Lyrique

Thunderstorms rage outside as I listen to melancholy musique, tearing up at the somber poetry and its symmetric outpour. Do not decry those tears; rain seeped through the window into my soul. I pen, in the silence that is the storm.
Where I stay up all night / And all that I write is a grey grey tune
Even the dim light of this laptop screen draws moths towards the window - night creatures eager for light. The bats soon swoop in for the feast. A great silk moth latches onto the window, and in my fright, I thought it a bat. Are they here for the light or the shelter beneath the eaves?
Are you looking for answers / to questions under the stars?
Dimly, the street lamps flicker through the valley beneath, illuminating needles of heavenly weeping falling onto unyielding asphalt. The souls of a thousand faces, spread across countless spaces, struggling, fighting, praying. I imagine a web of intersecting colors, illuminated by the cracks of lightning splitting this sky, a network of all our spiritual supplications. I read the Genesis, I read Psalms 23, I read Philippians 4, and I read Revelations 22. Listen, the storm is a song.
Oh I'll never know what makes this man
With all the love that his heart can stand
Dream of ways to throw it all away
Dreams collide, dreams of balloons and skies and transparent goodbyes, but distant, distant, as though a painting of a photograph of someone else's lives. It is a speculum of silver and stained glass, showing clearly nothing of love and hope and love, and the drums of the stormy night rage unending, though it is not rage, but the humming of bass strings.
All I ever learned from love / Was how to shoot somebody who outdrew you.
Small rivulets burn their whispering paths down the hills into the valley, into the creek in the hammock of the hills. I suspect the salmon leaping upstream to love and death, inextricably bound, mind this not. I can hear their splashes, a counterpoint. A coyote howls, an owl shrieks, the creatures stand still. But not the rain. I smile, and wonder what whispers the wind to comfort the clouds. May those words be carried far and fair this night.
Won't you come away with me tonight? /  We can fly past the moon and the starlight
What the water wants is hurricanes,  / and sailboats to ride on its back
And I ride the storm into slumber to swim with the salmon, gallop astride the lightning, and follow these rivers unto the vastness of the ocean, so I may gaze in its reflection and witness the sky.

And then, there are no words. Only the weeping of violins as bows breathe across silver strings.

Poetry Meter by Meter

I'm not as proficient as I could be. Are we ever? Everyday I discover pieces to a gigantic puzzle whose picture is still unknown to me. I suspect I'd be bored with a box-illustration of my life's adventure. Finding pieces under rugs and in book bindings and wise words - a more riveting quest. Today, I discovered just how naive my knowledge of poetic metric stands. I remember as a child struggling with syllables and stress on words. I always suspected I could stress any portion of a word depending on its placement and purpose. While this is technically true, I'd quickly sound like a fool abusing that principle.
I remember learning to clap as a child for each syllable. "Pancakes" -> *clap clap clap clap clap* 5 syllables. The more excited I get the more syllables a word contains? Fabulous! I've been reading poems, and sometimes it is obvious as in the Destruction of Sennacherib:
 The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

And sometimes I struggle more finding a rhythm, or the rhythm varies for effect:
She walks in beauty, like the night
   Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
   Meet in her aspect and her eyes;
Thus mellowed to that tender light
   Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

Reading these aloud, I feel a fight with some of the phrases. I want to emphasize certain parts, even though they are not stressed:
Meet in her aspect and her eyes -> / u u / u / u / is how it is supposed to be read, where sometimes I want to read it: u / u / u / / u
Or rarely :
u / / u u / / u
Both of which unstress the final syllable instead of stress it. Part of the problem is in the difference between this verse and all preceding metric. Each of the former lines are in iambic forms, and the fourth switches things up by starting out stressed? Tricky tricky, Lord Byron.

Then there are these:
Nor law nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds.
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds.

It starts out in iambic tetrameter, and finishes with a trochee and more iambic verse? That trochee so tricky! I see what you've done Yeats. Or do I? Such simple but effective techniques to alter the audience's perception and flow, focusing them or distracting them for significant, and subtle, purpose. Oh, to be a poet meister.