Hello, Writers and Dear Readers.

Today, we feature a beautiful piece of writing from a giant talent. See it on the channel, and we'll tag the author in the comments below. Here's the vid:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4WmmyxFZIA

And, As always...............

Thank you for being here.

-The Prose. team

Why wasn't the question - it was the morphine. I asked it for some relief it never indeed provided me. I needed more. I questioned more. It gave me nothing. Of course, I was left feeling empty. There was never enough to satisfy this need, which I couldn't relinquish. A thirst no one could ever quench.

Maybe my head was filled with too many things. I'm just writing it out to escape what no one else wants to know about. I like it better when people don't know these things about me. "I'm an open book." Bullshit. I call myself out but never verbally. I'm just playing a game where the rules were never explained to me. You'll figure it out as you go or lose, but they say no one's competing.

It all felt like bologna to me. Watch what you're saying, pay attention to who's looking, don't you know they're always watching. An ant they magnify doesn't matter how small they are still bound to see. Can you forget the critiques? Maybe, eventually. I was going to wait and see. Find what they never did. That was all me.

You go before me. That's not polite; it's the fear inside of me. It's creeping out. You see it but know nothing about it. We're just laughing about it now. How similar and oppositional we just might be. Why? I stopped questioning. Uninterested, I found you to provide me with no relief. So to this quest, I keep trekking.

they asked me which three dinner guests I’d choose. anyone, living or dead. they asked about queen elizabeth, rupi kaur. I said, I am a queen and rupi kaur is too much like me. it wouldn’t be interesting. meeting her would be sad and lonely, a glimpse into an alternate reality.

I’d choose ernest hemingway. ask him about his process, why he put a shotgun to his head. I’d pick the owner of my local independent bookstore, ask him why he’s successful. I think book store owners know success because they own literal guides on what it means to be intelligent: the classics.

I’d choose Georgia O’Keeffe. or maybe Rothko. how did they make the art they did? it was sure as hell on their own terms. paintings that are immortal, what’s their secret?

a dinner party with these people would be illuminating. a stark contrast to the every day, the boring. I want a mixture of personalities like the textures of different plants in nature. above all, I want to improve my art, be better than - they are?

I am palming the bulges of my stomach.

I am scraping the feeling off my forearms.

I am clawing at my clammy scarlet palms with uncut nails.

My head is dizzy, decayed, what's the harm.

I am ripping the plastic fat of my things.

I am peeling my cheeks till they're numb to tears.

I am pinching the skin that settles by my collarbones brink.

Somethings craving the spinning wheel's touch.

Sleeping beauty skin, sweating and pink.

Tell, my skin confines me far too much.

I am intangible, uncontrollable,

I am a psyche, a soul,

I am feelings that feel far too infinite-

And yet, how am I soft thick skin, far too firm, too whole?

How must a finite thing envelope my existence, a riot?!

I am my everything, and yet I stand on ten toes?

I am coursing blood and,

I am coursing thoughts without close.

Rather, make my fillings pocket-sized and planned.

My skin, horizonless.

My skin, dimpled earth.

My being deep in crisp cold soil.

Tremors sweep me,

Yet my skin is deep and tan and old.

Skin beneath the willow tree.

Skin on the bathroom floor.

Skin sunken from the sea.

I'll be skin, forever more.

Change helps us grow into a better version of ourselves. So we are still ourselves but just a better version. Like how phones evolve over time. Does the phone always need to be able to text people or call, yes. So then yes you should pay for your meal, because even though possibly a sad version of you ate the meal and now happy you has to pay for it, which made you that happy. The change to the food is that it was there and now it's in your stomach. Change isn't always drastic, it can be small as well.

"Just hold that happy thought, Peter..." Peter's attorney, one Mister Shmul Farbfinkelstein, held up a single finger before picking up his gold plated, pigtail style, early 90s m&m's phone that he'd had retrofitted so as to not be a piece of novelty junk, but instead a secured landline.

"Uh... okay, not a problem." It was a problem. Shmul had been blowing off his concerns about his case all morning.

"Uh huh... yeah... okay..." Shmul picked up an unfished pastrami on rye that had been sitting on his desk and began to bite into it.

"SHE'S ALIVE?!" Suddenly Mister Farbfinkelstein exploded into a fit of rage, shouting in Yiddish in the hopes that Peter might not understand him. The sandwich went flying into the air and landed somewhere on the floor, disintegrating into its many pieces.

