Earl David Freeland

Earl David Freeland writes late at night, where logic breaks and meaning survives. A math teacher, union president, and programmer, he came to poetry through necessity — writing as a way to survive, to reckon, and to tell the truth without smoothing its edges.

His background in mathematics and programming shows up in the architecture of his poems — precise, weight-bearing, built to hold tension without collapsing into easy resolution. His poems move fluidly between political, mythic, absurd, and intimate terrain.

What he writes has become Free Range Poetry: feral, self-taught, and hunting truth on its own terms.

His work has appeared in Poets Reading the News and The New Verse News, and he is a finalist in the Fall 2025 Black River Chapbook Competition for his manuscript Neon Babylon.

Freeland lives and writes on Florida's Treasure Coast, surrounded by students, ghosts, and poems that refuse to stay quiet.

  

Introducing the Poet

My muse said,
with a smile I knew too well,
"That last one-
a little bit rhyme-y, don’t you think?"
And I sat,
pen down,
words tangled,
until I couldn’t
write anymore.

She was right-
she always is.

I’ve lived by numbers,
equations neat and clean,
but the poems-
they used to dance in tight little boxes,
each step measured,
each word bound to a partner
it didn’t choose.

Some of them found new breath,
reimagined-
freed from rhyme’s grip,
given space to stretch
and say what they meant
from the start.

Others arrived fresh,
unburdened by old habits,
born from the same muse
but speaking
with a different voice.

Now the shapes are strange,
edges frayed,
stories spill wider, deeper-
the kind of space
that lets me breathe.

I’m no writer,
not really.
I’m a mathematician,
an explorer of limits,
of boundaries crossed
or ignored completely.

So here it is-
no rhyme to catch my feet,
no rules I care to follow.
Just words, finally
my own.