#prose piece

[softsweetwhispers]

| k. - WHAT MAKES A WOMAN? - @nosebleedclub xxiv. wolfpack. page from "Alpha Status, Dominance, and Division of Labor in Wolf Packs" by L. David Mech

#poetry #original writing #writing #original poetry #writing prompt #soft poetry #prose piece #story prompt #original story #prose poetry #the nosebleed club & its inspirations #musings of moments in a life that comes of and brings nothing signficant #generational trauma #trauma poem #blackout poem #blackout poetry #wolf pack #essays #womanhood #on mothers #poem #prose poem #poets on tumblr #poetryblr #female writers #writers on tumblr #writeblr #poetic #implied csa #tw

[fsnavratil]

//fs navratil

#poem #poetry #words #art #writing #my poem #poems on tumblr #love poem #poetry on tumblr #sad prose #prose piece #prose poetry #prose #prose poem #short prose #short poem #short poetry #god #queer poets on tumblr #queer writers #queer poem #queer poetry #introspection #dread #spilled prose #spilled poetry #spilled words #spilled writing #spilled ink #fs navratil

[paravirgo]

A Running Shake

There will never be a greater mystery to solve than myself.

I see the lines of my skin shifting each day,

I notice the little ways in which I change my habits in the middle of forming them,

And the way I viciously break any good one I keep up.

I feel like I will never recognize my own photos, every time I see myself, it isn’t me looking back.

I pull out many masks but never see the real one. I dig through every trunk, every container, every box to find Me. Me isn’t here right now.

Is there a place where missing faces go?

Multiple spirits pass by me and we dance together in the wind like lilies. I see rain melt their laughs and the water stifles the sounds of their smiles,

And the moon towers over us like a lighthouse, guiding the missing back home. Are there more of us? More lost masks and faces and souls?

Hoards of zombie mortals, guided by a distant and counterfeit glow,

right into my trembling arms.

I’m an empty husk filled with the directionless spirits that haunt our earth, I don’t see anything else for myself,

I am held at arm’s length in my own mind as the others take over.

Much like a bus stop, I exist for others to wait at.

They hop on and off; worker bees who never stay.

Passing through a portal as I stare into the mirrors that cover every surface, and there is nothing but darkness beyond them. 

Nowhere else, 

To go.

So instead I dance in the frosty, dew-covered grass,

Drunk on the moonlight, for she is as empty of a corpse as I am.

I know there will never be a place where I feel free of the ghosts living inside of me. 

They’re in my home, in my skin, and they’re always screaming for release.

“You cannot run from this,” I tell her. “It will always find you in the end.” 

#prose #poetic #my writing #original writing #poem #poets corner #writing #creative writing #masks #masking #bpd #bpd thoughts #words words words #prose on tumblr #prose piece #short prose #short poem #mental illness #mentally fucked #on writing #healing #writeblrpoets #writeblr #writerscommunity #writers on tumblr

[s0ftspot]

mary jane

Pesky buckle on my shoe cinched around the waist of my foot: You sit in places where laughter goes to die. I would fix you and adjust your constraints, but then you’d never be right. Too loose. Too tight. So I walk across cobblestone, seething from blistered toes and reddened feet, staring down at the notches forced into the black belt where your golden prong pokes through. Knitted socks frilled with lace wrap around my foot like soggy bandages. The product of boiling heat that manifests in the sole of these tar-colored Mary Janes. A pretty name for the bitch that brands my feet with blisters. The flappy layer on the mid-section of my foot presses its blade of fine leather into fresh skin, the sensation shooting up my nyloned legs. I should probably stop walking. But there are moments when I press my shoe into spongey grass; When I sigh a heavy expression of relief; When tension transcends from my body that I forget what I was complaining about.

