I swallowed my pride for you. A piece of me died for you. I never believed I could be so vulnerable. You stopped missing me when we were apart. I held open my weary eyes waiting for you to reply. My goodnight wishes never came and I slept in uneasy loneliness. I love you's were less often and awkwardly returned. I was yearning for the paradise we'd stayed in before. I still am. You called me that evening when you were tired of me at last. The only thing I remember saying was "I'm gonna go now." I didn't dare cry until the connection was cut. You couldn't know that I felt for you. In anger and bitterness I hear your name. I won't talk about you and I don't feel the same. You're a coward and a child and you'll miss me one day. When the one you left me for gets boring like I did. I wish I could warn the other little girls like me to stay away from boys who will take and take and take from their full hearts, just to build themselves up. There is no way to help girls like me. I will love and give and be torn apart. I will be driven to hate. Then, I will love again. 

The frivolous, man-made expectation of love is consistent with a disappearing generation called Integrity. Consistency veiled with a super-sized, gluttonous, capitalist society auctioning character to the lowest bidder in the front row. A Society with inflated, dysfunctional expenses and lifestyles due to inflated, dysfunctional habits and soulless pastimes. Habits born from the empty pits of weightless disconnection and misinformation learned. Jagged disconnection existing unintelligibly between the screen-faced youth and our ancestors. Our ancestors planted Determination in roots nourished with blood, while youthful complacency uproots Opportunity. Opportunity wasted on daydreams searching lonely oblivion for fate. Oblivion welcoming those easy to lead because everyone else is cynical and dances sideways. Cynicism is captured like a criminal and forced to plead guilty by those effectuating honest Individualism. There is a genocide of Individualism happening right now, I heard the Act might be removed from the e-dictionary next year. Next year founded obsolete by Instant Gratification. Gratifying their objectives the elders are tasked with publishing palpable reminders of Importance. Reminders sans materialistic holidays for those who unlearned how to truly listen.

Memories of my former self always prove to be painful. I get lost in day-to-day activities and convince myself that my path to a better me has not been in vain...I'm getting there. I'm surprisingly logical in my efforts, until others invite themselves into my walk. My path then becomes more like a battlefield.

"Say, do you remember how horrible you used to be in the past?"

BANG!

The words hit me like a bullet, wounding my knee and slowing my walk.

"What about that time you were in the wrong place with the wrong people?"

BANG!

Bullet to the hip, further impairing me and slowing my walk.

"And how about all of those bad choices you made? Do you remember? Do you?"

BANG!

Another shot! This shot hits my shoulder. As I fall to my unwounded side, I try to decide if I continue down this path in a most slow and painful crawl or, lay there, stuck with bleeding reminders of who I was before.

"Hey, do you remember how great you were doing before you were hit with your past?"

BANG!

Kill shot! Right to the head.

What if we focused on who we are today instead of how we once were or will be before we are dead?

She always wished for her life to be a novel, with an articulate flowing narrative. And it was at this moment, lying quietly at the close of the day, that she finally realized why: as a novel, there must be some sort of applicable plot and a defining moment where all the chaos just makes sense. As a character, her mere presence in the novel guarantees a certain degree of recognizable purpose. Her life would suddenly become this constructed and intentional thing, brimming with the possibility of being understood. Even now as she fantasizes about the words such a book would hold, her thoughts are formatted and wistfully spoken from the typed print of crisp pages. 

After years of virtual reality games, HD-TV and smart phone machinations, Evan Brock, 15, suffered from migraines, dizziness and nausea. His father Leonard was concerned — so concerned he launched a full-fontal assault on the medical community. Following months of tedious tests, a specialist in cognitive psychology, Kathryn May-Morris, said she had ID’d the problem: Cyber-Syndrome (aka DMS "digital motion sickness"). The solution: Total withdrawal from technology for a year or more. When Leonard Brock told his son the news, Evan ran to the roof of their penthouse apartment, dangled his feet over the edge and wondered whether life without technology was life at all.

To most men the symbol of the ultimate temptation is the mermaid. The female form represents life, home, love, companionship and warmth. The fish tail is experience, survival, food, wanderlust and nature. In short, the mermaid encompasses almost all the needs, dreams, thoughts and realities a man needs to survive. We can attach man's temptations to these words. Man is eternally tempted by all the things that comprise life. Could it be that man's very existence can be attributed to temptation?

Don't be confused about temptation. Temptation is not desire, nor attraction, nor need, nor any function man requires to live his life. Temptation is life. Temptation is the essence of being. Temptation is a basis for man's soul. It will be temptation that leads man to eternity. Temptation is a word that very poorly describes an inner yearning of humankind. That inner yearning is basic to humans and drives us all forward. Does this seem to present temptation as being God?

Pre-creation, procreation, life, all human experience is driven by temptation. The sciences and the arts are dominated by temptation. The choices humans make are determined by temptation. Temptation is like the glue that holds us all together. Temptation can be ignored but only if we are willing to die. Yet even when we die we turn to dust which becomes a temptation to become nothing all the while actually requiring us to live eternally in the infinite distance and time of the Universe.

Whoa, there, horsey! What brought on this tirade that seems to make temptation some grand human attribute? The classic definition of temptation is “the act of tempting or the state of being tempted especially to evil”. The classic definition is accurate and proper but it is not all inclusive. Temptation is the bright colors of the male bird. Temptation is that certain smile a wife gives to her husband. In short anything that attracts can be considered a temptation. Whether such temptation leads to evil depends on much more than the temptation itself. Mainly it is the will of the observer or the recipient of temptation that decides the morality or propriety of each observance.

