Nobody hands the speaker a signal. That is the quiet drama of Samantha Harper's "Freestyle poem 10-5-21": someone stands at an emotional crossroads, scans the world for permission to move, and gets only weather. The title, with its date-like stamp and the word "freestyle," makes the piece read like a journal entry written in one sitting, and the loose, conversational writing fits that impression. Its central idea is a contradiction: the speaker is lost but not hopeless, and calm in a situation that perhaps calls for alarm.
The first half of the poem looks outward. "Im looking for a green light" borrows the language of traffic, and the choice is telling. The speaker doesn't ask to decide; they ask to be allowed, wanting "something to tell me it's all right to move on." The search then spreads across the sky and the landscape. The "black night sky" is supposed to offer "a sign to keep going," and the "orange and red trees" are said to make it "oh so clear that it's time for change." That "oh so clear" is an interesting phrase. It could be sincere, since autumn leaves are change made visible. It could also be faintly weary, as if the speaker sees what the world is saying but still can't act. The wind makes the gap plain, blowing "right past me / Not waiting a second for me to catch up." Everything else is moving, and the speaker is not.
A small, accidental-feeling rhyme arrives in the most uncertain stanza: "I dont know / I can only hope to find out before it starts to snow." This is the poem's only real end-rhyme, and it ties the speaker's vague hope to the turning seasons. Autumn is sliding toward winter, so there is a faint deadline, though the speaker never says what happens when the snow comes. The question just before it, "Where they are going?", reads more like speech than polished grammar, and the poem's inconsistent punctuation ("Im," "dont," "i am calm") supports that sense of speed and honesty over polish.
Then the poem turns inward. "I am lost / But not hopeless" is its most balanced moment, two short lines pivoting on "But." What follows is the strangest line, and the most revealing: "It's a pleasant state of blue-ish." Colour has been the poem's currency, with the hoped-for green, the black sky, and the red and orange trees. Now the speaker can't identify their own colour. The "-ish" is a shrug, and the stanza's long, trailing second line ("Not sure what color it is, but not having the mental power to care") goes slack in the same way. Blue usually signals sadness, but here it is "pleasant," and the reason is not peace. It is exhaustion. The calm comes partly from being too tired to care.
The final images deepen this. "Im lucid dreaming it seems" sits alone as a one-line stanza, like a thought surfacing. Lucid dreaming means knowing you are dreaming, yet the speaker's awareness doesn't seem to bring control. The hedge "it seems" keeps even that uncertain. Then the missing blue returns, enlarged: "Im drowning in my own ocean." The word "own" matters, because the feeling is not imposed from outside but belongs to the speaker. The last two lines, "And i am calm / Even though I probably shouldn't be," let the speaker step back and judge their own composure. That "probably" is typical of the poem's tone, cautious and unwilling to overstate.
Structurally, the poem leans on present participles: "looking," "searching," "looking," "lucid dreaming," "drowning." Nothing is finished. The green light never appears, and no wind explains itself. Short stanzas, mostly couplets, give the feeling of fragments written down as they came.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it refuses to resolve. It doesn't turn sadness into a lesson or confusion into a decision. It records a mixed state, hopeful and numb, calm and sinking, and trusts the reader to recognise it. The shift from searching the sky to looking inside suggests that the signs the speaker wanted were never going to come from outside.