prose from anonymous

Hey guys, a friend sent this to me but asked to remain anonymous! Have some prose.


Ink beard

Roaming the streets of downtown austin, mid afternoon, "too proud to prostitute" the young man (no more than 28) holds up a folded cardboard sign. mostly out of embarrassment for actually stopping to read the sign (ehh I've seen better) I give him a crumpled picture of george washington. Thanks brother, I make eye contact to express some sign of empathy, he has tattooed a goatee onto his chin. The young lady at his side is continuing an ongoing conversation as if i wasn't there. I nearly comment as I thought I was being addressed. He lowers his net as I walk away, how at ease they seemed. What commitment to exile his defacement. I wander off just as neurotic as ever, trying to validate my own daily masks. I assure myself I am an equal recluse, the irony is not lost on me that I feebly attempt acceptance, too indecisive to go under the ink. What does it matter, whores the lot of us.

here's some prose for your weekend

Hey guys, how's your weekend? Guess what? I'm doing freaking great. Here's a prose poem.


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kill the police officer under the lamppost with your silver pistol when you are an animal I saw you wear the faces of the poor for fun and to let loose in river streams the mercury blood you have in your teeth. nobody trusts you. in love with sunglasses and a stress of old blue shirts. again you reach for your girlfriend’s hand and she is a movie poster. and nobody in red scarf. we break down in front of a church and we begin to watch the stiff movement of tombstones. the wind is not so silent.

the second post - two prose poems based on Woody Allen's new film

Hey fellows, here is the second post (and it's a double within a double) for all you lovely people out there in the readerverse. I saw Woody Allen's new film, Vicky Christina Barcelona the other night and was inspired by it to write these two prose pieces. The basic premise of the movie is a love triangle, and a particular scene sees Scarlett Johansson knocking on Javier Bardem's door, ready to engage in a tryst. So that's where these pieces of wunderbar come from. Enjoy my friends.

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crash of piano stairwells down into a night of sleepless I love two girls in the spirit of old trees split by lightning. my face is easy to imitate. I have large cheeks and hazel eyes and a nose that is slightly stiff. my teeth are something else; she knows and she knows. I have a face of mischief, but it is my knees that buck. I kick. I scary and terrible and cobweb and old wooden floorboard and toss the steel hammer into a sheet of plate glass. we want the blood of the world; I love no one.

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a knock came upon the door. he opened and she, blonde as fire, entered. they

shared some wine. his fingers were trilling. she told him, oh, of the void and

the sense she had of sensing emptiness. she told him that her dreams were of

ivory elephants and purple spears in the ground, or the sky, or the sea. away to

the sea, she said, over and over. Antonio joked about his beard, his face, and

told her he was a brilliant painter. she believed him instantly. I know of such

things too, her eyes told him, and they kissed. the carpet was not a place for

love, but it held their bodies and careened under the motion of hips. all over

the world of volcanoes and glass fountains and the angry lion cages and the

asses of the hungry and the poor and the destitute shaking and screaming and

saying oh yes oh yes we are vessels and of this you know everything my love

to be a flute in your hand or a snake underfoot and shoes on a wire. ugly night

winds came upon the windows and Zelda lifted her nude frame from the floor.

if this is the best of all my intentions, she whispered. Antonio lay asleep,

innocent. his body sighed, it heaped, it held still then rolled. he was so

defenseless and Zelda began to cry looking upon it. the wine crashed in her head

and she ran to the bathroom. the mirror was wanting. the toilet was wanting.

shower head and tile floor, wanting wanting. she sat down in the midst of the

room and counted backwards from ten. all is easy, and she imagined herself

knocking once more upon a door. and tossing wine. and a wind and a marriage.

Antonio woke suddenly and realized he was alone. the wine served him better.

he placed his hands over his chest and began to count upward to one hundred.

prose time...but how you feeling?

Hey fellow mellows, it's been some time since I've posted a good ol' fashioned prose poem, so without further ado, eat your hearts out.

