Earl David Freeland

Earl David Freeland writes poems the way some people solve problems: by asking better questions.

A math teacher, union president, and former programmer with a lifelong fascination with maps, myths, and human systems, he uses poetry less to explain what he knows than to investigate what he doesn't.

His work keeps circling inheritance, faith, love, consequence, and what people become. He has written about scripture, strawberries, wheelchairs, war, artificial intelligence, teaching, fatherhood, and the conversations inside his own head. Somewhere underneath most of it are the same questions: What do we inherit? What do we pass on? What does it cost to cross? What remains after we're gone?

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.

He lives on Florida's Treasure Coast, where he continues a long argument with certainty.

Free Range Poetry: feral, self-taught, and hunting truth on its own terms.

/var/poems/introducing_the_poet.txt

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Introducing the Poet

Earl David Freeland

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.

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