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

2026-01-04
```
in anything,
everything
```
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.
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.

2025-10-11

Walk the glass maze
Where every destination
Beams like a lighthouse, mad and frantic
But every path is visible
Only in cracks
And chips and
Stains.

2025-10-02

dry light
smoothes out the scrimshaw skyline
where bones of clouds fell down
aeons ago
this morning

2025-04-15
```
snow drifts scurry;
fox footfalls follow
to gaps in the maps
```
An experiment with consonance, assonance, alliteration, and (internal) rhyme that I originally put in haiku. Ultimately, it doesn't feel right there—too magical.

2025-04-09

There's a town no-one remembers,
And because no-one remembers,
No-one can forget.

2025-04-01

I want you to ruin me—
Apocalyptically—
Plant a new garden in me
Where only your flowers grow.

2025-03-15
Rails

You can't
Join up a country
By carving up the land.

2023-09-26
Stone Words Walk
```
There'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.

2023-01-25
Black Star Bolt

DEATH 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.

2020-03-18
Ticket
```
lets 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.
2019-11-11
You in Me
```
don'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.