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You fool. Speed by the cops. So so stop, don’t even stop, don’t tell your dada daddy. Don’t grab up at your ankles when your bent over and shaking like a leaf. Don’t just give up on yourself or your paltry haircut. Don’t just clamor for sunshine when you know you’ve been burnt and tanned and destroyed by the summer. Just drink your cherry wine, smash your lungs and limbs in alcohol and salvation. You are the lost engine driver on the way home to Rome. You have lost everything dear to you. Like me, like love, like your favorite pair of smooth leather black gloves, like a kiss you used to remember so well it excited you. Fall asleep, turn over on the mattress. A whole other world calls out, calls your name. Don’t block your ears and say, “I’m not crazy. I’m not crazy!” Go loops and spins and twirls and crashes. We don’t know the words anymore. Touch yourself, say, repeat, say, “I’m still here. I’m still here!”

it's a prose world, baby

Here's a prose poem for you hungry readers. Also, look out, whoah, on the heels of Erin's Austin World Poem Project, may I announce the Austin Universe Prose Project. It's along the same lines but instead of poetry, write some good old snips and clips of prose and lick your screen. Then scream and send it back to this frigging blog and do a slam dance in your apartment, home, aviary, etc. Alright, I'll email everyone I can think of with the project, but for now, here's a prose beast.

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We are both the best and the worst life possible. All, we’ve all. Love, we are coming home. Tears and tears and tears, oh god. You need this. Need us. These mountains devour. Van Morrison eats his heart. And apart. And thirsty, desperate thirsty. Another world calls us. Forget Virginia. Don’t take your time. We are the dust of the wings of angels and gods. This universe loves us, the world of eyes and ears and lips and teeth may hate us, but the ethereal universe of flower miracles, of human conscious blisters, is madly in love. We return and bless all every time we die. Ghosts that whisper the secret legends of gold. You return home to the Shenandoah, but I return to the eerie lake and all the myths of plumbers and early millionaires with their skyscrapers and their lust for oil. Trickle down the vine, feed a plant, see a blossoming bud, and then jump into outer space. We are divine, we may hate ourselves, we are loved.

her majesty's request

Hey, since Kat wants more prose poems, here goes. Also, maybe I'll start a new series of prose poems (bonus contest time: submit a topic via a comment on this post and maybe you'll inspire the new content of the prose poems).

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it was some summertime fun he road his hand up her leg and didn’t stop. she said, oh jesus you gonna, and then, and then. when she grew up like lazy grass, the river was her friend. so soft. oh god if I touch another person in this instance, it will all be the end of the record, the fin of the film, the gross collapse at the end of a long narration. and into darkness, oh into darkness. I am the flea of the back of the dog dying, just dying. a girl then says back to he that if it is children you need go in the distance and plant a seed in the dirt. I am not a field of a vision. all of the ending in my breasts, between my legs, yet still his hand eats and devours and climbs into the hot center of all thing.

also, I just wrote this poem!

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am a fork so dirt

the

girl

in the dress

on Broadway stripping

her knees

of the slip

go slip

go down a curb

of rain water in the South.

in love

all the time the

time

the kitchen sink is

emptied and

the kitten

leaves paw prints in the flower bed

she

sings

prose time

Hey, like Jeff, I too celebrate the funk of Friday the 13th. But I celebrate prose style! Yeah! Ain't that wacky!

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Christopher Savage

lord knows, she said as a whisper, it hasn’t been easy to live this year. I wanted to think of something else to say, but it was wooden cupboards banging around the eaves, you know, she began, it isn’t that I needed from you a brick garden for my elms, I needed, and she stopped. it began to rain, so slick, across many yellow slanted rooftops of this coast, I should be clear, she stated, starting anew, clearing her throat, her bashful eyes, the torpor of a middle child so sullen, it isn’t, well, I’m not so sure how to say this. you know the feeling of flying? or can imagine it? that’s me. and you, she pointed arrow-like to her grand empty cardboard box in the center of her living room, are that, an object so simple. I mean, I don’t try to say simple, I just want to say, she bit her lip. the lightning pang of a thousand different children. you are a grove of pumpkins. a patch, I replied, and she wigged her head. a patch of unlove, of anti-cool. something along those lines. basically, baby, get up on my side or get down in the valley and huddle on your stomach. it’s ugly, so fast and clean she washed her hand over my brow and kissed my cheek, and if it isn’t ugly, then she snapped and turned about, embracing the invisible window and becoming the storm, it’s not worth mentioning. I think. she slapped the pane of glass and began to cry.

