Cars file in and pack this field tight,
at dusk the midnight show begins.
Popcorn addicts at the Drive-ins
howl and get wild opening night.
Looking to be fed a fresh fright,
that scene seen before will not do.
A monster comes to the rescue
before you know what’s happening.
No motive can be maddening,
that jump scare was past overdue.
I
Am
The
Word
Dream
Before
Gaining
Momentum
(Naani).
Rat race compete!
Abstract clocks we beat,
Measured by humanity vanishing.
You're old, Father Time.....
Due to the vast amount he ate and the waste he produced,
and the scarcity of visitors interested in watching him,
the zoo administration decided to get rid of the old gorilla
and place him in an isolated cage for the rest of his life.
The sun climbs the glass-faced towers, Mist rises from ploughed paddocks.
Buses exhale diesel into the air, Fresh-turned earth lifts its dark, clean scent.
Coffee and pastries tumble into the street, Dew beads cold along the crushed grass.
My shoes kick paper from the pavement, My boots wake dust from the track.
A siren threads its needle through traffic, A kookaburra cracks the stillness.
Rain blurs the lines of the streets, Rain wakes the sharp smell of earth.
Fences divide the street from home, Fence lines loosen into distance.
At night, the city refuses darkness; At night, the stars reclaim the sky.
I look between the towers for one clear star, I look down the road for one clear light.
Out of my window
I see a robin,
Proud red breasted bird,
He's in my garden
Hopping and chirping,
No care in the world.
Hush in the daylight,
Tranquil in the night,
Time colours the sky,
Different portraits,
Different seasons,
So is my journey.
October 1, 2026,
Nette Onclaud,
Color My World Poetry Contest.
It sort of feels like what’s blurry is real,
roses and death’s-head moths breeding.
Oh magic mirror hanging on the wall,
please rid my mind of contamination.
Thick fog creates distorted verities.
Right becomes left and left is now right.
I must win this fight, confusion is war.
Second guesses, incomplete sentences
on purpose an important bite left out.
In a flat spin with your hands held up,
it sort of feels like what’s blurry is real.
Right becomes left and left is now right,
without a compass I’m completely lost.
Magic mirror allow me to see my path.
Better yet leave my future scrambled,
there’s an addictive quality to chance.
This bond of our hearts, so deep and true,
You are mine forever, and I belong to you.
The weather tonight is a beautiful sign,
To finally whisper that your heart is mine.
I have loved you wildly, with all that I hold, Giving you my heart, a story untold.
I am lost, I am crazy, in the warmth of your grace,
My entire lifetime, I want to spend in your embrace.
This bond of our hearts, so deep and true, You are mine forever, and I belong to you.
Yet, your memories burn like a flame in the dark,
Leaving my sleepless nights without a spark. My soul yearns to talk, to hear your voice speak,
Whenever your thoughts make my defenses weak.
Without your presence, I am an unfinished song,
But with you by my side, I finally belong.
I want to live every breath watching over you, Hiding you safely in my heart, away from view.To pour out every secret I've kept inside,
And keep every promise, with nowhere to hide.
Our connection runs deeper than the oceans wide,
Everywhere I look, your face is by my side.But without you now, my world has gone gray,
Come back to me love, and bring back the day.
This bond of our hearts, so deep and true, You are mine forever, and I belong to you.
Dawn threads the hedgerow.
One pearl on grass waits.
Holding night intact.
Mist drifts through orchard.
A lone thrush stirs leaves.
Morning spends its gem.
A gum leaf lets go—
not falling,
exactly,
but trying each wind
for its name,
turning
green-side,
grey-side,
turning—
turning—
until the earth
lifts
to meet it.
Contest: Color My World
Sponsor: Nette Onclaud
Date: 01.10.2026
Early morning dew
Tangerine sky glows
Spider web glistens
Cute mirror tears hang
Dawn dewdrop necklace
Sunrise pearl dazzles
BUSH
pluvious above
capercaillie
blushes
courting
upon calcareous
becomes BODY
arterial
histology
bedfast
gripped
emptying
becomes ROCKETRY
motor
moves clockwise
now riot,
destroyed
apotheosised
Horizon lines meld,
shimmers of color;
orange rays sink low,
caress gray-blue brine:
mirrored apricot
and salmon sunset.
