A dramatic monologue—a poem in the voice, and therefore from the perspective, of your unnamed speaker.


Grace

I am here when she wakes,
bruised and pale.
Her tangled hair covers her eyes.
She lies silent,
but she doesn’t hear me.

She leaves,
walks past the beauty around her.
Deaf to the birds’ song.
Blind to the blooming tree,
and she doesn’t see me.

She gives her body to him,
battered and bruised,
for a bag of rocks.
My hand is on her shoulder,
but she doesn’t feel me.

She smokes,
shakes and convulses.
Her eyes roll back in her head.
She falls down to the floor,
and I love her.

A 10+ line poem that employs rhetorical patterning to maximal effect. There are no restrictions on subject and none on style, save that end rhyme is forbidden and punctuation obligatory.

 
Too Late
 
A whisper in the night,
A dull tone in my core,
A distance, a longing
I still refused to see.

He stole my song of solace,
He severed my sense of self,
He silenced my psalm of spirit,
‘til
nothing
was
left
of
me.

A 10-Line poem – on any subject and in any style – that uses striking, vivid imagery both evocatively and symbolically.

The Red Eye

Two drained wine bottles litter the kitchen table
One fallen over, clearly not as stable

His phone that never leaves his side lies abandoned there beside them,
And blinks a warning siren of the coming colliding mayhem

An unknown sweet jasmine scent mixed with warm caramel
Suffocates me as I climb the stairs praying for our survival

My bedroom door ajar, my sanctuary breached
Hell’s gate to a life alone I must endure before I reach


In the coming weeks I’ll wonder, what was less expected
My catching the red eye home, or this woman he has slept with