John Fante’s bright night flowers, regret, and the cessation of consciousness.
From the great city of Fante's Los Angeles at dark, enters two writers yet to be featured, and now their words have graced the show, and we're here to tell you, the words are beautiful.
Here's the link to Prose. Radio.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lOWnoK36fY
And here's the Challenge where the writers are featured, created by beatricegomes.
https://www.theprose.com/challenge/14419
And.
As always.
Thank you for being here.
-The Prose. team
Nietzsche’s madness, Huck Finn jailed, chained expression.
Look how these two writers pair up to follow a German of genius in Episode 2 of Prose. Radio's Liquid Velvet Literature spotlight, featuring these long-standing columns on our own private Mount Olympus of rogue minds and loving hearts.
Frankie Valli was off by one beat:
Prose. is the word.
Here's the link.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZV4ZF8-neE
And.
As always.
Thank you for being here.
-The Prose. team
Footprints
They finally nabbed him
I don’t know what was more disturbing
The trail of bodies he left behind
Or the numerous Polaroids
He took of himself
Tangled up like a marionette
And hanging from his ankles
Like a human pinata
From the tree of life
Way to go champ!
Don’t forget to pick up
A participation trophy
On your way out
David Burdett
1/17/2024
To Pin a Moth
It's going on 13 years since Gil passed away. He was our last connection to a past that wore itself for us like an invisible locket of childhood. Gil on one side, my big brother Jem on the other, lying right upon my heart. Atticus always said it's the unexpected that mortars men as kin, more than any blood. Guess that's the way we felt about Arthur Radley, too, our hidden friend "Boo," down the road. He was the kindred that came out from the shadow and saved Jem after the beating we took, costumed in the dark, stumbling home from that fateful Halloween school pageant.
Bob Ewell was an alcoholic, a physical and emotional abuser, but he wasn't an amnesiac. He'd no compunction taking his ails out on his daughter, or on our father Atticus, nor on us children-- bidding his time, as he had to, to divert suspicions. If it hadn't been for Boo overcoming a deep-set agoraphobia, Ewell would have broken bones in all three of us; me, Jem and Gil, and left us to bleed out. Revenge for the bad reputation that he'd brought upon himself, but which he'd blamed Atticus for, thinking he'd leverage social opinion and inferred racial superiority, to nurse what Atticus referred to academically as his "inferiority complex," meaning colloquially and more specifically, as perception of being "poor white trash." Like Gil said, an image Ewell had reinforced in himself, with loathing, and then berated his family with, as well.
I'd felt akin with Gil long before we'd taken those earliest vows, unofficially, with stolen kisses under the massive oak in his family's yard. Then some years after, we'd graduated and officially married, and had Alternia Radlee Finch Harris. So named, we agreed, to honor the memory of that summer that brought us all close together, him and me, and Jem; and our late housekeeper Calpurnia, and Atticus, may their souls rest in everlasting peace.
That summer turned to fall and drew us spiraling out of a dark- light ignorance and innocence, like the partitions of misunderstandings and misperceptions. I know that we were blind. We weren't blind in failing to see. We were blind in the glare of our own fears, projecting in flashes onto other people, and again by the fears reflected back onto us, from the eyes of equally fearful strangers. Trinkets of "knowledge" like that sparkle falsely and deceive us. We think we are learned, like when using big words, not quite fully cognizant of their meanings. Information becomes a collection, looked at, and not understood, not experienced. Something dead, even when living it, because we have labeled it, rather than identified with it.
Never did I suppose, since that time, that I would find myself caught up in that blaze again, and so isolated. Jem and his wife Angelica and their three children all moved to Canada years ago. We telephone a couple times a year, what with money being tight, and travel all the more prohibitive. We cherish the idea we'll one day have a small future family reunion. We'd thought maybe when Alternia has her children, though now that seems an eternity away. Maybe never.
Gil'd had a big heart, always. Too big, Alternia would say, in simplification, hugging the empty space in place of her father, when the doctor'd tried to explain the enlargement of the ventricles to her. He'd had a murmur from infancy, and it tore unexpectedly as he got older, a sudden gaping hole when he'd finished med school. Demonic twist of fates, he laughed, with a brave face. He said, "loving us was worth the pain," if loving us too much had caused the rupture in his aortic valves.
