Free Verse
Free verse poetry uses the features of poetry on a micro level, but not a macro level. Unlike prose poetry, it still consists of lines and stanzas and often includes deliberate use of meter, syllable measurement, and/or rhyme locally, but not globally (as opposed to blank verse, which uses a global meter or pattern of meters, but not necessarily any rhyme).
Poems
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2026-01-20
Not a blot of silence on all the pages of all the dictionaries in all the worlds.
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2026-01-04
in anything, everything
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2025-12-31
black trees cut white contrails cut blue sky; the year ends in tatters ends up in many hands sewn together again to make something
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2025-11-02
blue blood waving red flags patched with white rags
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2025-10-23
God blessed our Policeman Whose head is as big as his heart, And fingers as few as his fears.
Very closely based on a fragment. I went back and forth on whether to add another couplet and I had some pretty insulting stuff but I felt like less was more in this case.
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2025-10-13
The distance between two people is always shorter than a straight line.
This started off as a geometry shitpost and then I changed “points” to “people” and suddenly it Acquired Meaning, or interpretability I guess.
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2025-10-11
Walk the glass maze Where every destination Sings like a lighthouse, mad and frantic But every path is visible Only in cracks And chips and Stains.
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2025-10-02
dry light smoothes out the scrimshaw skyline where bones of clouds fell down aeons ago this morning
At first I tried to write this as a septolet, but I didn't like how the format affected the phrasing, so I wrote this in a more free form instead. Later I went back and wrote it up in septolet form just to see how it'd work. I still prefer this free-verse version, though.
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2025-09-27
God's own Fall Gives the church Food for thought
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2025-09-25
InterviewAround we go, The scholars' city there between Our rails, Our interview devoid of meaning, Only questions for those who don't want answers, Only to capture prismatically The crafted timbre of my voice For all eternity Until God blows the servers out.
This started as a crooked quad, then broke out at the last second and turned into something else.
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2025-09-25
Dry rain gathers in waves; Trees undress in the red sky.
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2025-09-22
time did not forget the stones; they forgot time
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2025-09-17
strewn berries crushed by feet of people passing by; the old ways neither live nor die
Originally the second and third lines didn't rhyme, but I re-arranged “passing people” into “people passing by”.
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2025-08-01
the oak outlives the ivy, carries its corpse, thin fingers creeping into every mossy crevice forever
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2025-06-06
Gaining altitude Heading for the city of lights Hanging from the clouds, Windshear rips the wings apart And folds an elegant menagerie Of green-eyed Scrap-hearted Creature features From the wreckage— Flying.
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2025-06-04
A cloud's not a thing in itself, but a place where the all-pervading water of life consents to be seen.
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2025-06-02
daisies stretch their necks to better see the cars an inch away
Could almost be a Kelly lune but for the two extra syllables.
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2025-06-02
crowds of wheat embrace the sun and brown in soft devotion
This has a vaguely hymn-like quality, I think?
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2025-05-26
a silvered soft cat stiffly grooms himself on the empty patio the flower pots, too heavy for my mother's hands, are all gone
Reworked from a septolet written the same day. I also tried to make this one a tanka, but I couldn't quite condense it enough. Maybe some other time.
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2025-05-15
Gusts Come screaming, Dip their beaks in rust, And catch electric glow-worms Burrowed in the rings Of burnt-out Cars.
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2025-04-09
There's a town no-one remembers, And because no-one remembers, No-one can forget.
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2025-04-02
For stones The place is always “here”, The time is always “now”, It's always a good day to die, And, breaking, be reborn.
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2025-04-01
I want you to ruin me— Apocalyptically— Plant a new garden in me Where only your flowers grow.
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2025-03-25
Mutter Pearls of argument long lost Into the wild reeds Bandage up my donkey ears And go home.
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2025-03-15
RailsYou can't Join up a country By carving up the land.
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2024-11-22
They're digging great holes in your mind, and though I don't know what they're after, I hope you take it far away to those distant dusty spires and come back with hatchet held high.