Faye Lanham Gibson
Copyright 9/30/2026
For Color My World poetry contest, Nette Onclaud, sponsor
Dawn paints sky scarlet,
crimson sun flecks flare
malachite meadow.
In autumn’s bronze frame
olive grass wears crown
made of dewdrop pearls.
Introduction
The pleasure of browsing the Other collection begins with uncertainty: each poem may ask you to discover a different organizing principle. Instead of approaching every entry with one fixed template in mind, readers become attentive investigators. A title, keyword, recurring sound, visual arrangement, or pattern of turns may reveal whether the poet is working with a personally invented design, an uncommon established form, or a deliberate adaptation that resists easy classification.
Read side by side, these poems can demonstrate how differently writers understand formal identity. One poet may build a compact architecture around repetition; another may rely on stanza proportions, shifting speakers, patterned imagery, or a sequence of linked movements. Some designs announce themselves immediately, while others become perceptible only after a second reading. That variety makes comparison especially rewarding: the central question is not whether every poem obeys the same blueprint, but how clearly and persuasively each poem establishes its own terms.
Browsing multiple community poems also reveals what an isolated example cannot. You can compare how much explanation a poem needs, how readily an invented pattern can be felt, and whether an unfamiliar structure intensifies the subject or merely surrounds it. Read beyond the first example and notice how each writer balances freedom with coherence. The most engaging entries invite readers to recognize an underlying design while still leaving room for surprise, emotional movement, and an individual voice.
Reading Guide
Reading this collection requires a flexible but exacting kind of attention. Because the poems may represent different uncommon, adapted, or newly created designs, comparison should begin with the evidence each poem provides. Look for repeated decisions rather than assuming that an unfamiliar feature is accidental. Then ask what those decisions contribute to the experience. As you read the community poems, try to reconstruct each poem's local contract: what does it teach you to expect, where does it fulfill that expectation, and where does it productively depart from it?
- Search for the governing pattern. Notice repeated line lengths, stanza shapes, sounds, phrases, grammatical structures, or image sequences. In an unfamiliar design, repetition helps readers perceive intention. When comparing poems, ask: at what point did I recognize the pattern, and was that recognition satisfying?
- Distinguish structure from decoration. A visible arrangement or recurring device may look striking without influencing meaning. Consider whether the design changes emphasis, pacing, or interpretation. Ask: would this poem lose emotional or intellectual force if its pattern disappeared?
- Listen for audible coherence. Even when a poem has no familiar rhyme or meter, echoes of consonants, vowels, stresses, and syntax can bind it together. Read aloud and ask: what sound principle helps this particular poem feel shaped rather than arbitrary?
- Watch how expectations are revised. Once a poem establishes a pattern, even a small variation can create surprise, hesitation, humor, or emotional pressure. Compare where different writers break their own precedents. Ask: does the departure feel purposeful, and what becomes newly important because of it?
- Follow the movement of thought or feeling. An unusual container still needs development. Trace changes in scene, speaker, tense, argument, or emotional temperature. Ask: does the structure carry the poem somewhere, or does it merely repeat its initial effect?
- Consider the role of presentation. Spacing, indentation, punctuation, capitalization, and stanza boundaries may be central to an experimental design. Ask: how would my reading change if I heard the poem without seeing the page, or saw it without hearing the poet's phrasing?
- Test the ending against the poem's own logic. Closure may complete a pattern, interrupt it, reinterpret it, or leave it deliberately open. Ask: does the final movement fulfill the expectations created earlier, or challenge them in a way the poem has earned?
After reading, describe the poem's organizing principle in your own words. Then compare that description with another entry. This practice keeps attention on how each poet interprets formal possibility rather than forcing unlike poems into a single mold.
Writing Tips
Approach a poem for this collection as both poet and form-maker. Your task is not simply to choose unusual formatting or attach a name to a draft; it is to create an intelligible relationship between subject, pattern, and reader expectation. Begin by deciding what pressure the poem needs. An inherited but less commonly listed form may provide that pressure, while a newly devised structure may let you shape it around the material. In either case, the design should help the poem discover something it could not reach as easily without it.
- Choose material that needs a particular container. Subjects involving cycles, interruption, accumulation, fragmentation, argument, or transformation often suggest structural behavior. Before drafting, ask what the experience actually does: does it return, split, narrow, accelerate, or reverse? Build or select a design that enacts that motion.
