Problems with Form

There’s a song that inspired a poem in me. In my head I know many of the images that I want to include in the poem. I am pretty sure that the poem wants to be in the lyrical mode—or at least wants to be lush and graceful. I tried writing the poem first in free verse, but I just couldn’t write a decent opening after several attempts. Last week I was thinking that the poem might want to be in formal verse, perhaps ballad stanzas or couplets, but my experience with rhyming poetry is that it forces you into a certain level of abstraction and compression. I don’t think this is what the poem wants. I need more room for the specificity of the images. I suppose that I could try blank verse or syllabics. I’m beginning to think now that this poem may in fact want to be a short story, or it could want to be one of those oxymoronic prose poems!