Walt Whitman, the end of time, a bird in steel, and a world starved of words.
What do Walt Whitman, Danzig, Jim Morrison, Elvis, a shit job, and existentialism have in common? Episode 15 of Liquid Velvet Literature on Prose. Radio, that's what. Two writers follow W.W. to bring it home with words jumping alive with fire and life, and a touch of death.
Here's the link.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_ZY-9k0ZKg&t=121s
And here are the pieces featured.
https://www.theprose.com/post/807692/at-the-end-of-time-alexis-karpouzos https://www.theprose.com/post/807771/a-caged-bird
And.
As always.
Thank you for being here.
-The Prose. team
Big body streams
Hard to find the words to describe how life's tribulations degradingly betray us. Fight rather than make peace. Speaking, rather than doing. Exclusive destruction feels good, construction of myself only does for a while.
Life goes backwards, forwards, right and center. Non-linear in the horrifically grotesque image of realism, not a potpourri smelling hippy at his 15th festival this year talking about time.
Staying in one place is too much for me to bear as I sweat beads of boredom. A few years makes the last six months a place of monotonous cocksuckery and melancholy suicidal ideation that brings me right back to the places and people and things which cause my beads to turn to stress and frustration and fear.
Currently I am obsessed with the concept of duality, because there is so much of it in my own life.
I have very little insight into other people's lives since my own is all consuming like a raging inferno at a Texas fraternity's bonfire.
I like my writing and I don't. Others like it, I wonder if they're lying to appease and placate. Adjectives? TOO MANY I suppose. Fuck you that is how I write you can throw this fucking book in the nearest garbage bin, and then jump on in.
Time spent appeasing people is time spent by the weak and miserable. I don't even know you. You're just dumb enough to buy my book. Be strong and miserable. Be dangerous and harmless. Be an asshole and a saint.
Be confident and vulnerably insecure to the point you leave yourself open to immense pain and suffering that permeates a majority of your memories and feelings towards on a daily basis until you are so fucking dead inside that you don't want to kill yourself anymore unless it would make you feel alive and not completely gone as your pride consumes you, what you once felt you can't even feel in your chest.
It's you.
i am a dog
i sleep most of the day
maybe the night too
she feeds me
shes nice
her miseries are mostly of her own making
she frets over the shade of her mascara
she further frets over those creek lines under her eyes
i see her without makeup too
she isnt too bad
but rates herself a bit on the lower tier
that has made her too accessible
vulnerable she always was
i knew her vulnerability when she over fed me
when she would sit under the jacaranda
and keep looking at me
and end up with tears and tears
she talked to me as if i understood
she would pat my head
and ask whether i was tired
i would ask instead
whether she was tired
but beyond this mundane emotional infestation
we knew stuff
i knew she was alone
moneyless
trying too hard to live till the next day
trying too hard too pomade her hair backwards
trying to hard to just fit in
i think she understood me too
i'm black and furry and stupid
she thinks i'm an over thinker
its most likely that every fear of hers
she finds as a fear of mine too
maybe in this stupid two room apartment
like so many other stupid two room apartments
we are just living
putting on a good show
and nobody really knows that we are tired of pretending
still
pun intended
atleast she gets laid
i'm all by myself
Memento Mori.
In the end,
There is only death.
It's a concept I've struggled with often. Not necessarily via interpretation or meaning, but fully digesting it. Internalizing it.
The inevitability of death is utterly, brutally terrifying. It's in the idea of a life cut short, the act of achieving & climbing the ladder ascending to your goals, but failing to entirely leave your mark — that is a truly horrifying thought.
I can imagine it is for you, as well.
You stand before the clock of eternity, its design bereft of the usual hands, its flat surface kin to a sun dial. Instead, you yourself serve as its hands, guided by a demiurgic force coursing through you. Every ticking, passing second, a new, monolithic titan is forged from the zephyrs of time — a new being of your subconscious creation. Each, resembling you physically.
What one would fail to realize off first glance: whilst recherche in their own ways, these are just versions of you, manifestations from your different thoughts. Or, rather, what you could become.
You can become your quintessence.
You are the stars beneath the moonlight, & the clouds along the azure horizon.
Everything yet nothing revolves around you; you simply move with the currents & adapt accordingly.
I say this to say to both you and myself: stop wasting time dreading the past. Stop wasting time looking into the future. Stop wasting time investing your energy in the wrong places. If you want things to change, & change for the better — if you want to become the quintessential version of yourself you envision — you have to evolve past that which brought you turmoil & doubt, & rise in the end. Only then will you have mastered the art of stoicism, & find your equilibrium in helpful settings or helpful activities where you normally wouldn't be at or do.