Around eight years old, I learned to envy girls with pretty shoes. Jellies were a popular phenomenon that came in different colors of sparkled plastic. I couldn’t afford them, so I’d watch instead, imagining what it would be like to wear that trivial piece of plastic. I would follow girls, practice their steps, and envision a life cured by Jellies. I was convinced that the shoes made them more likable. It would make me more likable, more loveable, more of anything. The same stood for UGGs, the ones called BaileyBows, who had perfectly cut ribbons lined along the back of the fur; Shoes for comfort, for security. Or those heeled slip-ons that made you feel like an adult when you wore them. Or Mary Jane’s, who you love until they make you bleed. I see now there was nothing to envy.

I lug around the weight of these shoes, ready to hang up my feet on a wired rack. I am sure the leather will break in by tomorrow. I rest, walk, and stop every so often to rub the bone violated by the leather flap. Maybe it’s something wrong with my foot. Eventually, I find comfort on a bench nearby.  I remove the Marys and place them beside me, where they perch unbothered and triumphant. When we’re apart, you’re much nicer to me. My moment is interrupted by a reminder on my phone: I miss you. We should hang out today. I wiggle my toes and cry out in protest as I pick up the leather boats beside me because I know that I have to go. I slip on the first shoe, then the second. I stack my legs over my feet, hips over my thighs, and begin walking to Mary Jane.  

#prose piece #sucky grammar #love #relationships #honest feedback #writers on tumblr #writerslife #writers and poets #poetry community #free wrting #creative #lil sad #open to suggestions

[dreamsandroots]

Oannes (fish facts)

And in the dwindling light, as I lay my body down amongst the strangers I found myself unable to move and had for some time considered that I might have been slipping into the after, my attention melting into an unrecognisable frequency and I thought myself having heard the thundering waves and the rain speak to me, and in between breaths it said:

--you might think it a strange kind of gift, for a fish such as myself, to have been granted omniscience and perhaps even more so because I am in fact now a dead fish. You also may find some level of irony to the fact that, were we not strangers, I would be known to you by name. It is not enough to have some worldly purpose, to ascertain the reason for our being. A life learnt in fixtures; a false laugh so convincing you’d forgotten the real thing. There is no reason for the tear in your eye, there is only reason ‘til you’re alone. Either way I am known as ‘fish’ and you are known as ‘human’ and that’s about as much sense as we will make of it. If you’re wondering why all of this, I have come to tell you that there’s an overlap in life and death which is perhaps foreign only to your species. You see, while you return to the ocean only in your deepest sleep, we spend much of our lives immersed in the present imminence of the other.

It may surprise you furthermore to learn that many of a kind who swim the oceans deep face death before their time has come. There is some sadness in this as there is always some joy in life. This unfinished journey through the waters compelled me to contemplate body in relation to the distant stars: it was unrecognisable. A kind of anxious, indefinite wandering. We are all far-flung neighbours of the mind and many wonder whether it is truly possible for us ever to return home. In the darkest hours we observe in the constellations such variation of form: from vortices of gas and gravity and rock to the sinewy legs and fleshy arms, the tools that breach the earth, the minerals to build silos, the rockets carrying bodies back to shining heaven, the traps, the spears, the nuclear codes, your heads protruding into flat noses and soft, pink tongues. Eyeballs red and overstimulated. Your carnivorous teeth. Were we not also creatures of majesty to you once? Were we not once more than the remainder of your desire? Do you recall the time when you first sprouted legs and walked the ground? (Or did it not quite happen that way?)

Please be patient if we ask that you rest your gaze in the candle’s glow until you can make out the enclosed form: dull eyes staring through eternity absent of subject; broken scales tipped on a dry riverbed; my mouth an unremitting ‘oh’ shape never to be resolved. It occurred to me that mind takes shape in the conjunct where one repetition blurs into another. This is not poetry exactly, not exactly stream of conscious thought, though there are indeed many fish in the sea. This is just another singular representation, no before-time no ever-after. Biology in praxis: the extension and elocution of countless markers playing out in cognitive realtime. Hybrid literary conversational nonsense in post-mortem aquarian register. And while we can sympathise with the weathered souls, whose traditions have been marred by the rising costs of tools and the dropping price of our dead flesh, we would still like to insist that they think about their role in our genocide: the way an occupation, or any way of life really, can operate in much the same way as a fishing net, embroiling you and transporting you along the fault-lines of inopportune fate, gasping for air on the deck of some cheap dinghy.

