“Two Strangers” – A POEM

Hey, coming at ya with some freshly made poetree. More surreal and metaphorical than most of my other poems (wait I take that back, all of them are already super metaphorical I think). But definitely more dream-like and intangible. With an interesting ABAC rhyme scheme, where only two of the four lines rhyme. Perhaps that does something in the way of propagating the story content of the poem, where there’s organization and reason to events, but at the same time, an ungraspable abstraction.

Yes, the structure of a poem can portray something about the conceptual, the ideas being expressed within writing, sometimes:

“Two Strangers”

By Michael Metzler Jr.

I met two strangers in the street
With faces masked in shadow cloth
With hat brims pulled in dark deceit,
They passed me by in muffled tones.

The face of one I thought I knew
Though features hid in tar of night
How could I know that it was you,
That night you passed me in the street?

Two words I caught, the others lost
“No time,” it said, before they left.
With breath becoming quickly frost,
No choice had I but carry on.

What can I do, but contemplate,
Throughout my days, unbidden,
How then untimely was your fate,
The day you left it all behind.

For years I’d stand still at your grave,
Imagine words I’d like to say.
What words can I, like those you gave,
The ones I thought forever gone?

Perhaps some parting good advice,
Before you left all those you knew?
Some respite from this mortal storm,
Where answers sought are hidden?

Just when I had resigned my mind
To quiet fate of ignorance,
A memory I’d left behind
Met me walking down the street.

I met two strangers in the street,
With faces masked in dead of night;
The hat brims were not of deceit,
And though one spoke in muffled tones,

Two words I caught, the others lost,
“No time,” it said.

the end