we're gonna have a proesy good time

Hello eager beavers, it's been some times since I've put a prose poem on the blog beast, so no time like the present. And how are you doing? Living it up? I had a dream last night where on million bugs flooded into a two story house I was living in with my parents. It was kind of like that scene from The Craft. So I'm doing good too. Wink!

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Just to leave off stopping for now. We can’t be hurt and we are vagrants. Zero sleep. Destroy every last little thing that crawls in your carpet, touches your windshield, flares in your voice. Completion was never the point. Illusion rests in time and order and if you would dance you could be greater than god. Greater than the heathen and pagan and christian buddhist atheist chant. We are god words and simple and crude. And being born is like stealing. Like cheating. And being now, we are the greatest of inspirations. Past future tense and leather. Take away all the pain of your moments then consume it. Bite your own teeth. It is simple and overly redundant. We need it. Create every breath you hold. Give it freely. Don’t know but care, don’t care but know, haunt the hills, haunt the snow, haunt the sun and haunt the globe. We are the truth written in stone or rock. If your hair wasn’t colored red than it would be blonde. My eyes, if not green, would be black.

Happy St. Prose Poetry Day

Hey, guys, I haven't posted a prose poem in a while, so ba da bing. Happy St. Swithins day by the way.

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If you arrange all your shoes in perfect order, point them north, and casually look at your watch the minute the sun goes down, you’ll know how it feels to be prepared. The warrior outside, roaming hills with the moon as his friend, understands that when he lives, and with his sword and gun, he’ll die a little bit, more and more. This makes him smile and I wish I was there. You wish that you were there too, with me, right now. You would not say to me to take my time. I’d smash a local radio and shout all of the day is gone. You are gone. You would not say to me to love the way of shadows from hollows. You would say go climb into a tank, drive down the main road, and make your mark in explosions. Everyone will have to say your name then. But I don’t want to. Not really, I don’t think.

blogs away

Hey, here's another prose poem I just wrote.

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she thinks that now, if ever, would be the perfect time to carve her initials into her hair and walk down the avenue in a lime green dress, touting her new success at initiative and disdain. but she moves onward, past the hair salon, and into the old alley where grime collects in puddles of reflectance. she is beautiful, but not in any way you could tell, and she is young, but again, this is a secret. for her the last resort is to go straight to a coffee shop, down three cups of espresso, and extend the last forty hours of her waking. just once, to reach that level of misunderstood living, that is what she wants. the taxi cab, the old bum besting birds for bread crumbs, the nun in her books and emptiness, the woman, the man in his old beat jeans, the girls on the corner, watching strangers bounce from cutlery shops, and the jazz man trumping his best solo with a silent rest and lean. the girl is the girl that can become a woman of love, she is exactly that kind, but she has to know it first.

View from a bus

Hey guys, I wrote this prose poem tonight while riding the bus home from school. The driver was a real warthog, and he inspired me instantly. I'd like to dedicate this to him, then. Goodnight, sweet prince.

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The bus driver looked at me with a glint of anger and jealousy. That I, in my youth, might collect myself upon his bus, listening to my music, and so callous as to smile at him, was too much to take. As I prepared a seat for myself, the driver sped away, jerking the bus beneath my feet. This is an odyssey, capable only of seeing through windows in the dark. I couldn’t tell why the bus driver thought so ill of me; I slid carefully into a seat and rested my textbooks beside me. I would shortly write away with the rhythm of potholes and local transit idiots. Perhaps cute girls as well, or artists, whichever should be. And you know, he’s not so bad – the driver. He talks to people, but like a dog, and he closes his eyes, but like a toad. Sorry; it’s his mustache. Makes him look pathetic. And he growls, I suspect.

