he says he'll make me his martyr

if i beg him,

that he'll let me feel religion 

if i let him turn the hem of my shirt inside-out,

kiss the cotton out of my mouth,

and spit fire.

he makes fists out of my fingers

until i am back alleys and barbed wire

ready to storm heaven

when his trumpet calls.

he says we were made to make god tremble,

to make kingdoms fall.

so i let his lips linger on my skin.

he tells me to give up

so i give in.

he says my kisses are penance

so i repent on silk sheets,

worshipping a faith

that's got me down on both knees.

no sleep

and the churning in my stomach 

tells me i should be asking for forgiveness,

but i've only been praying for keeps.

he drinks

the blood in my palms

instead of washing them clean,

talks vices into psalms

and scriptures into blasphemy.

i feel sin in my ribs

and him on my lips,

trying to pull purgatory

out of my hips

until i am all fire and brimstone.

i don't know if i want to believe.

he says if i give more, i'll receive,

that even if my faith shakes and my back breaks

he won't leave me alone.

i hit dead ends

and thin walls

to drown out his voice.

i pour my veins into

vessels just to hear

white noise.

he says

he'll make us legends to believe in,

that we'll do too much evil to die in vain.

he abandons me once i am his.

he never tells me his name.

You asked. We listened. Prose. 3.0 is finally here.

We have been working tirelessly behind the scenes to bring you the biggest and best update ever.

So what’s new?

Portals:

Pinterest has boards. Facebook has groups. Reddit has subreddits.

Prose now has Portals.

Subscribe to your favorite Portals and enter specific Portal challenges.

We have launched 3.0 with twenty-four ready-made Portals such as:

• Philosophy 

• Horror and Thriller 

• Fiction 

• Feedback 

Public portals are a place within which you can read and write.

Restricted Portals are read only. If you’d like to submit content to a restricted Portal please contact us.

Private Portals are exactly that, private. Unless you are invited by an admin, they will not be visible on the Portal list.

Writing features:

Introducing: bold, italic and underline. We also now have justification options.

Challenges: Now you can all post challenges again, use this feature wisely. Challenge yourself, and each other.

Reprose:

You can now share the posts you like with your followers, just like a retweet. You also have the option of Reprosing to your profile.

Bookmarks:

We’ve replaced likes with Bookmarks. Show your appreciation and save the posts to your Bookmark list. Don’t worry, all existing likes have already been transferred.

All new look:

The brown is gone! *Fist pump* We have a cool new color scheme, post design, and menu. Even if we say it ourselves, 3.0 is looking damn fine.

Read count:

The read count is self-explanatory, it counts your post reads. Simple.

Blocking:

Someone raising your heckles? Block them. We can’t all get along, and now you don’t have to.

Account De-activation:

Whilst we really don’t want you to go, deactivation is child’s play and can be easily reversed.

Take your time, have a look around. If you have any questions or feedback, please contact us, send us a direct message in-app, or reach out to one of the Prose admins.

Now, let’s get some writing done, shall we?

Leonardo Da Vinci said,“Art is never finished, only abandoned.”

This is true for every short story I ever wrote, whether it was published or not. The published pieces, upon subsequent reading months or years after the fact, reveal things I would change today. And the rest – many, many of them – either failed to find a home, or I wasn’t able to finish them for a number of reasons, usually that I’d lost faith in the central premise the plot was built around and preferred to work on something new.

It’s one thing to give up on a story, and a very different thing to give up on a novel. A novel can take a long time to write, usually at least a year. That’s a lot of time to have nothing come of it. However, I do believe that any time spent writing is worth it, regardless of the outcome, especially if you learn more not only about writing, but about yourself as a writer.

...

Tune in to The Official Prose. Blog later today for the full article by author and guest blogger Anne Leigh Parrish at: blog.theprose.com/blog.

When you see the Sun travels across the skies on his barge to emblazon the beginning of new day; when the people who do nothing but complain about their jobs and the monotony of their lives feed no more hearts to their star as the myths demand it, and there is no more wonderment about all the living beings and their tiny lives swarming at my backyard, and the melody of the birds every new dawn sickens them when they are about to awake, and they don't recognize the unique symphony every rain drop performs once they kiss Earth cheeks, and when they go out and pick up the newspaper, they only see a trite star and they think that such white circle cannot grant any wishes; when you keep your child from playing with the different worlds a book can offer, when his dormant, explorer eyes go blind with TV to keep him from playing with his own world and all it has to offer; when when the meaning behind an honest smile does not exist because it is just a facial gesture, a movement of the muscles; when they only see the written words but cannot go in between the lines; when the surface of everything weighs more than gold; when the beating metaphor inside our chests is just to keep us alive--then you will see that people have lost the extraordinary and replaced it with the meaningless literal images of life.

DA 2014

As your life goes from day to day,

You'll make some friends along the way,

Some will stay forever true,

Remaining loyal just to you,

But others still will scheme and plot,

To betray you, as like as not,

And difficult to spot are they,

The ones most likely to betray,

So when they stab you in the back,

Then come in tears alas, alack,

Remember your Forget Me Nots,

The Leopard cannot change his spots.

Just send those schemers on their way,

To find another ruse to play,

And join your true friends, loyal all,

To lock your doors lest Leopards call.

We are paper dolls,

building homes out

of poetry. You're

fixing my rips with

Scotch tape, and I'm

kissing your paper

cut knees. Don't

leave. Me. We've

only just begun,

love. Let's write

into the sunset, and

find out what we're

made of.