At first, my heart made treaty with the night,
Bearing my own soft chains as bracelets worn;
I shaded candle, called the coward light,
And flattered dark as if indulgence sworn;
Yet thine own whispers, Soul, like trumpets blew,
And bid me face the field I fled and rue.
conquer

For valor, taught by fear, turns back to charge:
I steeled my pulse, and ran into the roar;
The griffin Doubt spread shadow-wings at large,
And Envy hissed behind her iron door;
I kissed the blade that hunted me before,
And found it grew a key to Freedom's store.
conquer

I drilled my passions as unruly bands,
Set hunger's pikes and made sloth stand to rank;
I gave my rages seals and stern commands,
And banished drowsy peace from every flank;
My breast the drum; my breath the iron thump,
Till inward blasts made outward ramparts slump.
conquer

Then night grew velvet to my tempered skin;
The raven hours perched tame upon my glove;
Grief, like a sullen page, was sent within
To oil the mail and buckle Hope above;
Then counsel, feathered white, descended—dove;
And armed me all in calm, and all in love.
conquer

Forth went I then, cuirassed with gentle might,
Where kingdoms trade in thunder, streets in spite;
The world's black market whispered terms of night,
And rumor loosed her jackals for delight;
But I, re-nerved, ran to the cannon's glare,
And fear, outflanked, forsook her ancient lair.
conquer

I stormed the courts where flatteries are crowned,
Met gold with gaze that would not bend nor bow;
I marched through temples, tore the velvet sound
From incense thick as cloud on Sinai's brow;
I courted storm, made treaty with the Now,
And signed with blood the covenant of vow.
conquer

At last, the Dark that hunted all my ways
Kneeled like a charger, pawing to be led;
I bridled midnight with a comet's blaze,
And wore its star-shot banner for my head;
Night served like wine; I poured it, warm and red,
And slept a captain on its sable bed.
conquer

O friend that reads me by a trembling flame,
Thy midnights, too, have pressed a jealous brow;
Run at thy wolf; compel him bear thy name;
Take flame for comrade; make the moment bow;
Let tears baptize thy helm; let sinews plough;
And we shall sound one bugle from the prow.
conquer

Come, take my gauntlet; lash thy pulse with mine;
We'll hunt the dark that lingers on the plain;
Our double-heart shall set the stars in line,
And ride like dawn through every bastioned pain;
The world, once legion-named, shall bow its mane,
And we, one soul in two bright helms, shall reign.
one word we breathe upon the world,
conquer.

-- Jeffrey Phillips Freeman

I wanted to try a rhyming poem in an old sounding language that was inspiring based on the concept of conquering ones self allows one to conquer the world.

Just for some background, I specifically wanted to replicate the Cavalier/early‑modern style of poetry. So aside from the older style of language I also tried to personify abstract concepts like Doubt, which were typically capitalized during this era of poetry. Which might explain some of the odd use of capitalization.

Beloved,
tonight I bring my whole foolish republic
to the wide republic of your chest.

I arrive with my cheek as a petition,
my mouth as a signature of heat,
my hands two humble ministers
negotiating treaties of warmth beneath your breath.
Under your collarbone—the border—
I declare myself citizen.

Your chest:
not a prize but a province;
not inventory, but invitation.
It is the law of hush, the senate of pulse,
two round parliaments of tenderness convened by your breathing.
I attend every session with my ear.

I say ridiculous things because desire is ridiculous:
I would pay taxes in kisses,
file for residency under your buttons,
build a small embassy of fingers
in the soft diplomatic valley where my worries surrender their passports.
Stamp me again, and again—
let the paper of my skin carry your warm visa.

Your chest is a bakery of heat.
I come hungry; I leave crumbed with light.
Your chest is a pair of amphorae
pouring patience into my restless noon.
Your chest is a shore where my storm
learns to speak in smaller waves.

I study its geography without stealing it:
the bridge of bone where my breath becomes careful,
the slow hill of rising air where I climb with my lips,
the wide plain where my palm finds its country of yes.
I measure nothing—
the amplitude teaches me surrender by itself.

I tell the truth:
I want the furnace of your chest,
its tender weight, its living pull—
the way warmth gathers beneath cotton and becomes a secret orchard.
I want to read with my mouth,
slowly, the patient alphabet written there:
letter by letter, breath by breath,
until every vowel turns to honey in your name.