In the end, let us embrace the dance of life, knowing that each step forward is a testament to our resilience and strength. Let us seize the present moment with unwavering determination, forging our path towards greatness with every heartbeat. For in the grand tapestry of existence, our legacy is not measured by the fleeting sands of time, but by the indelible mark we leave on the world. So let us live boldly, love fiercely, and create tirelessly, for memento mori — in the end, there is only the beautiful symphony of a life well-lived.
Grit & Grace
You stand amid the ashes, beautiful in your rawness,
a phoenix cloaked in shadows,
dirt smeared across your cheeks like war paint.
Gritty resilience etched in every line of your face,
you are the embodiment of both storm and sanctuary.
You've danced with the flames, haven't you?
Let them lick at your scars, turning pain into power,
fear into fuel.
Each ember, a soft, fluffy touch
against the hardened layers you’ve worn like armor.
In the fire's embrace, you find purity—
a cleansing so profound,
it strips away the veneer of your past selves,
leaving only the essence of your being,
dark yet dazzling.
Set it alight, let the flames rise,
watch them consume the doubts,
the past whispers of 'never' and 'too much.'
In this conflagration, you are reborn,
not from the ashes, but from the blaze itself.
Beautiful, dirty, gritty, dark, fluffy—
you are all these things and none,
transformed by the inferno's kiss,
a testament to the power of fire
to cleanse, to change, to liberate.
He Ain’t Heavy He’s My Brother
by Wilkinson Riling
There is a quote from French dramatist Jean Baptiste Legouve, "A brother is a friend given by nature." I can say from experience, nature went out of her way to provide to me the best friend, the best brother, a person can have. It would be years later when cruel fate would override that process of natural selection with the indifference of a random accident.
We were two years apart, my brother Richard and I, but I can tell you we had a deep connection I've heard only exists among twins. Physically, for all the similarities, there were significant differences. Richard was taller, I was leaner. Richard was muscular, where I was slight. Richard was left handed, I was right. Richard was outgoing and personable, I leaned towards being introverted. The one trait we both possessed was we could look at each other and know in that instant what the other was thinking. With just a glance we could detect in one another our thoughts, mood, veracity, anxiety, needs and most of all humor. That was the one super power he had over me. He could make me laugh anytime he wanted, and often did.
When we were kids we had a basement my Dad had refurbished with a tile floor, drop ceiling and wood paneling. Pop even put a TV in the back wall when the first remote controls came out. The basement was a man cave long before they were ever known as man caves. Speaking of caves, when you closed the main door and covered up the basement window, it was black as pitch in the cellar.
The neighborhood kids would come over to play a game of "Tag in the Dark." The person who was "It" would step out of the room and count while everyone scurried for hiding places. That person, after reaching "ten Mississippi," would turn off the light, enter and have to search in the darkness to find the next person to be "It."
My brother never bothered searching for anyone else, he just would start calling out my name in a funny voice and wait to hear my stifling giggles. I tried so hard not to laugh one time, I wet my pants. So, when he tagged me and the lights came up, I was not only "It," I was pissed, because he made me the focal point of much childhood derision. But I knew then as I know now, all's far in a game of "Tag in the Dark."
My brother had a softer side to him as well. When we were kids we shared a room and a bed. Around Christmas time we both liked having a back scratch. When we gave each other a back scratch there was always an argument who went first. Because if you were the first scratcher, then you, as the scratchee, could fall asleep after. Without a clock we had to figure out how to time the length of the back scratch. So, we used the Christmas standard, "Silent Night." The back scratch would last only as long as the first two stanzas of the carol. Richard always got to give me a back scratch first, leaving me half asleep to finish up. I still remember my seven-year-old voice cracking on the high notes of the lyrics encouraging one to sleep in heavenly peace and finishing with my brother asleep in what could only be described as such.
I smoked my first cigarette with my brother. I was around ten. We would go behind our garage along with my brother's friend Scotty. We took turns puffing and try not to cough on a Winston cigarette Scott stole from his mother. Our garage was backed up against a small hill that divided our block from the street behind us. This hill gave us easy access to the garage roof where we would practice our delinquency. On this particular day, we were racing to climb up to the garage roof. Scott and I took the well travelled back route.