There is an old fish adage which states that one does not deserve to see in the skies what one cannot already recognise beneath the sea. In your body might you recognise what is alien and multiform. In your wanderings through the nitro-oxygen ocean may you realise that the term ‘master’ implies fixed position, that the term ‘fiction’ implies an escape from some imagined master, and that between the two poles we insert a divine marker: ‘God’ for instance, although ‘Existence’ or ‘Reality’ or ‘The Material Universe’ or ‘The Big Bang’ would serve just as well. There are no fish facts. There are only billions upon billions of tiny bodies that make up any given utterance, ready to be fed to the masses, to digest in full.

We tell your tale in elegy form, for in our darkest moments it seems you have been lost to us. The truth is that we no more wish to see you suffer than we’d have the sea engulf the land above. We love the land and the stars beyond, even if they are both locations which, in life, exclude our being. We love too the sky children: sometimes we’d hear echoes of their deeds; find joy in their vulnerability, their recklessness, their bold, head-strong audacity in the face of certain finitude, even if, oftentimes, we simply plotted our escape from the fallout of their appetites. We remember the deluge, we watched as the ark crossed the horizon, colours forming in its wake. The stories we tell change and the land remains the same. And one day the land is obliterated and only the story will remain: the spirit signifier; this always-living always-dying.

Moments of cataclysm represent cracks in the veil of certainty, implying small instances in which new possibilities may arise: the ocean reflecting back upon itself, holding itself to standard, or even spewing raw material from its orifices, organising and replicating the conditions for life, the entirety of memories relating to your feet as a xenogenesis of the fin. What you can’t quite hear will slip you to the alternative. Here meaning is magnetic, gravitationally bound into implicit hierarchies that are repeated until they become accepted as self-evident 'truth' and the possibility for alternative is obscured. Big fish eat little fish, orbits within orbits. Cells overflowing with concentric impermanence. A river that strives for order only to be overflown, the spirit with the smallest mass pulls you most sideways.

A language-line begins at some unknowable point and, travelling through a voice, finds its way to replication, divvying up sections of the whole into separate empires until we have above below, night day, inside outside, reason emotion, as if love were a binary yes no, until we are swimming through spirits that turn mind matter, fixed toward abstract value void infinity. Simile like a dream chained to the dreamer. The hook is part of the fish is part of the child is part of the pantheon. You are God’s tears and what you can’t hold firmly onto in your dreams you seek to reify. What we know is the teardrop, what we don't know is the ocean--

And while it seemed (by dint of their straggled breath) as if my companions could hear this voice these words the same as I, having no real way to see their faces and to judge nor verify their reactions I could not therefore assess the validity to the words I’d heard and decided in the end that I had best let my eyes moisten into fuzz, exhale until my lungs depleted, my swaying form to resume its slow descent into the ocean sleep, a black wanderer forgotten.

#writing #stroy #parable #dream #Oannes #gods #fish #prose piece

[connectingwithsoul]

I’ll never see you again Or maybe life will throw you at me once again Either way is fine I don’t really care... It’s been so long I made peace with you being gone I released the pain And I don’t hold onto anger anymore Remember your song ? Well, it still sounds nice But it’s not the most beautiful thing in the world anymore @connectingwithsoul

#love #Romantic Poetry #lost love #sad memories #sad love #moving on #quotes #poems and poetry #prose piece #creative wrting #emotional words #dreamy

[putah-creek]

Like a wrinkle in the dark, or a wrinkle in time. More than thirty years later, her smile is still the same. And pulling her in close, she still feels the same in my arms, and the clocks spin in reverse. Time backs up like a truck to a loading dock. The man on the forklift is ready, and the truck will be loaded in no time at all.