Little did he know, however, that Peter spoke impeccable German, a language not at all removed from Yiddish, save for some Hebrew terms here and there, terms such as schmuck, schmegeckel, and schmegoikin, all terms for a pimmel, a schlange or a schwanz.

"I told you to have her disassembled and tossed into the fucking Hudson, you FICHEN SCWANZKOPF!" There was a pause as Peter raised an eyebrow like that one gnome meme.

"No you schmuck, I didn't tell you to let her out of the trunk of your car to run around New York as if she was your best, good friend, you worthless..." he readjusted his yarmulke just as it showed his bald spot.

"...okay, listen, you know where she is. Hit up Shlomo Dinkelferber's old Misyer Potato-latke-head lookin' self, and have him toss her in a tub of acid..." he paused. "Uh huh... okay... alright." He paced a bit.

"Alright, I've got some stupid schmuck client here, and I'm trying to waste his time to run up the clock so he pays me more... okay... alright... and bring me a new pastrami later, I broke mine because you're a stupid idiot!"

"Sorry, where were we?" He asked Peter after slamming the phone down and sitting across from him.

"Uhm... I was just talking about how I didn't murder that girl and feed her to sharks... but like..." Peter's demeanor changed. "If you're into that sort of thing???" Peter gave him a confidently inquisitive look.

"Ah, sprechst du Judischer Deutsch?"

"Nein, normal Deutsch, aber es ist nicht so anders."

"Welcome to the team brother!" Mr. Farbfinkelstein extended his hand, Peter extended his, then Mr. Farbfinkelstein pulled out a pistol and blew Peter's head off.

"Here we go again!" He said rolling his eyes, as he picked up his secured landline, gold plated, 90s m&m phone and made a call.

Abecedarian

Related to acrostic, a poem in which the first letter of each line or stanza follows sequentially through the alphabet. See Jessica Greenbaum, “A Poem for S.” Tom Disch’s “Abecedary” adapts the principles of an abecedarian poem, while Matthea Harvey’s “The Future of Terror/The Terror of Future” sequence also uses the alphabet as an organizing principle. Poets who have used the abecedarian across whole collections include Mary Jo Bang, in The Bride of E, and Harryette Mullen, in Sleeping with the Dictionary.

Verse whose meter is determined by the number of stressed (accented) syllables—regardless of the total number of syllables—in each line. Many Old English poems, including Beowulf, are accentual; see Ezra Pound’s modern translation of “The Seafarer.” More recently, Richard Wilbur employed this same Anglo-Saxon meter in his poem “Junk.” Traditional nursery rhymes, such as “Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake,” are often accentual.Accentual verse

Verse whose meter is determined by the number and alternation of its stressed and unstressed syllables, organized into feet. From line to line, the number of stresses (accents) may vary, but the total number of syllables within each line is fixed. The majority of English poems from the Renaissance to the 19th century are written according to this metrical system.Accentual-syllabic verse

Acmeism

An early 20th-century Russian school of poetry that rejected the vagueness and emotionality of Symbolism in favor of Imagist clarity and texture. Its proponents included Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova.

A poem in which the first letter of each line spells out a word, name, or phrase when read vertically. See Lewis Carroll’s “A Boat beneath a Sunny Sky.”Acrostic

A four-line stanza invented by the Classical Greek poet Alcaeus that employs a specific syllabic count per line and a predominantly dactylic meter. Alfred, Lord Tennyson imitated its form in his poem “Milton.”Alcaic

In English, a 12-syllable iambic line adapted from French heroic verse. The last line of each stanza in Thomas Hardy’s “The Convergence of the Twain” and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “To a Skylark” is an alexandrine.Alexandrine

Allegory

An extended metaphor in which the characters, places, and objects in a narrative carry figurative meaning. Often an allegory’s meaning is religious, moral, or historical in nature. John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress and Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene are two major allegorical works in English.

Alliteration

The repetition of initial stressed, consonant sounds in a series of words within a phrase or verse line. Alliteration need not reuse all initial consonants; “pizza” and “place” alliterate. Example: “With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim” from Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Pied Beauty.” Browse poems with alliteration.

Allusion

A brief, intentional reference to a historical, mythic, or literary person, place, event, or movement. “The Waste Land,” T. S. Eliot’s influential long poem is dense with allusions. The title of Seamus Heaney’s autobiographical poem “Singing School” alludes to a line from W.B. Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium” (“Nor is there singing school but studying /Monuments of its own magnificence”). Browse poems with allusions.