My brother had a better idea. My father had left a ladder out, unbeknownst to us, Richard set it up in front of the garage and started to climb. Scott and I arrived on back of the roof just as Richard's arms came over the opposite end of the garage followed by his grinning face. He had that smile on his face thinking he surprised us with his ingenuity. It took less than a second for that smile to be replaced by a look of fear and regret. The ladder slipped out from under him and he disappeared from view. I don't remember hearing him scream, I do remember the sound of crashing glass.
Scott and I ran up to the edge of the roof and looked down. The image is burned into my brain like a color daguerreotype. The edges may be faded, but all the consequential parts clear and visible. Richard lay splayed on his stomach perpendicular to the fallen ladder and surrounded by shards of glass from a broken window. He was wearing short pants. His left leg was cut open at the calf with a four inch wide vertical tear that ran from just below the knee to just above the ankle. There was a pool of blood around the area of his leg. I could see the white of his bone protruding out from the canal of blood held in his place by a levee of skin.
I don't ever recall being more clear of thought. I remembered our neighbor had been working in his garage. I jumped off the back of the garage and ran through the neighbor's hedges, I told my neighbor that Richard needed help. The neighbor ran over with rags to use as a tourniquet. I didn't follow. Instead, I ran down the driveway and up the street. This happened on a Saturday afternoon. I recalled that another neighbor up the street always had her father over for a late afternoon spaghetti dinner on Saturday. Moreover, I remembered her father was a doctor. I got the old man away from his Italian dinner and to bring his medical bag. I pushed him down the street imploring him to hurry and to save my brother.
The doctor had clean bandages and gave my brother a shot of something just as the emergency vehicle showed up. In the end, Richard required over seventy stitches and had to work to rebuild muscle in his leg. It only served to make me aware of how accident prone my brother could be. I've heard it suggested because he's left handed as the reason, but I believe it's because he was fearless. He remained so even after taking that fall.
My brother went on to become of all things, a roofer. Talk about tempting the fates. He started his own roofing company which became locally very successful and well respected. I pursued a career that took me to the West coast. Whenever I'd come back to visit over the years we'd rib each other about our childhood exploits, whether wetting pants or falling off ladders, to any weight gain that we managed to accumulate over the years. Even though we both put on the pounds, Richard would always smile and say, "Bill, you ain't heavy, you're my brother." The line was taken directly from the 1969 hit from the Hollies, "He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother." It would become our theme song.
In 1989 I was at work at my desk in California. The phone rang. It was my father. He told me Richard had an accident. "Please don't tell me he's gone, Dad." He wasn't, but it didn't look good. I flew home that evening. My brother had fallen after a chicken ladder snapped in half causing him to slide off a three story roof. He struck a car and then hit the pavement head first. A chicken ladder is a homemade wooden support that allows a roofer to walk perpendicular to a slanted roof. This gave out causing Richard's fall.
The first day I arrived at the hospital and saw him, Richard's head looked swollen to the size a beach ball, tubes and wires stuck in and on him like tentacles draping from an electronic squid. I got to hold his hand and let him know I was there but I have no idea if he heard me. I spent the day bedside and whispered to him stories from our childhood.
On the second day, I am left with another color daguerreotype in my brain. My father and I were visiting Richard. We were talking in low tones at the base of his bed. Without warning, Richard bolted straight up in bed, eyes wide open, staring directly at us, his left hand reaching out to us as if he wanted us to grab his hand and stop him from falling. It was and is, the scariest thing I ever saw in my life. Because I had no idea what to do. Nor did my father, because we banged into each other trying to move out of the room and call for a doctor. Richard was pulling at tubes and cables and stretching all the wires clipped to him. The doctor and nurses scrambled and settled him down, but I can never forget the fear I saw in my brother's eyes and the helplessness I felt. The doctor said Richard might have been reliving the fall in his mind. Add to that, what my father must have been going through and it was all beyond my emotional imagination.
The third day remains the most incredible for me, because it contains elements of life's mysteries causing me to question my very sanity and issues of life after death. I can play back bits and pieces in my head like a tick tok video, so let me time stamp it for you.
It was March, 13th, 1989. 7:30 a.m. an early Spring morning. The sun had risen above neighborhood rooftops. I'm sitting in Richard's hospital room with his wife. We're letting Richard know we're there. I'm speaking in low tones because I don't want to excite him and repeat the previous day. His wife is gently stroking his forehead. A nurse barrels into the room like Mary Tyler Moore on prozac and loudly proclaims, "Good morning, Richard, it's a beautiful day!" She opens the blinds to let in more sunlight. "Spring is in the air! The tulips are in bloom and your family is here and they love you very much!"