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2023-09-26
Stone Words WalkThere's only two things that survive The most powerful energy known to man: The Weapons and the Words. Old Man, I feel sad. The good life is gone, gone. The world's gone to hell, we all know it, But nobody Knows what to do about it. The sun stays up all night, but the blackness don't quit. What do you do, young scholar, When you've fought all the battles that you could And got nowhere? I'll take the story of everyone Whose most profound fear was being forgotten, The stories of everyone Who saw death's face and knew That dying right is something you need to build for yourself.
The opening poem from my tiny solo exploration analog game Stone Words Walk, which is nominally about wandering around “monuments” in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. In 2020 or so there was a brief TTRPG trend where you'd dump all the names of things you'd made into “Talk To Transformer”, a web interface for an early GPT model; it'd spit out a bunch of names in the same vein and you'd make something using one of those names. Anyway, I ran it a few times and one of the outputs was a long, rambling series of lines that I re-arranged a bunch in cut-up style to get this free-verse dialogue. I kept it around for years before eventually including it in this game, since the game matched the themes in the text itself and my act of chopping and changing to build meaning.
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2023-01-25
Black Star BoltDEATH RACE ON DEAD PLANET UNDER FURIOUS STAR SPEWING DARKNESS ORGY OF VEHICULAR VIOLENCE WHAT GORGEOUS ALCHEMY MAKES FIRE AND LIGHTNING OF CRUDE / SAINTS AND HEROES OF KILLERS? DON'T ANSWER THAT LET'S DIE NOW! TOTAL CATASTROPHONY!
The opening poem from Black Star Bolt, a sci-horror death race incursion (scenario/adventure) for the eco-horror game Trophy Dark, included in my collection Dark Tidings. It's basically ad spiel/competitor invitation.
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2020-06-06
The Grand Dating GameWhat's your favourite moon? Should countries need the the moon's approval to declare war? What's your favourite moon? Should the moon be given “human” rights? Full moon or crescent moon? Is the moon real? What's your favourite moon? Do you think most people would like to be like the moon? Is it morally acceptable to clone the moon? Has the moon gone too far? What's your favourite holiday moon? Gibbous moon or new moon? Would the moon want to contact us if they saw the internet? Normal moon or supermoon? Do moons have a duty to help one another? Clear moon or cloud-wreathed moon? Do different people see the same moon? Should moon healthcare be a human right? Howling at the moon or gazing at the moon? How important is the moon in your relationships? What's your favourite moon crater? Could a wood chuck chuck the moon if it wanted to? Is the moon political? Harvest moon or blue moon? What's your favourite form of moonbeam? Is it okay to be married to the moon? What's your favourite moon? Moon or moon? What's your favourite moon? Is it okay to steal money from the moon? Is voting an effective way to change moon phases? Eat the moon or live the moon?
A kinda cheap poem, because I made it by taking questions you might ask in my analog dating game Over the Moon, about two moon-obsessives meeting each other on an old-school dating site. This part of the game's a bunch of questions along the lines of “ketchup or mayo?” and “should apes be given ‘human’ rights?” inspired by stuff I read once in a blog post by OkCupid staff about the weird questions they let people pose on their site. The in-game gimmick is that, depending on the situation, you swap key words and phrases for ”the moon” and other moon-related stuff.
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2020-03-18
Ticketlets me in lets me out shows me wonder all about [or] the laws of entry demean and diminish they keep you out you break them down
I wrote this years ago on twitter for Deckjam 2, a jam to make Spindlewheel cards organised by Ben Roswell that was later collected in the Twine game Luminous Knife by Samantha Day. The Spindlewheel deck (originally created by Sasha Reneau) is basically a Tarot-style deck; each card has one name with two prompts of three-to-four short lines of text, with the prompts complementing or contrasting one another. There's a variety of analog games that use it as a more varied and contemporary oracle.
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2019-11-11
You in Medon't worry about me we're not so far away just write to me and I'll tell you what you know I'd say
Part of You in Me, a postcard-sized game that can be found in my itch.io catch-all. It's a 2-player analog game about two soldiers who know each other very well (maybe gay lovers?) writing letters to each other in the First World War; you take turns writing, and whoever's not writing basically plays their character but as a voice in the writer's head.