He'd held my hand so lightly from the hospital bed, weak and tender. "Don't go," whispered low when he wanted a word with Alternia. She was six, but old enough and wise enough to take things seriously, especially when he used that paternal voice. It reminded us immediately of me and Atticus, each of us precocious. How he knew then, I'll never discern, but something must have prompted Gil. He wanted me to hear. He said, "Altie, it is hard to be different; and impossible to be the same. Think of me in your trials. Have heart; and take care of your mother."
Maybe it's just the overlap of words, and definitions, that haunts me like in a crossword puzzle, and it was not at all prophetic. Just seems that way, in the blanks, now that Alternia is in juvey. She's seventeen. Eight more months and the rules would be different. They tell me the detention's for her own safety, for what she claims to have seen, not so much for the actual charges of possession and robbery, disputed. Nor for the assault she suffered, undisputedly. It pains me, for not having been more vigilant. It's as if a failing of my motherhood.
Maybe it was my fault for not leaving Maycomb. Maybe it would have been the right thing to do, by the family, to sell Atticus' house and leave behind the Ewell's and especially Mayella. Jem said the Ewell's had tainted the county for him and he was glad to get away--- to college out of state, and then out of the country altogether. Jem had talked a lot about Human Rights, and why he was following in Atticus's footsteps as counsel. He worked pro bono whenever he could, and we were all rightly proud. He'd never had much respect for Mayella, though. It was like he sensed she'd carried a sickness, latent, that which had progressed so detrimentally in her father. I confess I held it against Jem, a little, as though he had hardened his heart, unjustly, and I tried to keep mine open.
Psychologists claim that victims perpetrate, or perpetuate, their wrongs. Still, I thought it unfair to look down on her, her history being what it was. Bob Ewell, had long been a neglectful self-indulgent. It's hard to add the word "father." Mayella had been deprived of many things, foremost childhood, and parental love. I reckon I'd cheered for her silently when I'd heard she'd married Robert Farrow and that they'd had twins, a boy and a girl, and I'd lost track of them, in our own family plights. The little I knew from our catty neighbor was that after less than three years Rob'd left her, and that Mayella had picked up on some her father's habits, what with drinking and other rumored substance misuse, prescription as well as illegal. Maybe it'd always been like that, just better kept, behind curtains.
I had no idea of the depths of abuses. We hold "Mother" in such esteem. Reviled behaviors are incompatible with its definition. Men are as if always one step removed from the tie of paternity. Culpability is more easily placed, maybe on account of this doubt, for emotional or physical abuses, even sexual abuse. But how could a mother? ...a Mother.
Altie had been, with my repressed reservations, as well as charitable encouragements, friendly with the Farrow twins. She'd always been closer with Warren, than Cassidy, Cassidy being reticent in words and gestures, and quick to bow out of group activities. Our Altie'd no such reservations and wouldn't hesitate to drop in to visit Cass whenever she withdrew. It should have been a red flag, but it seemed an adolescent phase that Cass withdrew more, and more, and Alternia with her, pulling away from home.
It tugged at my heart that my girl was grown, and soon I'd be empty nesting, as they say. It did not occur to me that things were complicating, in ways that would subsequently implicate my baby.
She'd come back one night, not so long ago, and said something that stopped me in my retirement to bed with my books and chamomile tea.
"Wherever did you hear words like that, sweetie?" I asked her, biding some time to respond judiciously. My landed work as a real estate agent had prepared me for emotional data gathering, pitching and making a sale. I scanned her body language. I inferred she'd had a disagreement with her friends.
"um.. tonight... Warren said you were a 'butch-mom' when I left after our study group, Scout." Hanging his quote with clawed fingers. The teen's words meant most obviously to wound, instill doubts in the most vulnerable areas of stability, and pierce self-image.
She accepted my definitions and resource suggestions. I departed thinking of growing pains and could only wonder what was going through her mind. Again, I thought of Atticus always treating us as "reasonably thinking individuals."