I asked the nurse how he slept through the night. She smiled saying he had such a good quiet evening, no seizures. She again reminded us it was a beautiful day and left. I turned to my brother's wife and smiled. "I think he's going to be okay. I'm going to call Dad." I went to a nearby pay phone, fished out a quarter from my pocket. My Dad picked up in one ring. "Dad, Billy. Richard slept through the night, no seizures. He even looks better. Dad, I think he's going to be okay." Those words no sooner left my lips when I heard the intercom. "Code Blue, Code Blue, Code Blue."
"Dad, get down here, now!" I had a sinking feeling I hope I never feel again.
I ran back to my brother's room, it was already crowded with an emergency staff. My brother's wife was against the opposite wall in the hallway looking in, but it was hard to see anything except the backs of the doctors and nurses working on Richard. The patient room right next to my brother's room was empty, so I stepped up to the doorway to get an angled view of them working on my brother. They were doing CPR and all the other emergency procedures we see on TV hospital dramas but this drama was real. Or was it?
There was a radio playing music in the empty room as they worked on my brother. The radio was playing a song. It was a song by the Hollies. "He Ain't Heavy He's my Brother" was playing as my brother was dying. I started to think I was in a bad dream, not quite a nightmare. This can't be happening. But it was. For four minutes and nineteen seconds I listened to that heart breaking song watching as my brother's life ebbed away. To add to the mystery of the moment, the next song that the radio played was Chicago's "If You Leave Me Now." His wife later told me that was their song. Was that Richard saying goodbye to us? Was it just an amazing coincidence? Was my brain seeking connections to help me deal with the trauma of the moment? I don't know. It haunts me to this day.
As the song says... the road is long with many a winding turn that leads us to who knows where? But if I'm strong, strong enough to carry him, he ain't heavy, he's my brother.
I carry my brother in my heart.
AT THE END OF TIME - ALEXIS KARPOUZOS
I know that our efforts all come to nothing. Analyze life, tear its trappings off, lay it bare with thought, with logic, with philosophy, and its emptiness is revealed as a bottomless pit; its nothingness frankly confesses to nothingness, and Despair comes to perch in the soulI know the end of us all is nothing, I know that at the end of Time, the reward of our toil will be nothing — and again nothing. I know that all our handiwork and all our ideas will be destroyed. I know that not even ash will be left from the fires that consume us. I know that our ideals, even those we achieve, will vanish in the eternal darkness of oblivion and final non-being. There is no hope, none, in my heart. I know, No promise, none, can I make to myself and to others. No recompense can I expect for my labors. No fruit will be born of my thoughts. I know the time — eternal seducer of all men, eternal cause of all effects — offers me nothing but the blank prospect of annihilation. So, my dignity is broken and weak, in recognition of my impending defeat.
The man who is alone, who stands on his own feet, who is stripped bare, who asks for nothing and wants nothing, who has reached the apex of disinterestedness not through blind renunciation but through excess of clear vision, turns to the world which stretches out before him as a burned prairie, as a devastated city — a world in which no churches, asylums, refuges, ideals, are left — and says: «Though you promise me nothing I am still with you, I am still an atom of your energies, my work is part of your work; I am your companion and your mirror as you march on your merciless way. But I owe nothing to any one. I would be responsible to freedom alone.
Everything is Clear Even Under the Darkest Night
Our coastal city lies in perpetual twilight of a dream. The pollution paints the sunsets in colors of sickly pink, tempting citizens to commit a sin. Our water supply is poisoned with copper and fears, and even our faucets weep at night. Our air is bitter, our soul pours out, and everything we taste is seasoned with tears. On the street corner, a faceless man turns to me, pleading: "When your sweetheart is six months pregnant with your child, take a marker and write in bold letters on her belly - 'I am the murderer of your passions'".
I woke up, and behold - it was a dream.
Each morning I wake up from my bitter dreams into a reality where nothing stirs: I watch all those blurry figures walking in the public space without any fuel of desire and feel that there's some great essential matter around here that I'm missing. I remain spellbound by the dream until evening, when its magic fades as I encounter my monochromatic reality.
I don’t know what's wrong with my mechanism, but almost every relationship I had at some point turned into that evening breeze that comes from the sea and threatens to crumble wishes into rust.
Many times it's hard for you to break free from it, you don't want to hurt people and make her realize what a fatal mistake she made when she chose you somewhere under the dome of the sky, as you kissed and promised her your eternal love. Too bad girls can't tell when you've already broken up with them in your heart, long before they impose their nakedness upon you.