- State your private rules before you become attached to the draft. Write a brief working note describing the pattern you intend to test. This prevents the beginner's mistake of declaring accidental features to be rules after the poem is finished. Your plan can change, but each change should serve a discoverable artistic purpose.
- Give readers enough evidence to perceive intention. A pattern repeated only once may look coincidental, while a heavily repeated pattern can become mechanical. Establish the principle clearly, then decide where variation will produce emphasis. A test reader should be able to sense some governing logic without requiring a lengthy explanation.
- Do not let compliance flatten the language. If a required length, sound, or sequence produces filler, inversion, vague abstraction, or predictable phrasing, revise the sentence rather than congratulating the rule. Formal ingenuity cannot compensate for inert diction. Preserve syntax that sounds spoken by this poem's particular voice.
- Use freedom as responsibility. An open category does not remove the need for discipline; it transfers more design decisions to the poet. Limit the number of active devices. One strong relationship among sound, lineation, and thematic movement is usually more legible than several unrelated tricks competing for attention.
- Revise imagery as a developing system. Do not scatter vivid details merely to decorate the pattern. Let images recur with changed meanings, or arrange them so that each one complicates the previous image. In a newly created structure, image progression can help readers feel coherence before they consciously understand the design.
- Read for pace, not just appearance. Mark where your voice naturally pauses, rushes, or leans on a word. Compare those moments with the line and stanza boundaries. If the visual form repeatedly fights the sentence without producing useful tension, adjust the layout or rewrite the syntax.
- Make the ending answer the structural premise. Avoid stopping merely because the planned units are complete. The final movement might close a cycle, violate an established pattern, compress earlier material, or reveal why the pattern existed. Whatever strategy you choose, the ending should feel consequential rather than administratively finished.
During revision, remove the form label and ask a trusted reader to describe what they notice. Then share any relevant name or design note and ask whether it changes the reading. Listen especially for places where the pattern becomes invisible, predictable, or more interesting than the poem's subject. Finally, read the draft aloud twice: once following the punctuation and once emphasizing the line breaks. Revise until sound, pace, imagery, voice, and structure create compatible pressures rather than separate displays.
Interesting Facts
- Classification changes the reader's role. When a familiar template is unavailable, readers pay closer attention to internal evidence. Repetition, spacing, syntax, and sequence become clues from which the poem's organizing logic can be reconstructed.
- Freedom can be more demanding than restriction. A poet working without a widely recognized blueprint must decide which constraints matter and make those decisions perceptible. The challenge is not escaping rules but creating or adapting limits that produce meaningful consequences.
- An explanatory label cannot rescue an unclear design. A form name or brief note may orient the reader, but the poem still needs to embody its principle. The strongest structures can be felt through pace, recurrence, proportion, or change even before they are fully understood.
- The same departure can create opposite effects. Breaking an established pattern may register as comic surprise in one poem, grief or rupture in another, and release in a third. Its emotional meaning depends on what the poem has taught the reader to expect.
- Visual and audible identities may diverge. A poem can appear highly patterned on the page yet sound conversational when spoken, or look loose while relying on intricate sonic recurrence. Reading silently and aloud reveals whether these two experiences reinforce or challenge each other.
- Readers often remember the relationship between device and discovery. Novel arrangement alone may fade quickly. A pattern becomes memorable when its repetitions, omissions, or transformations help reveal a change in the speaker's understanding.
- Comparison broadens the idea of formal success. As you browse the poems in this collection, you may encounter inherited designs beside personal inventions and adaptations. Reading several examples shows that rigor can arise from different kinds of consistency, not from one universal appearance.
Popular Themes
Subject and structure are inseparable when a poet is using an uncommon, adapted, or self-created design. The material often suggests the behavior of the form: a recurring memory may call for returns, a divided identity for parallel voices, or an unstable event for controlled disruption. The possibilities below are literary affinities, not claims about which subjects appear most often in the collection.
- Identity beyond available labels. A poem about resisting categories can gain force from a structure that also occupies an uncertain or self-defined space. Shifts in voice, naming, or visual alignment can dramatize the tension between imposed and chosen identities.
- Transformation and threshold moments. Changes of age, relationship, belief, or circumstance suit designs that alter as they proceed. Expanding units, disappearing repetitions, or a late structural reversal can make change physically perceptible to the reader.