-james lee jobe

#prose poetry #prose poem #prosepoem #prosepoetry #poetry #poem #poems on tumblr #poetry on tumblr #poets on tumblr #writers and poets #writers on tumblr #soft #prose poétique #prose piece #poems and poetry #poetic #poetsandwriters #poems #poetrycommunity

[adocentyn]

Red Brick Dust

The place where I grew up was full of Victorian red brick buildings, as is where I live now. I have memories of the school playground walls – great, heavy, excessively robust walls, orange-red, luminous in the sunlight, and already ancient.

These same red bricks not only formed the fabric of the playground walls, but the school itself, and most of the surrounding neighbourhood. Such red bricks are particular. They are the handmade ones, rather than later machine-made ones. They are the ones seen to be substantial, individual, soft, and glowing.

The bricks of the playground walls crumbled to a fine red dust when acted upon by a child’s finger, yet those same walls had stood solid and immovable for a hundred years. I knew this unexpected but satisfying friability even in the days before I began Primary School.

The red brick dust was magical – magical because it seemed something beyond language. It surrounded everything and everybody. It held up every building children and adults moved in and out of. It separated the inside from the outside for them, yet, they knew nothing about it – they never spoke of it. It partook in eternal silence, as do the myriads of dust motes caught in a beam of sunlight.

The red brick dust also was something alchemical – a prima materia – unformed stuff reducible only to itself – and nothing but quality, substance, being, essence, and tincture – and all that which stands between ten-thousand named things and nameless chaos.

It was pure stuff before being subjected to naming, measurement, mathematics and other activities of the classroom. Within red brick dust, immanence and transcendence are the same – both partake in the original, pristine state.

An artist friend shared with me a love of red brick walls. As a minimalist, she saw them not as barriers, but as rhythm and presences. We saw such walls glow miraculously in the Sun, and under right conditions, breathe like Rothko's paintings. Together, we painted, drew, and photographed them.

Sometimes, usually late afternoons in Autumn, when the Sun is low, there are streets where only the tops of red brick terraces are lit up – and for a while, two worlds are revealed to the eye. Above, the heavenly realm opens up as the transfigured top floors of houses burn with golden, orange-red intensity and bedroom windows glare with solar fire. Below, nearer to the street, the familiar forms, named things, and activities of Earth persist in cool, watery shadow.

#poetry #esotericism #alchemy #taoism #reminiscences #childhood #walls #red brick #prima materia #prose poem #prose piece #philosophy #gnosticism #consciousness

[catmint1]

Grief will keep you reaching back / for what is not there

Adrianne Kalfopoulou, “Poem in Pieces, a Log,” A History of Too Much

#quotes #adrianne kalfopoulou #poem in pieces #a history of too much #poetry #prose #grief #on grief #nostalgia #text #1K #5K #10K

[boutzie]

-will you sit on the toilet, and read to me, while I soak

in the tub? that’s the kind of quality time I dream of…

Boutzie 🌻

#boutzie #boutziee #boutzieer #poetic words #love post #thoughts about you #prose poetry #prose piece #words for you #love poems #my poerty #black women poets #inner thoughts

[marcogiovenale]

interruption / victor coleman. 1968

thx to Daniel F. Bradley for this: A 2nd edition of Victor Coleman’s “Interruption”, cover by bpNichol. 1st edition, Ganglia, 1968, 2nd edition Curvd H&z 293, 1cent 149, September.

View On WordPress

#bpNichol #Curvd H&z 293 #experimental writing #Ganglia #prosa #prose piece #Victor Coleman

[softsweetwhispers]

The wind brushes against the baby cherry blossoms in the trees, featherlight teasing causing them to shiver. It carries with it the scent of camellia and daffodil, a sign of blossoming hope and the beginning of spring. 

The air is painted with pastel colors, hues of green and yellow and blue. The weather, once biting and cold, is now something inviting. It wraps around her playfully, its ministrations barely felt under the soft fabric of her jacket.

She’s not one to put meaning into the seasons changing, but even she cannot deny the beauty of the world opening up around itself; like the hidden, unrivaled wings of a butterfly, colors staining its delicate form, emerging from its cocoon. The way the animals stir, the way the plants turn towards the sun, which seems to brighten under the attention, the way everything seems to wake up, livening under spring’s life after winter’s long drag. 