I still imagine that one day I will meet someone who will possess a truth that no one else can speak. That her big eyes will shout to me: "let's do vandalism together, not out of hatred, God forbid, but out of enormous love". And my own eyes will respond: "My love. You are all I have. You and I are from the same quarry of precious stones". I also deserve a small sample of it.
She will surely have thick lips and an enormous chest that will contain within it everything a man yearns for. And she will be very beautiful, although beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it's an integration of components that communicate with each other and with you.
But just as long as she has thick lips. Maybe she exists somewhere and will burst into my life in a storm, and then we'll meet at night in high places and I'll hold her hand under the meteor shower so she won't be afraid of the falling star upon her. I just need to maintain cautious optimism; anyway, it's a hundred times easier for me to find good sex than true love in this city.
In the meantime, maybe I'll meet someone, not for the sake of profit (that includes mutual exchanges of body fluids). We'll talk about the deepest truths of the heart, without falling victim to our sexual boredom. Maybe there will also be a spark and then we'll meet and order a bastard bottle of whiskey and unleash havoc upon it, for all eyes to witness.
I believe in my ability to do this; I just need to gather some ambition to battle my evolutionary urges that impose temporary desires on me, and to demonstrate more responsibility in the personal realms between male and female, even if I know that the sin hides somewhere in the allure of first intoxications.
I roll another cigarette.
The day passes by and it's getting late, but everything is clear even under the darkest night. Now everything makes sense to me. I began to fall asleep on the sofa, and from the forming dream I begin to hear her voice and mine blending together in a passion without an end.
Murder on the Dance Floor
Dance is a rizz master, capable of sweeping anyone of their feet. Well, except for Curtis. In Curtis, dance met a man who was simply no simp.
Curtis distinguished himself by being extra. A fact so ably exemplified on this particular night. Few noticed as he took to the dance floor, fewer even cared. In moment's time, Curtis captivated them in a way, few ever could.
They are those with awkward co-ordination. They are those who exhaust a singular dance style to the limits of its applicability. They are those who have two left feet. Then there's Curtis, a potent mix of all three.
Where do we even start? His face hadn't yet decided to smile or smolder so it did the next best thing, vacillating between a Clint Eastwood-squint and a Joker-grin. Meanwhile, his flailing arms made a nuisance of themselves billowing in the air like they just didn't care. From afar, one would have easily mistaken him for an inflatable wind-dancer.
Curtis' hips didn't lie, they flat-out protested. Grieved at the quarantine enforced by his torso and legs, they contented themselves with jerking back and forth for the duration of their lock-down.
The rest of his body was a different kind of mutinous. A cursory glance at Curtis let slip an open secret: Not that of a boy in a man's body but a man's body unwilling to comply with the demands exacted by his boyish mind. There's a difference.
Under the pretext of dancing, this smooth criminal violated every ordinance sacred to the dancing community. Worse, he did it with a nonchalance and indifference that thumbed its nose at all things woke.
Curtis careened across the dance floor like he owned the place. The only thing more surprising is that he didn't clatter into anyone. Though anyone in close proximity wouldn't think twice about keeping a safe distance. They were lost for words looking at him, while Curtis was lost in his own world.
Curtis had no sense of discretion, no regard for public validation. He danced, little else mattered. For a club that admitted adults only, such child-like indifference was a sore miss among the many present. It had been muffled, shackled and then killed by the insidious conformity to the expectations of others and the world around them that came with growing up.
This was a man who really killed it. He didn't need alcohol, weed or some prohibited intoxicant to get his juices moving and rid him of insecurities. Insecurity had decided long ago that it wanted nothing to do with him. It really never had a choice.
A people so obsessed with how others perceived them could only watch on in silent envy. Their care-free selves had long since died by their own hand. Curtis' dancing made them yearn to resurrect it again. Indeed, a murder had been committed on the dance floor. One by the Curtis, the other by the revellers present.
A Caged Bird.
Here I sit, adrift in silence's solemnity,
My fingers, veins bulging, battle against the machine's demand.
Focal dystonia halts their dance, as sweat turns to rivers,
Yet the relentless demand persists, coercing me to write,
As if they believe I find solace in this torment.
In my youth, I was taught that dreams materialize,
But now, my only vision is freedom, elusive yet palpable.
I long for release from these steel confines,
For a life beyond the suffocating grip of obligation.
Still, I surrender to the typewriter's call,
Each keystroke a reminder of my captivity.
But amidst the struggle, one thought sustains me:
My family, my anchor in this storm.
If I should meet my end before this unforgiving page,
Let them know that every word was written with love,
That my sacrifice was not in vain,
And that my longing for freedom was their legacy.