller
But I still couldn't stay away
I got so entranced that her name was synonymous with mine
I couldn't help but stay.
Skipping stones along a crumbling ground
How does it work with no one around?
If there is no one to read
What do I write for?
If there is no one writing
What do I read?
Ambition against the machine
Flesh gives to the metal
A pen’s work is easily destroyed
The cloud is forever
Art is human
Art is mine
But wherefore art thou reader?
When mine art is displayed?
I see my love, drawing near
He's carrying two drinks
Suspicion begins ascent
He perceives, and speaks
"I brought your favorite drink"
"I don't like chocolate"
"Oh, my sweet, this isn't chocolate...it's MOCHA
.....and this MOCHA is from Columbia"
This unexpected JOY bursts forth
Like a fairy being birthed out of a flower
"You see, I would cross the Ocean just to bring
You MOCHA from Columbia"
...refreshment for a weary soul
Written by Trudy Schrader on 09-17-2026
a man of towering stature,
mercurial temperament
well-known, his avarice
for absolute power,
a dreadful reputation
for intimidating underlings
in brutal fashion,
unsits the current king,
takes control
of the kingdom.
there's not iron gate
he cannot get past
the strongest of towers,
he could tumble down
his favor cannot be won
by a silver coin.
who has the the courage
to challenge his authority?
he mutes the loudest,
makes whispers
out of their screams,
he fearlessly
takes on giants
he puts away crowns
too heavy for his head
yet, his shadow fills
any room he walks into,
it makes
the proudest bow low,
still, he can never touch
anyone's light,
or steal the love
foreign to him
You're the artist with the pen,
the painter with the brush,
the designer with the colour swatches.
You interpret your dreams,
give rise to your ambition,
create your ideal future.
Your vision crystallizes at will,
draws upon your imagination
to materialize your surroundings.
There may be times of ugliness
when the world seems dark and
intent on dragging you down.
Remember this too shall pass,
renew your closeness with nature
and replenish that innate beauty and joy.
(“The Cave of Unknowing”, 2012, original oil)
My mind a cave of favorite characters
And greatest hits
A life time of connections and sidekicks
Frank Zappa plays the soundtrack
In a tumble of tightly compressed acoustic riffs
A genius long gone, but ever present
When he’s done he says,
In tightly compressed electronic bytes
“May we burn it all down.”
And I wake to another day, another dawn.
(9/17/26)
Autumn meant cooler days—
picking apples from the trees
or helping pack them
in boxes.
Mostly Granny Smiths:
firm, green apples
made for hot apple pie.
Red Delicious came
with their built-in stand;
Jonathans carried a blush
and a crisp, sweet bite.
I remember seasonal pickers
high on three-legged ladders,
canvas bags strapped
across their shoulders,
paid by the weight
they carried down.
Each apple was turned
and lifted from its branch—
stem intact,
next year’s bud
left safely on the tree.
Above us, Mount Canobolas—
an extinct volcano—
gave the orchard
its rich, dark soil,
roots drawing sweetness
into every apple.
The final threshold.
Death gives a sign,
uncertainty and unanswered questions.
A strong and steady bridge,
many have crossed it.
Listening in the emptiness,
a harp without strings.
Emotionally imperfect.
Words fail,
thoughts and feelings dominate the room.
~ without need for description
You have struggled for so long.
Accepting does not refer giving up.
The thing I never said
meant nothing,
Words cannot change the course of life.
A night without a facade,
reflecting your truth and sagacity.
You do not need to prepare.
Follow the light in soothing peace,
with unconditional acceptance.
Take a load of Aldo
My father I been
Carrying a heavy load
Full of my problems
That I keep Putting it of
Every single day
Because I never feel
Like solving my problems
On my own
And I am the one that
End up suffering
By not solving the problems
Own my own
So today I will ask my father
To give me a hand in
Solving my problems
Because my father knows me
From inside out
Because he is the one
Who had created me
Many years ago
With his holy hands
And he had placed me
Here on earth to live
And I feel blessed to
Be able to live on earth
Also you had made me
In to the men I am
I am somebody that is
Special needs
Father I already got used
To it
Also father I am always
Praying to you
I never forget to pray
To you
And in my prayer
I ask you to get rid
Of my mental illness
That I have for a long time
Now
It has been 5 years now
That I haven’t had a crisis
And I am keeping away
From the hospital
The loons haunt the sunset
Whispered warning in the darkness
Alert the fawn as it slowly sips
A last golden arrow
Pierces the edges of nightfall
Tiptoes across the silent lake
Each ripple an unseen presence
Both prey and predator
Searching for each other
The moon square dances
With its prancing shadows
Changing partners on the wind
The stars hold their applause
Lavender clung to Grammy like a familiar blessing,
a soft aura rising from her walk-in closet~
that kingdom of faux furs and pearlized buttons
where dresses hung like quiet stories waiting to be told.
I sat beside her at her dressing table,
watching the slow choreography of her bronze-brown hair
as she brushed it into its practiced sweep,
each stroke a reminder of the elegance she carried
long after her hand-model days had faded from magazines.
She tore two sheets of paper poudre,
handing one to me as if passing down a secret rite.
“Gently,” she said, and I followed her movements,
feeling the powder lift whatever childhood dust remained
from my ten-year-old cheeks, leaving them soft, matte, new.
Foundation, rouge, a whisper of plum on her lips~
then her porcelain hands folded mine inside them,
their warmth steady, their touch feather light.
“You’re a lady now,” she said; in that moment, I believed her~
believed I was becoming her lady-in-waiting,
one beautiful enough to be part of her gracious royalty.
When the night whispers your name
The silence between heartbeats
Dreams woven with stardust
Under the light of the milky moon
Every sunrise holds a promise
When the wind carries secrets
Lost in the echoes of time
Shadows dance under the moonlight
When the ocean meets the sky
In the quiet of the morning dew
The warmth of forgotten memories
In the arms of a gentle storm
When raindrops tell their stories
Lightning whispers across the sky
Embraced by the first snowfall
Under a sky painted with dreams
The melody of a distant past
When love blooms in silence
Through the lens of a fading photograph
Where do we end?
With a new beginning.
I always imagined love to be a gentle reclamation
Of all the broken pieces
Of every brick and stone
Of every hidden secret
And every skin and bone
A solitary castle, high upon the cliffside
My heart, a fortress
Am I protecting it?
It's seen days of battle, broken all around
Stones scarred and crumbling
I have held these scattered pieces
Waiting for the day
When someone comes to claim them
Rebuild it brick by brick
Back to something beautiful
Ravaged by time now,
The walls have long since crumbled
But thorny vines and spraying roses made it home again
Made a sanctuary
Love, at last.
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.