March is here, with its undeniable optimism and renewed possibility. Without it will come, undoubtedly, the trials and tribulations of starting from the beginning, the hardships and challenges that will threaten to tear her down. 

But for now she is new and enlightened. She will gracefully embrace this change and all that comes with it, and she will survive, only to come back stronger again, as she does every year. 

| k. - @nosebleedclub march i. blossoming hope

#the nosebleed club & its inspirations #spring poetry #original writing #poetry #original poetry #writing #prose piece #writing prompt #original story #story prompt #soft poetry #prose poetry #spring #springtime #hopeful poem #creative writing #writeblr #writers on tumblr #writers and poets #poem #poetryblr #poetic #poets on tumblr #original poem

[fsnavratil]

//fs navratil

#a collection of words #poem #poetry #words #art #writing #my poem #poems on tumblr #love poem #poetry on tumblr #prose poetry #prose piece #prose #prose poem #short prose #poetic prose #queer poets on tumblr #queer writers #queer poem #queer poetry #wlw poem #wlw poetry #women #short poem #short poetry

[paravirgo]

Flow of Loving

Sorrow and despair rising like an angry tide, I wept. If only my tears could be as angry as that tide, I could have saved myself. I could have harnessed this power into something magical but that is never the case. Magic is not real and there are no heroes. I was certainly not a hero. Under that hot sun, sitting on the crumbling earth of the shore, I felt the true weight of emptiness. None of my muscles were strong enough to bare it and it was then that I walked into the sea, letting those weary bones float on the surface of the current, completely vulnerable to any way the waters chose to go. Through Love and Loneliness, I have lived more days than I ever wished to. 

From all that has been lost, my own blood and insides—they still seek to take more. I am pouring myself dry despite already being an empty cup and where I keep finding the wine to fill their glasses, I do not know. There is not a warmer savior than Death and his arms would embrace me in a way no man ever had; safe and certain that I will no longer be harmed. Death’s hands are the only ones who have not hurt me. It was there resting upon the waves and counting the stars as they bloomed in the night sky that I found peace. No longer under the will of anybody else, no longer anything but myself. Truly free, truly individual, truly alive. 

It was there in the arms of other women that I learned love; a friend, a sister, a mother. It was not a prize to be bought or a trophy to be displayed but a calming flame in the middle of the snowiest night. A roiling heat that could not be extinguished in the face of freezing ice sickles. Love, bold, would stand in front of envy, hatred, delusion, and misfortune with her chin titled up proudly. Unafraid and desperately alive, she would always conquer the lands with a gentle fury that left the people tingling up the spine and seeking comfort in their lovers limbs. Love would teach joy, laughter, and wisdom—she could reveal any secret hidden away and her secret was that in her truest form, nobody would be scared of what you have concealed. They would take those long-harbored pains and bring them into the sun, patching up the wounds left behind before leading you into the safe throes of a sweet-tempered life. It will taste like cherries and pine.

When there is nothing left but rubble and embers, Love will still stand there waiting for you. She is always there, hiding amongst ashes, leaping at her first chance to be seen and heard. Love is not unlike a song from a bird, chirping into the wilderness with fervor that he may be picked and grateful when he is given such a fate. So many souls have thrown disrespect on Love’s name, saying she causes suffering and grief, but I believe those ones have simply never known anything else, so they cast their doubts. Love is the salve rubbed on your burns as well as the clouds shielding your eyes, a mighty protector armed with sword and song to fight your battles, and ease your mind. Suffering and grief is caused when Love slips away, ripped from you during the strongest of storms; alone and desolate is the new home for you once you have lost her. Sometimes, it is your own foolishness that chases her away. Foolishness and malice is a betrayal to Love, an insult which cannot be forgiven easily when she has so graciously come to you. Hatred is not the opposite of Love; Loneliness is. 