A word, statement, or situation with two or more possible meanings is said to be ambiguous. As poet and critic William Empson wrote in his influential book Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), “The machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry.” A poet may consciously join together incompatible words to disrupt the reader’s expectation of meaning, as e.e. cummings does in [anyone lived in a pretty how town]. The ambiguity may be less deliberate, steered more by the poet’s attempts to express something ineffable, as in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “The Windhover.” At the sight of a bird diving through the air, the speaker marvels, “Brute beauty and valor and act, oh, air, pride, plume here / Buckle!” The ambiguity of this phrase lies in the exclamation of “buckle”: The verb could be descriptive of the action, or it could be the speaker’s imperative. In both cases, the meaning of the word is not obvious from its context. “Buckle” could mean “fall” or “crumple,” or it could describe the act of clasping armor and bracing for battle.Ambiguity

Someone or something placed in an inappropriate period of time. Shakespeare’s placing of a clock in Julius Caesar is an anachronism, because clocks had not yet been invented in the period when the play is set. In Charles Olson’s epic The Maximus Poems, the central figure encompasses the poet’s alter ego, the second-century Greek philosopher Maximus of Tyre, and the fourth-century Phoenician mystic Maximus. This persona arises from outside of time to reflect on the state of American culture by recounting the history of Gloucester, Massachusetts.Anachronism

A word spelled out by rearranging the letters of another word; for example, “The teacher gapes at the mounds of exam pages lying before her.”Anagram

A metrical foot consisting of two unaccented syllables followed by an accented syllable. The words “underfoot” and “overcome” are anapestic. Lord Byron’s “The Destruction of Sennacherib”is written in anapestic meter.Anapest

Anaphora

Often used in political speeches and occasionally in prose and poetry, anaphora is the repetition of a word or words at the beginning of successive phrases, clauses, or lines to create a sonic effect.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech, which uses anaphora not only in its oft-quoted “I have a dream” refrain but throughout, as in this passage when he repeats the phrase “go back to”:

                           Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, 

                           go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and

                           ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can

                           and will be changed.

In Joanna Klink's poem “Some Feel Rain,” the phrase "some feel" is repeated, which creates a rhythm and a sense of an accumulating emotions and meanings:

Some feel rain. Some feel the beetle startle

in its ghost-part when the bark

slips. Some feel musk. Asleep against

each other in the whiskey dark, scarcely there.

See Paul Muldoon’s “As,” William Blake’s “The Tyger,” or much of Walt Whitman’s poetry, including “I Sing the Body Electric.” See also Rebecca Hazelton's explanatory essay, “Adventures in Anaphora.”

A form of personification in which human qualities are attributed to anything inhuman, usually a god, animal, object, or concept. In Vachel Lindsay’s “What the Rattlesnake Said,” for example, a snake describes the fears of his imagined prey. John Keats admires a star’s loving watchfulness (“with eternal lids apart”) in his sonnet “Bright Star, Would I Were as Steadfast as Thou Art.”Anthropomorphism

Contrasting or combining two terms, phrases, or clauses with opposite meanings. William Blake pits love’s competing impulses—selflessness and self-interest—against each other in his poem “The Clod and the Pebble.” Love “builds a Heaven in Hell’s despair,” or, antithetically, it “builds a Hell in Heaven’s despite.”Antithesis

Aphorism

A pithy, instructive statement or truism, like a maxim or adage. See Benjamin Franklin’s “How to get RICHES.”  Browse more aphorisms.

An address to a dead or absent person, or personification as if he or she were present. In his Holy Sonnet “Death, be not proud,” John Donne denies death’s power by directly admonishing it. Emily Dickinson addresses her absent object of passion in “Wild nights!—Wild nights!”Apostrophe

A basic model from which copies are made; a prototype. According to psychologist Carl Jung, archetypes emerge in literature from the “collective unconscious” of the human race. Northrop Frye, in his Anatomy of Criticism, explores archetypes as the symbolic patterns that recur within the world of literature itself. In both approaches, archetypical themes include birth, death, sibling rivalry, and the individual versus society. Archetypes may also be images or characters, such as the hero, the lover, the wanderer, or the matriarch.

Brothers Michael and Matthew of Bright Bluff pack their bags and head out.

“Matthew, are you sure you are ready?”

“Yes, brother.”

“What will you do?”

“I will make father and mother proud.”

“How will you do it?”

“I will earn coin and make my way in this world.”

“And who will you do it with?”

“You, Michael. I will watch your back as you watch mine. We will make our way together.”

“Yes, little brother. It is you and me against the world.”