Listen—your heart is a bell under evening,
and I am the village that stops to hear it.
The sound enters my jaw,
travels to the stubborn rooms that speak in coins and headlines,
and tells them: be quiet, she is here.
The rooms obey.

Your chest is bread that remembers the oven;
my worry breaks open on its softness and goes still.
Your chest is night’s mantel—
I slip beneath and my hands become reasonable.
Your chest is the book I re-read with joyous impatience,
skipping to the good parts:
the heat, the hush, the little thunder that says continue.

Absurd? Yes.
I wish to mortgage the moon to buy more time there.
I wish to appoint your chest Minister of Mornings.
I wish to rename the calendar after its textures:
Silkday, Hearthday, Lantern-eve.
I wish to place a tiny ladder on your sternum,
and climb until my mouth finds the windy balcony of your breath.

When you laugh, the field trembles:
wheat under sudden wind,
and my hunger scatters into a thousand bright birds
that all dive back to the same warm nest.
When you sigh, the lamp leans closer.
When you say my name,
your chest pronounces it twice,
and both pronunciations burn through me like cinnamon and sun.

Let me be clear, without hunger’s mask:
I love your mind, the builder of windows;
your voice, a clear street through night;
your kindness, the city where I live without fear—
and I love your large, generous chest
because it houses those cities and keeps their lamps alive;
because it offers my face a country of forgiveness;
because it answers every foolish vow with heat and shelter.

Here is the economy we practice:
I pay with breath;
you give me change in warmth.
I press my ear to your left horizon
and the sea inside you presses back.
We bargain in whispers;
we settle in heat.

Let others praise meteors and crowns—
I praise the double lantern of your chest,
how it makes night negotiable.
Let the bed be our parliament,
the sheets our acts of law;
your chest, my only constitution.

Afterward—after the sparks,
after the honest labor of closeness—
I rest there, face to sanctum, and the world recedes
like a loud market closing its doors.
Your scent—sleep, salt, cotton—
signs its name across my cheek.
I keep the signature.

And if I am extravagant with adoration,
forgive me; gratitude has poor table manners.
I will send postcards from your collarbone,
ink them with steam,
and in the place for the stamp I will press my mouth,
hot and slow,
until the message arrives:
I am home.

Beloved, I pledge myself to this ordinance:
two breaths, one after the other,
exchanging a small fever until even the dark feels welcomed.
In the wide, tender country of your chest,
I am not improved.
I am made human—
and the room learns how to burn gently.

-- Jeffrey Phillips Freeman

I was challenged with writing an obsessive and lustful poem about a man obsessed with a woman's breasts. This was the result.

When the hush first sparks—
skin kindles skin,
a struck match in the midnight orchard;
sap races, petals burn, hunger sings in the bone.
Each heartbeat is a drum that forgets tomorrow.
In this bright furnace nothing exists but flame,
and even the flame forgets itself.

Then the music of weathering:
two currents curl into one river,
water tasting water, naming itself anew.
Morning’s hush fills the house like warm bread;
fingers trace a map across shoulders—
soft cartography of laughter, salt, and sleep.
Yet feelings, like tides, lean on the moon:
one silver change in the sky and they withdraw,
leaving bright shells that crack between bare feet.

So the hands learn truer speech than the mouth.
They lift the roof beam,
gather the shattered glass,
teach the garden to dream in winter.
The pulse no longer begs for thunder;
it steadies into the simple rhythm of roofs that do not leak,
of chairs pulled close against the long wind.
Here, devotion is measured in how quietly
a door closes at midnight,
how surely a light is left burning.

And farther—beyond the orchard and the river—
wide night opens its immeasurable wings.
I know no country but this joining
where the border of “I” thins to breathable air,
and your palm on my chest beats inside my wrist,
and your lashes settle when my own eyes surrender to dream.
In that vastness, pulse answers pulse,
the way constellations borrow fire from the same black silk:
each spark fiercely itself, all sparks the same blaze.

Yet there arrives a season
when the most faithful act is distance:
to loosen the knot, step back from the blossoming tree
so its roots may drink unshadowed rain.
Care is a silent pilgrim—it walks whether watched or not.
I carry the thought of your morning across whole deserts of days,
weighing each step against the color of dawn.
If the path that guards your sunrise curves away from mine,
I will still kindle lanterns along it,
warming myself by their light even as I vanish beyond the dunes.

