Lately, I’ve been practicing writing poetry with strict adherence to stress. Rules are made to be broken, but one has to understand the rules before one does the breaking. When I practice using stress I don’t typically have a subject in mind, so I build line by line and let the story form organically. This means my practice poems are unplanned and any imagery or meaning are coincidental, accidental, or supplied by the reader. That being said, I can’t seem to move away from a bittersweet tone, references to stars, and death. It’s just what comes out.

Today, I wrote most of a poem while sitting in the laundromat, and finished it this evening. It came easier than others, probably because I just wrote a line I thought was pretty and let the poem choose its own path based on rhyme and meter. The first line I came up with was in iambic tetrameter, so I stayed with that for the whole poem.

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This World of Ours

My time had come to meet the stars, 
To leave behind this world of ours. 
I crashed my car into a tree. 
My life, it ended suddenly.  
I lasted long enough to hear 
The sirens and to feel the fear.  
I closed my eyes, and then I slept.  
Into the darkness I was swept,
The black between the sparkling stars.  
Their liquid silver light lahars
Wound through the void and lighted it.  
I found a place where I could fit, 
And soon was shining with the rest.  
So ended my unconscious quest.  
I went to live among the stars, 
And left behind this world of ours.