“Why Prose.?” -Rolando Hernandez

It began for me very early—writing in my awful cursive small stories on index cards and leaving them in library books, waiting room periodicals, and the phone books that would hang from phone booths. Some were confessions, others were love letters to the natural world, but most of the time I used the small blank paper to capture the quiet observations of my travels.

One such example was a card I left in the San Bernardino library in a book called “Expect the Unexpected.” I can’t imagine it still being in print, as I remember it being quite terrible, but I was smitten with the message and I left a missive about taking cabs in downtown Colima, Mexico and bailing on the fare. At 7 years old, I was pretty much an asshole. The point of the story I had left was that, for the entire ride, the cabbie thought he was getting the better of me but, as we arrived to the park in the center of town, he never saw a mop of black hair move so fast while laughing.

Expect the unexpected, indeed. My warning to the world that I was out there.

Time went on and the same impulse to use words as keys to open worlds was the only thing that ever could save me. I was floored by the imagery in Galatians (in the fullness of time) and Romans (dead to sin) far more than the promise of a risen Christ. I never begged a day in my life while in the years I was homeless and wandering the states, but I would write poems for food.

Not only did words unlock wallets and charity, it also unlocked doors to people’s homes. In Casper, Wyoming, I met a secretary in a fast food restaurant who bought me lunch and let me crash on her couch for a week in exchange for a haiku. The immediate connection between what I wrote and its recipient was intoxicating.

Words would beat down the walls and doors my fists could not.

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Tune in to The Official Prose. Blog for the full article by Rolando Hernandez (@rh) later today at: blog.theprose.com/blog.