Cloaked in the scent of rot and mildew, Loneliness drags you into her dark caverns, eager to finally have guests in her home. What she is is not her fault; she was bred to be this way. Centuries of isolation, stagnation, anguish. All of these things came together in the darkest underbelly of our would to create the plague of being alone; a fate worse than Death. Within Death, you have peace for there will be no more sickness and no more tribulations. Within Loneliness, you feel her smothering desire to be Love. That slick, oily desperation for companionship that clings to your skin. The times in her cave are times I like to forget despite my own faults being the reason for my presence. This is another thing people do not like: facing their own flaws. 

At last I feel my body falling beneath the surface of the waves. My eyes have long since closed after naming the constellations and I dream of what Love had given me; of what my foolishness drove away. Just as there are no heroes, there are no monsters but ourselves and the stories we conjure in our minds. Perhaps that is the problem, our own power. As the tides claim my body, I float above all that is earthly and familiar towards the other suns that gleam in the sky. I feel hope that I may meet Love again. 

#prose #prose piece #prose on tumblr #short story #short prose #writers on tumblr #my writing #creative writing #original writing #fiction #poetic #spilled ink #love #lonliness #water #love poem #love prose #poem #poetry #writers and poets #long prompt #medium #writing community #writeblr #writing #writer

[wayfaringauthorofficial]

Look at this room, at the spotless tile floor that was my home, my bed, for so many nights. It’s hard to forget the hours I spent with fingers in my mouth, worming their way down my throat, in a futile attempt to get everything out. Time after time, I tried and failed- not that anyone noticed. Because who wants to see the pretty, privileged girl suffer? Not her mother, nor her father. They dress her up like a doll and parade her around. Look at this prize I made, they gloat. I can mold it into whatever, whoever, I want. My life will be the best as long as she stays in line. But what if I can’t? What if I don’t want to, or if I don’t fit? This cookie cutter mold, made just for me, is small, confining. I swore I would never give in, never let myself crumble at their feet, but here I lay tonight, tears staining my face. Here I am at my darkest hour, covered in blood and tears. Here I am in pieces, doing my best to keep them gathered. But you don’t see that, because I won’t let you. I keep them tied together with bits of ribbon. I keep them close to me, just like Mama wanted.

#just wrote this #amwriting #amwriting prose #my own prose #prose #prose on tumblr #prose piece #new #just finished #spilling words #spilling secrets #don't break the mold #mama's perfect girl #emotional abuse #ptsd poem #been thinking about this #been on my mind all day #trying to get better #complex ptsd #new poem #brand new

[dreamsandroots]

Pitch Frequency

No remnant of shared language was to be found in the laws of attraction. 

Instead, the body emerged as an ongoing series of half-thoughts played out in parallel susurration, growing from the enjoyment (piecemeal and centri/selftrifugal) of an infinite deference. Ebbing, it found that every flavour of breath followed from abject contemplation: each nuanced gasp of silence breaking bread in lieu of words it couldn’t find:

… an idea whose chief concern is to prevent its own manifestation in the flesh, it will wait indefinitely, only to find ambiguity in the suspicion that patience without limit might also be a curse …

It experienced such exhalations of breath/debt in short bursts of quick succession, accrued and unpaid, finding implicit value in the resounding now—in the echoes of an imminent re-realisation of all product as landfill—its dumbfounded reflection split into duality: the self-conscious animal, corrupted heart chakra, distrusting of the passions.

Desirous of replication yet denied:

… to rest well entails the quest for sustainable paradox: suspension of disbelief; the eternal circulation of arbitrary meaning … 

And when it might finally open its mouth to speak it would hesitate for fear that an unrecognisable truth may appear most readily in the spaces where word blurs into inarticulate noise:

 … fall to earth, golem of flesh, partial recurrence, ascend descend, up and down—this static moment of surrender …

Its gaze shifts now to a far point on the horizon:

… each journey ends at the door of some material death … 

It holds the memory of pleasure and wears the face of one who is desperate to recall.

#prose poetry #prose piece #prose poem #dreambodylanguage