Don’t rhyme. Don’t write about love.
Rules of modern poetry—old fashioned
They said, and too obvious—3000 years of
Verse have lighted enough the impassioned
And left us nothing new

If I am to write about us now, my love
It’s best I focus on some telling narrative
Craft a symbol of us from the dust and move
The Reader by some ineffable imperative
Of form rather than formalism

You can see how romantic this is, sure
Explaining modern nuances of verse
As though Shakespeare does not endure
Or Byron—oh, Byron!—vanished in the hearse
But irony at least still lives

So let’s do it all, love—twas always our plan
Let’s do it all, love—break all the rules we can:

.                 Telling Narrative
.                 Once upon a time, lovers unlikely met
.                 And destiny weighed heavy upon them
.                 He, overdue, was not quite a man yet
.                 She, moonlight, magic too advanced for him

.                 Symbol of Us
.                 In the creekbed we found the strangest of stones
.                 Amorphous, unidentified, the fossilized imprint
.                 As old as our re-entwining souls—the silent moans
.                 Of a feathered fern likely extinct, its spiral indent
.                 Echoing from a place we know but can’t speak of
.                 We made love, took it home, made love some more
.                 We laid it at the threshold, a symbol of our love
.                 Perfectly imperfect, gorgeous testament of evermore

-Jason Lee Miller