- Memory and reconstruction. Fragmented scenes, recurring phrases, and gaps can imitate the partial nature of recollection. A formal pattern can suggest the mind's effort to restore order, while deviations reveal what cannot be recovered cleanly.
- Private ritual and obsession. Repeated actions or thoughts benefit from recurrence with subtle variation. The structure can show whether repetition offers comfort, control, entrapment, or gradual understanding.
- Place, heritage, and linguistic inheritance. An uncommon regional or cultural design can shape how landscape, family speech, and belonging are heard. Even in a personally devised form, patterned diction or syntax may preserve the cadence of a particular community without turning the poem into explanation.
- Technology and unfamiliar realities. Subjects involving interfaces, networks, interruption, or mediated conversation may invite modular, branching, or disrupted structures. The formal behavior can embody how attention and intimacy change within those environments.
- Humor, play, and rule-making. A newly established expectation gives comic writing something to overturn. Humor becomes sharper when readers recognize the pattern just before the poem bends it, misapplies it, or delivers an unexpected final consequence.
As you read the community poems, compare writers who approach related subjects through different organizing principles. One poet may represent memory through fragments, another through exact recurrence, and another through a gradually changing sequence. The theme matters, but the chosen structure determines how the reader encounters it.
Editorial Insights
The central artistic tension in this collection is freedom versus legibility. A poem may arrive without the shared expectations supplied by a widely recognized template, yet it still needs to create an experience of intention. Too little pattern and the form can seem accidental; too much insistence and the poem begins to resemble a demonstration. Memorable work finds a middle ground in which readers recognize an organizing intelligence but continue to feel discovery. The poem teaches its own method gradually, giving the audience enough orientation to notice when a repetition deepens, a sequence turns, or an apparent rule is broken.
Structure feels necessary when it arises from the subject's behavior. A poem about fixation may circle the same phrase while altering its context; a poem about fracture may divide syntax across spaces that cannot be crossed smoothly. In such cases, the design does more than package meaning: it becomes part of the meaning-making process. Editors and attentive readers notice whether formal decisions direct emphasis, manage silence, pace revelation, and shape emotional pressure. They also notice whether the language remains alive inside the system. A demanding pattern is valuable only when it sharpens diction, imagery, and thought rather than forcing filler or unnatural phrasing.
Common weaknesses often begin with an idea of novelty detached from development. Visual display can substitute for movement. Mechanical patterning can make every unit perform the same task. Forced language may expose the poet's struggle to satisfy a private rule, while over-explanation can deny readers the pleasure of discovering that rule. Another risk is insufficient development: the structural premise is introduced but never complicated, so the poem ends after proving that its device exists. Strong revision asks what changes because the pattern continues. Does recurrence gather emotional weight? Does variation alter our understanding? Does the ending transform what came before?
Individuality remains visible through the choices no template can settle: the temperature of the voice, the specificity of images, the placement of silence, the degree of disclosure, and the timing of surprise. Even poets using similar constraints can create radically different experiences because they establish different relationships with the reader. Comparing multiple community poems develops judgment more effectively than treating one entry as a universal model. It allows readers to separate novelty from necessity, consistency from rigidity, and obscurity from productive mystery. The lasting question is not simply whether a poem has an identifiable design, but whether that design enables language, feeling, and thought to become more exact.
Read, Write & Share
Read several community poems before settling on an idea of what belongs here. Compare how each poet establishes an unfamiliar pattern, adapts an existing practice, or makes freedom feel deliberate. When a poem holds your attention, leave a thoughtful comment about a specific turn, sound, image, structural choice, or ending; such observations help form a genuine conversation rather than a simple verdict.
Then try designing or adapting a structure for material that needs it. Test the poem aloud, revise until its organizing principle strengthens the language, and publish your own contribution on PoetrySoup. Your interpretation can give other readers another possibility to consider.
Collection Statistics
This collection contains 22 poems, offering multiple opportunities to compare how writers handle work that does not rest within a single familiar template. Some poets may follow an inherited design that lacks a separate collection label, while others may adapt conventions or challenge them through a personally constructed pattern. Because the organizing principles can differ, readers can compare not only finished effects but also how clearly each poem establishes expectations, develops them, and makes variation meaningful.
Sub Categories
Definition | What is Other 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.