Still, the circle confounds—
what pours from the heart also fills it,
the well deeper for each bucket drawn.
To hold another’s becoming is to steady one’s own—
stone lending strength to stone in the arch.
And the great engine of the stars is nothing more
than this relentless giving:
fusion that spends itself into radiance,
glad of the heat, indifferent to applause.

When the storm of wanting passes,
what remains is the quiet mast that outlasts tempests—
wood seasoned by countless dawns,
firm enough to tie a sail to,
wise enough to release the rope
when the wind turns toward a farther shore.

-- Jeffrey Phillips Freeman

Another poem I just wrote as I reflect on the meaning of love.

I arrived to you as a harbor battered by its own waves,
salt‑scored, muttering to gulls that never answered.
In your quiet courtyard my storms fell silent—
we planted lemons in the clay and their small roots
took hold the way forgiveness does: unseen, unhurried.

I walked the corridors of myself, lantern lifted,
so the dark could witness me no different
than the noon‑bright street.
Each shadow I carried bent to its knees,
learning the discipline of light.
I saw the old currents of impulse go quiet,
not hushed by force but eased by vigilance.

I traced the geometry of hearts:
how delicately they tilt toward ruin.
Still I braced their trembling arches
with words braided from breath and vow,
hoisting strangers’ mornings on my shoulders
though their replies fell cold and unyielding.

A silence grew intelligent between us—
naming absences, polishing regret—
the error named is already softer.
I studied its chipped syllables like a scholar
rubbing dust from a shard of amphora,
footnoting apology upon each fracture
forging now a lexicon of healing.

I stood naked before my own pulse,
counting each weakness the way a diver
counts breaths before the plunge:
one for fear, one for pride,
another for the hot coal of a hasty tongue.
Yet I did not turn away; the sea was instruction,
its pressure a promise to surface true.

And I loved—God, I loved—
with a rope that had no knots for pulling away.
I gave breadth, I gave shelter,
but would not barter the marrow of my tenderness
for hands careless with its fragility.
When neglect arrived dressed as devotion,
I slipped my name from that weave of thorns.

The horizon blistered, then brightened—
metal sundered into light.
I gathered yesterday’s shards,
turned them until they glittered,
and stitched them into the lining of the coat I would wear to leave.

So here is my leaving:
not a retreating tide, but a river
reaching its mouth—salty, yes,
yet opening to a vaster blue.
I walk, cedar‑scented, luminous with bruise,
my pockets filled with unspent dawns.
I call this heartbreak, and I call it victory,
for I am the man who learned
to guard the world from his own storms,
to stand readable as daylight,
to lift, to care, to cradle, to mend,
to declare his cracked places,
to sprint toward the roar in the dark,
to sharpen his wondering mind,
and to love without chains—
while never again accepting iron
masquerading as a kiss.

I keep the lemons thriving.
Their blossoms remind the night air
that bitterness, too, can flower.

-- Jeffrey Phillips Freeman

Been a few months since my last poem, just had too many emotions to express them any other way this evening. I hope you all enjoy.

When the earth held its breath,
and the trees stopped speaking in green,
I found your shadow pressed into the silence—
not like absence,
but like the memory of warmth
left in a chair
after someone has risen.

I did not call your name.
It was already there,
inscribed beneath the skin of rain,
folded into the hush of wheat fields
bowing under the weight of their gold.
Even the wind carried you—
not as sound,
but as the echo of longing
before the voice has formed.

There were no angels.
Only the dust rising
from the soles of tired workers
who knew love by its weight,
not its wings.
And still, the sun leaned low,
willing to touch the dirt
just to reach us.

You were the breath I took
before understanding what it meant
to be hollow
and still full.
You were the salt in my wound
that sang.

Oh, what a terrible, beautiful thing—
to be stitched into another’s silence.
To be the ache
someone calls home.
To carry within you
the whole cathedral of their absence,
lit by nothing
but the soft, persistent flame
of remembering.

And still—
I would carry it.
The ache, the salt,
the tender ruins of your voice
crumbling somewhere
between my ribs.

I would carry it
into the next life
and the next,
and the next—
not because I must,
but because
even grief
was more beautiful
with you in it.

-- Jeffrey Freeman

A poem I just wrote as I sit here missing Noi Noi. She is so far away its hard, but I hope to see her soon.