When she came home a few nights after with a split lip, it was too late. Something had gotten out of hand, and it was spreading in the neighborhood by mouth. The stares, the whispers, the silence, the cold treatment, and the heated slurs. I suspected down deep, it was creeping up from the Ewell-Farrows. Our experience from the Bob Ewell/ Tom Robinson trial in our youth had prepared me to see it as an illness of humanity, nothing personal.
It was Cassidy who was in peril.
***
Author's Note: sequel to "To Kill a Mockingbird" ... in which the main character Scout, now widowed mother of one teenaged daughter, finds herself in the trial of a lifetime to stop the incestuous abuses of a neighboring mentally unstable Mother (Mayella Ewell-Farrow) against her children (Warren and Cassidy Farrow), and the wrath that incurs from inherent social needs, sibling jealousies, parental emotional ties; and community outrage.
Faith and Meth on Friday
Two great things that go great together... But: Before we get to the two featured writers, we want to congratulate Eric Johnson, or ErJo1122 here on Prose., for the near-future release of his book, There's Gold In Those Hills, a collection of short stories that will be available on Kindle the first of next month. We'll link it below if you want to pre-order yours. Congrats, again, Eric, on the accomplishment!
Today, two posts are featured from the Spotlight page, two of our columns in the Pantheon of Prose., two poems by two great men. See the links to the pieces and profiles below.
And here's the link to The Prose. Channel for their narrations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLYWh60Mnoc
And.
As always.
Thank you for being here.
-The Prose. team
Countdown to Ecstasy
There is no someday
My prince will come
Rib eye retirement plan
For men like me
When I am dead
All that will remain
To prove that
I ever existed
Are these words
That god willing
Will find their way
Into the heart
Of another broken
Human being
And hopefully
Make them think twice
Before they decide
To pull the trigger
So promise me
That when the Devil
Finally does decide
To do me the ultimate favor
And punches my ticket
Bury me upside-down
So the world
Can kiss my ass
David Burdett
1/8/2024
though he didn’t feel quite the same
was the love real?
yes, it was.
and what was, still is
because the past stays the same
all of yesterday’s molecules that make up
my-today’s-self are still
the same
the ignorance-is-bliss kind of
love that I loved with
is still under my skin
it was purely true
love – for me
because I was the honest one
who knew nothing
of lies and heartache and seeing other people
the same way as I did
with the one I loved
I knew only love, and I know
it was only love
only, love, my only love
I know this
to be the truth utmostly
because I loved him
I loved
him. I
loved him.
I loved him.
Fibonacci Lessons
I
Wanted
More than
I worked for
I wanted a life of ease
Of few restrictions on the mind and soul
A life of freely retained recourse and justified avoidance of price or cost
Such a life of presumptive levels of suppositions
During my hours of dreams
And working hours
In Never
Never
Land
I
Wanted
A wife
Offering her sex
Who expected nothing in return
Never to be an equal partner in matrimony
But one with obedient vows singularly focused on attending to my singular needs
Such needs requiring constant vigilance and immediate action
With nocturnal desires to please
And diurnal abilities
For my
Viewing
Pleasure
I
Wanted
All of
What I wanted
In a formed sequence recognizable
By denizens six standard deviations from the mean
Residing in perpetual wanderlust adventures financed by counselors of equal merit and skill
And denizens equally spaced from that very same mean
Residing in decreased ambition areas
Where the bar
Is set
Very
Low
Since
What
I wanted
All I wanted
Was not anything I needed
Decades of desire hiding decades of intelligent thought
Buried deep within a frightened little boy who could not express his feelings
But that was then and this is now
I now see the light
For who wants
Now wants
Me
Forever
Metamorphosis
I listened politely
As he explained
How he had
‘Solved the equation of alcohol’
Yet sadly
The last time I saw him
He looked 11 months pregnant
And the whites of his eyes
Were canary yellow
And all I could think
To say was
‘You never were very good at math’
And come to think of it
Neither was I
David Burdett
1/5/2024