Temptation, oh temptation. Thy name alone brings me memories of loves and lusts long left behind. I find myself needing to be tempting more than the object of any temptation. Temptation it is that brings me the ladies of the night. The sweet, tender souls that lay at my side and allow my caresses to pique their needs. The beautiful, voluptuous ladies than will hold my hand and take my kisses and plead for more. The ladies are all I live for in my prolonged existence. They make tomorrow worth waiting for. When I awake I will use the day to prepare myself for spending another night with the ladies. I will let temptation take control of my mind and follow it to the rewards of being one with another. Temptation, now and forever. Oh, temptation.

Come with me sweet lady. Join my bed. Let us be together what neither of us is alone.

I'm quite biased, but Prose is also my favorite app for a reason. 

It's not the beauty, despite how beautiful a work of art Prose is. It's the soul. 

The soul of the design, the functionality, the content, and the people. Prose is a safe environment in which I can express my soul completely, and in which I can listen to other soul express themselves completely. 

The soul of Prose, and its constituents, emanates aliveness, passion, wonder, elegance, depth. It embraces the full spectrum of light and dark and rejuvenates me like a literary fountain of youth.

Love you, Prose.

"As soon as I could go 'Mamagagayaya,' I was learning Spanish, German and English all at once, a whirlwind of romantic words and phrases, gestures and actions, all painting the emotions of the often-mysterious human palette," says author, ghostwriter, and editor, William "Dino" Garner of his early writing career.

Prose. had the recent pleasure of speaking with Garner to find out more about what's involved in negotiating multiple creative roles.

He says that his mother was his first editor.

"She was dogmatic about speaking properly, in Spanish and English. At the other end of the kitchen, my adopted German family was equally diligent in teaching me proper high German, not the slurry variety of the southern region. So my formative years were filled with de rigueur images and sounds, tastes and scents of all color and stripe, all conspiring to mold me into a little prince of distinguished letters."

This "cross-cultural formality" is what made him want to explore more “undignified” (read: vibrant and colorful) forms of language. He spent time observing the behavior spoken by "the beggar on a corner, gangsta in a traphouse, and hundreds of other real-life characters who forced the evolution of the English language," he said.

"During a brief intermission back in the U.S., I entered Kindergarten in the good State of Georgia, and promptly started editing my teacher’s backwater grammar."

...

Stay tuned for the complete article today on The Official Prose Blog at: blog.theprose.com/blog.

I

She rouses from a road bump,

spots me reading a book of poems,

and assumes me to be educated.

Her sweatshirt is rolled up like a bikini top,

unveiling her large stomach

with the pomp of a premiering vaudeville show.

She’s been unselfish since birth,

salt of the earth worth her weight in gold.

Sold down the river at her own demand,

she walked straight into our house of mourning,

wrapped her wise arms around my 11-year old frame,

and kissed my tortured mind.

She reminds me that spring is coming back for us;

we just have to spin the world a little more first.

But she’s been forgotten and forlorn,

become a run-down ghost town

whose people left her long ago in heart

before she lost them to industry.

And I write to her, to you because I loved, love, will love you

and I want to understand who you are,

who you were, and who you’re still yet to become.

Watch now how slowly a tear can form,

and then fall, when you’re crying

and think you have nothing

worth being sad about.

II

The sexiest thing you’ve ever said to me was

I want you inside me

and all my blood rushed center and down.

But you were supposed to be my sandbox, not my stone tablet;

there to make me realize how quickly I would die.

Our void grows contemptuous,

widens with each jealousy,

sprouts a new offshoot so green,

so doomed to be forgotten.

I hope your children grow up to be poets

so you’re never able to understand them.

I reread the printed letters from my lawyer,

make constellations of his patterned excuses.

I catch every person’s phone conversation

and reply to both ends, snatch their vested secrets,

could expose the truths of their youths.

But you haven’t read about me in your guidebooks,

and you’re not sure who to believe anymore.

III

Born of the same soured soil and tainted rain,

we did the only thing we knew how,

grew inward – tighter and tighter into each other,

hoping that our togetherness could save us

from the harshness of our surroundings.

But the darknesses we hold inside us –

deep and consuming enough to digest galaxies –

have somehow found homes in our foreign bodies.

We are eroding within, like our lost coast,

ever crumbling into the insatiable gulf

as grown men seek a fantastical world

where their monsters obey them

and not the other way around.

She had to have heard the morning moanings

of VHS vixens through thin walls.

Shut up, shut up, sit down, and get lost

in this sitcom rerun with him for the third time today.

His self-slapped golden handcuffs keep him

tight where his boss wants him,

marionetting stability and rigidity

as our former selves fight inside to stay alive,

waiting for the worst moments

to resurrect themselves in their familiar haunts.

He couldn’t domesticate the beast with obedience;

his training just taught him to gnaw the wrong things.

We want to be brackish,

but fear what we may kill in the process –

some just can’t comprehend the water’s ways:

filled only with soft breathing and flushed skin –

the work of an inexperienced child

who’d only before fucked women

to submission in his mind.

And your elegance and innocence couldn’t save you,

not this time.

One day, they’ll understand

the power of a peaceful moment,

the courage of calming the raging storms of their souls,

the wisdom of harnessing their ferocity for greater ends.