Unconventional Grammar, Reimagined

Below are takes on five iconic poems—each tweaked per your prompts and showcasing their signature grammatical play.

1. e. e. cummings (no capitals, loose syntax)

since l o n g i n g is first

who counts the d r o p of dawn

t'will never brush your wings

in tender blinks…

i c a r r y your echo

through twilight's soft— blown sigh

and lips forget the grammar

that reason must deny— blown sigh

– drops all capitals, collapses punctuation into line breaks, and inverts expected word order to foreground emotion over form.

"Silence" —is the pause between stars—

That settles on worn Rooms—

It steals the haste of morning—

"Joy" —is that feathered thing—

That clings to fractured Light—

It sings—though Words may falter

And never—takes to Flight—

– liberally uses em-dashes to interrupt and fragment the line, inviting the reader into the poem’s breath and space.

i caught the sun-swirl’s sudden-song—

Raw-joy riot on dawn’s dewy wing;

Life’s lance-light dances—bold and long—

In dapple-dawn-drawn reckoning.

Heart-hoist, soul-spark, sky-sinew tight,

Wielding wonder’s welt and wake;

Every breath a blaze of bright,

Deep-cracked joy no night can shake.

– invents stacked compounds (“dapple-dawn-drawn dawn-kestrel”) and employs a tight, accented rhythm that upends conventional meter.

so much depends

upon

a yellow

raincoat

a single flame

in ash

a silent breath

unheld

– strips away punctuation, uses extreme line breaks, and isolates words to amplify their visual and semantic weight.

“April—is the stillest month,”

one says—“a lull between storms.”

Another whispers, “No—

January hides more ghosts.”

Memory stalls in empty rooms,

disjointed echoes fill the tracks;

a streetlamp croons a half-forgotten hymn,

while distant laughter—brief—

dissolves in rain.

October—is the latest moon—breeding

daffodils out of fresh loam, mixing

hope and anticipation, stoking

tardy roots with southern showers.

We gather fragments—each a shard

of what was once a single song—

and piece together meaning

in the pause before the dawn.

– maintains the abrupt tonal shifts and high-low diction of modernist collage, replacing “April” with “August” to recast the season’s cruelty.