There are moments when a poem cracks me open like an egg, when language arranges itself into patterns that feel like recognition, like someone reaching across time to press their palm against mine. These are the poems I want to share here—when inspiration descends and time stretches enough to hold it.
I'll mostly inhabit the landscape of classic verse, the poems that have aged into public domain, their copyright chains dissolved by decades. Not because modern poetry doesn't sing to me—it does, God, it does—but because the legalities are simpler when the poets are long dead, when their words belong to everyone and no one.
A necessary aside, a disclaimer that tastes like dust in my mouth but must be said: I own no rights to these poems. Not a single syllable. I share them under fair use, that fragile umbrella that protects education and discussion, the examination of what moves us. This is a classroom with no walls, a conversation about beauty that anyone can join.
What you'll find here will be subjective, biased, mine. I'm drawn to certain images, certain rhythms, the verses that lodge themselves in my ribcage and refuse to leave. This collection will map my interior landscape more than any objective survey of "important" poetry. I'm not a scholar—I'm a body that responds to language, a heart that recognizes itself in certain arrangements of words.
This first poem arrived because October is pulling itself over the world like a veil, because the harvest moon hangs fat and golden in the darkening sky, because autumn makes me feel everything at once. The season when things die beautifully, when decay becomes art, when the air itself tastes like memory and smoke.
So here. The first offering. A poem that found me, or maybe I found it, in this liminal time when summer bleeds into fall and the world remembers how to let go.
Under the Harvest Moon: A Solitary Reckoning
Sandburg's moon hangs like a two-faced bartender—pouring silver with one hand, slipping cyanide with the other. I gathered around this poem like a moth to a porch light, seeing my own reflection in that harvest glow, recognizing the knife edge hidden in the beauty.
The moon is a double agent. Silver tongue, switchblade in silk. It kisses my cheek while cutting me open, and I felt it—that particular violence of something beautiful that won't let me look away. Love's little hands aren't cradling anything; they're striking matches, flicking lighters under my ribs, pick-pocketing memories from the spaces between my bones. Those wild red leaves aren't just flagrant—they're flammable. They're every ending dressed up in its best colors, every death wearing friendship's face like an ex who still texts at 2 a.m.
But it's that line—asks you beautiful, unanswerable questions—that splits me open like ripe fruit. That's the whole covenant right there, the thing I keep trading back and forth with the universe: questions I can't answer, riddles scribbled on scraps of paper, moonlit admissions that I'm haunted. I don't answer; I just keep asking louder, keeping myself alive by refusing to pretend I know.
The Deaths I'm Counting
Fall is a funeral, but which corpse am I mourning? I saw multiple bodies laid out in that silver light.
The death of staying stale—of recycling the same patterns until they wear grooves into my bones, of choosing the familiar ache over the terrifying possibility of becoming. The death of the girl who was young, coddled, terrified of her own wildness. The death of whoever I was before I understood that staying safe is its own kind of violence, that preservation can be a slow rot dressed up as wisdom.
The harvest moon is a mirror—silver, cracked, honest. It shows every bruise I've been hiding, every version of myself I'm ready to let compost into something fertile. The one who kept the door open for ghosts because at least ghosts are predictable. The daughter who made herself small to fit inside someone else's blueprint. The artist who whispered when she should have howled.
That moon hands out unanswerable eviction notices: Stay stale or step into something raw and real? Keep performing the acceptable version or finally strip down to the wild, messy truth of who I actually am? The person I've been playing is dying under that silver light, and I can either mourn her or let her burn.
Why "Under the Harvest Moon"
Sandburg parked the poem there—in that specific silver light—so I'd feel the choice crystallizing in my hands. The harvest moon is the last lantern before winter demands we either preserve what we've gathered or let it rot. It's the final illumination before everything goes dormant or transforms.
It's the last slow dance before frost cuts in, before the season forces the question: what are you bringing into the dark months, and what are you leaving to fertilize the soil?
He named it that because even stagnation deserves to be seen clearly. That moon makes staleness visible—shows me exactly what I've been clutching, what I've been too afraid to release. Because it's the season when everything's ripe enough to either be harvested into something new or left to decay into what it always was. I stack my old selves like corn stalks and have to decide: are they beautiful relics or just dead weight?
The title is a dare. Step under that moon and admit what's been rotting. Stand in that silver spotlight and choose—stay preserved in amber or step into the messy, gorgeous work of becoming something more authentically mine.
The Final Question
I'm standing under that harvest light now, feeling it bleed silver over my scars, my ink-stained hands, my cracked-open heart. The moon keeps asking its beautiful, unanswerable questions, and I keep turning them over like tarot cards, like promises I'm almost brave enough to make.
Do I stay stale—familiar, safe, slowly suffocating in my own comfort? Or do I step into something new, something that tastes like my own voice unfiltered, my own vision uncompromising? Do I keep being the palatable version or finally become the wild, weird, unpolished thing I am when no one's watching?
The moon doesn't care about my fear. It just hangs there—switchblade and silk, prophet and poison—daring me to choose transformation over preservation, to say yes to the version of myself that's been clawing at the door, to walk into whatever strange and sacred territory I've been circling.
The harvest moon is burning. I'm dying to step into whatever comes next—the art that's too honest, the words that are too raw, the life that's too big for the box I've been living in.
Even if it costs me the comfort of being understood. Even if it means becoming unrecognizable to everyone who knew the tame version.
I'm ready to be more me. The moon is watching. The season is turning.
It's time.