Poetry in stereo

Hey guys, to follow up the Jeff-in-the-backseat-video, here is one of me reading "travel logos 80." And yes, we do live in that car. It's a mad, mad, mad, mad, mad, mad, mad, mad world.

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america the beautiful: you’re mother’s legs are individual and smooth, generic, of course, but altogether desirable and graceful. I should clarify, however, that it’s an ugly woman to be the loudest one in the room, and it’s an idiot to have the fastest car in the desert. can’t get going too fast, can’t reach far enough. you know it’s late, it is getting hot out, even, and if all you want is to run down the avenue with sparklers in your hands and a red flag to tout, well, baby, you’re centuries late.

prose poetry power

Hey guys, here's another prose poem from me to you. I love you all and oh gee what a wonderful world.

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A tirade for princess want. And you are the fourth person to step out of a shadow with a white mask on hiding paler skin. Go jump on a stranger. A comfort. Look in the stranger’s eyes, and see, and laugh. Curve your hands down the stranger’s face, ask their fiancé about love, and run away without shoes. There is a song composed of desert road, dirt, great intentions, the last raindrop diner on the lowest point of earth. Let me listen, hush now, let me listen. We can nearly imagine ourselves singing it with brand new suits on. Blue suits that are full of shiny sequences and frequencies. I love you, you piece of infinity. When I kiss you I am kissing everything in existence. We can’t stop like vagrants, we are nearly upon the grand castle with gray spires and dragons.

more ramblings

Also, hey, why not two posts today? Also, here's another prose poem, cut from my eyelids and bleached in my brain sauce (was that bad? sorry, just trying to sound like a Batman villain). Anywho, ho ho ho, here we go.

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I should be sleeping. The lamp is on. The cat claws the mattress and I yell at her because she has sick things inside her. The lament of time is that there is always too much and it costs nothing. The lament of the morning, one that has not yet held sleep, is that it’s a wonderful place. My hair is still clean even though I rolled around in puddles of drab mud, killing cars. You don’t even suggest we should go out for ice cream. You like to rent movies, buy them for cheap, and plug them into your head. Fall asleep, I am a cheap doll molded by somebody wonderful. I am glued to my own feet, my own steps, my own avenues and longing. Let my shoes kick off, smash against the hall, die in the pit of sandals. You say look in the mirror, wise up, don’t be so dopey. I look at the morning sun and hear it whisper. It repeats my name, truthfully, please believe.

rambling man

Hey guys, this post comes from a series of prose poems I started about a year ago. I'll post one or two a week, so do the rumba, the samba, the two step and the white man shuffle.

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You me and everyone we ever hope to know comes caress like caress just to be seen. We dive into swimming pools, makeshift diving stances because we know we become nothing once we hit the water. You are diamond. I am bald circle. Around we become the same things as our parents when they were but twenty four and a half. You are ninety two. Stuck shoes on your feet because if you take them off now, you know you’ll stay. And staying is all night. And all night is a waste of all your god given vision. Come down, calm down, you are the open windows in my house that do not shield me from the music blaring down the street. It is an empty sound, you know, but it mocks me, calls me a loveless shorn shamble sweater. And it’s summertime. Ragweed and starched blankets white and hanging. Arrange the whole summer off to go to the beach and soak up sand and sandpipers. I always thought you were pretty, even as a child I didn’t know. Go back into your car. The highways, and these places of magic, are alone and lost without you. Mother to all travelers, rage and raven and ribbon. Unite us, guide us back. Home never again but just a place that is easy, soft, an orange hue, a place where children are allowed to be soulful scrambles. A place that is easily desired and never ever found. Damn this generation and damn me for being a part of it.