First
Crocus is the Bertha
of flowers...
by the harsh
cold nomification
and hard edge
pronunciation,
that emphasizes
labor over beauty,
breadth of sentiment
in personification
and the notion
that Rose
is also
a difficult name
to say in duration
however
germane...
it doesn't either
roll sprightly
as its scent might
from soft velvet petals
on thorned stem
in heat of summer...
The small and mighty
dust of the lowly
bloomed Crocus,
pale and lilaceous
over the crusted
evaporating snow,
weighing in
with 24 karats
dust of saffron,
most precious
gold flavored
Spring...
and I plant this
strange light bulb
into the topsoil
with great hope,
and hoarse voice
to signal
for me
the end
of winter
04.19.2024
...a favorite flower... challenge @Last
For Sally
Every time she sees me
She looks at me
Like a worried mother
Like she knows something
That I’m too stupid to figure out
Like she’s the one
Who hasn’t had a drink in 8 months
Like World War 3
Is right around the corner
And she’s having difficulty
Maintaining an erection
And all along
I thought cats
Were supposed to be
Cute little furry
Multidimensional
Empire destroying
Energy vampires
Who slept all day
And shit in a box
Turns out
I was wrong
David Burdett
4/19/2024
Bittersweet Nothing
Incubation tomb,
Wormhole to the womb,
Out into the skewed scatter
Of a million unknown days,
And spat out like Jonah
From soporific embryonic seas
That once lulled me into a slipstream sleep,
That entrenched its world,
Fathoms deep.
My febrile seedlings are rage ready for feeding
And I am now the starring role
In now here nowhere.
Day one.
They crudely clamp my cherry flesh
With feral precision,
And the mothership of mother
Lays unaware in her morphine drip cocoon,
Now but a rag doll frame
Of cracked and poked contour clay
And a jumbled jungle of sinewy limbs
Hung up into a submissive V,
While the defiant airs of the doctors
Cloud good will
With cloying empty gestures
That sickens God Himself.
And maybe my pinpoint eyes
Saw the monster behind the curtain
And wanted to scramble back
Into Eden’s haven,
But mother lays near death
With her veins a bullet train wreck
Of razor ribbon origami nightmares
As the overlapping overload
And analog readouts
Scream haunted transmissions
Of bad tidings
And numerical harum scarum.
The nurses are angels
Bathed in day glow white,
And dance with tribal drumfire,
While the rattle of my tinny roar
Is but a most lonesome whimpering bid
To return to God
That pulses through glass
And weakly shakes the earth
With its feeble revolution
And murmuring protest.
I am now a flightless bird
That only knows,
That the humming artificial sun
On the chalk white ceiling
Can never warm my numb bones
Nor settle the collapsed composition
Of afterbirth aftershocks,
And the fragmented grunt
Becomes undone;
And all of this,
On just day one.
I already know this place is dead.
Mother’s bed was hallowed
And God spoke like muffled thunder
Through the pale pink walls.
I cry.
My cup of tears runneth over.
I am coma eyed with silver slash vision.
I am undreamed dreams that I dreamt I dreamed.
I am welcomed to the dark ironies
And colliding planes
Of moon and sky and sun.
It is day one.
My cup of tears runneth over.
God,
Hold my hand,
As we walk through this wonderful wasteland,
Of bittersweet nothing.
8
may your days
be filled with fresh grapefruit juice
and sweating hot tub laughs
gravel dives for an escaped dog
bunny coffee runs
and a cigarette in the outdoor shower.
may your days
be an early spring marsh sunburn
ignored outlook notifications
and white bean salad stirred with shared hands.
tears in a nail salon
over a friend’s forgotten book
and a screen door scaring all in the night.
just scooping salsa like soup
in a familiar silence.
Metallic Bones
The calendar looks like a dart board, covered in holes. Empty days and meaningless numbers, circles that don't mean a thing.
I used to mark the days, be able to count the hours since my fingertips last hit the keys, last strung together a slew of words that were possibly profound but more often than not just ramblings. He's gone now, no looking back, and I'm better for it. Everything happens for a reason, or at least that's what they say.
I'm like a swimmer out of practice, nose waterlogged and I keep stopping to catch my breath. God, this used to be so easy, but we're getting back into the swing of things. You and me, old pal. This rusty old machine is still good for something. Oh, and this typewriter's still here, too. How nice.
In some ways it was bound to happen, you know a human's nature must be stronger than the delicate bond between slightly-less-than-strangers. I'd gotten caught up in a messy web of sinewy connections, and I'm sure it'll happen again. But for now, we release. We relive. We write:
He'd been not too close but not too far away either, that's how I liked them, anyway. Enough to tell me I'm pretty--with his eyes--but didn't dare say anything. Just shy enough.
His fingertips were like paper cranes, careful and artful. Swan dances across my knuckles. Something about his smile, too, you know the way they pull you in. A laugh, a look. He hadn't been my type. Until he was.
We counted the hours using each others' eyes, found some sort of constellations right behind the iris. A ticking clock back there built for us and ignorant to all others. We thought it ticked forward, at least at first. And the longer I looked the more convinced I saw that it was a countdown. More I saw that the paper cranes were unfolding, and the stars were never with us anyway.
It fell around us like wallpaper without enough glue. Strips of rolled up paper, still sticky but not quite enough, whispering at our feet. A room of destruction but not enough to hold it together. Built to fail. Perhaps.
And in that room, no words. It was the one thing I always had on me, words. And I'd lost them somewhere, shoved them deep into your chest where I couldn't find them until you tore yourself apart and left all the words in the world pulsing on the floorboards, your flesh split on either side.
I broke you, I know. But I needed those words back. They fuel my ticking clock, no matter the direction. They're my sun and moon and everything in between. I wear them like prize furs, douse them in flame and scream them from the silence of my notebook pages.
You stole everything from me, and I stole even more. So here's all of it back again, the story of us. What you always wanted, no? I never did show you my writing. I never could. But my fingers are made of ink, made of metallic bones in the shape of typewriter arms. I can press my finger to the page and make a letter. This soul is bound in ink and wrapped in leather. Words become I.
Words could never become we.
So this is it, then. And my soul can breathe.
Butthole Surfers, raditude, new sprouts, German flavors, and ghost of word.
From the work here on the site, thrown over to Prose. Radio's episode 25 on YouTube, Butthole Surfers lead us into a piece with sass, followed by sprouting words of grace, into one -then two- bits of German taste on the tongue, and wrapped by a grip of a ghost with grit.
Here's the link to the show.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVZw1ZbauGQ
And here are the pieces featured.
https://www.theprose.com/post/811875/tonight-i-could-writeoh-dammit https://www.theprose.com/post/807048/glowing-and-growing-new-sprouts-at-night
https://www.theprose.com/post/812246/german-potato-salad https://www.theprose.com/post/812228/if-you-ate-a-proper-german-crumb-cake
https://www.theprose.com/post/811880/ghosts-of-word
And, as always.
Thank you for being here.
-The Prose. team
If you Ate a Proper German Crumb Cake
“And, I think-- to be honest, I think most of the cake is crumbs, because that’s what tastes good [laughter]. And there’s also a reference (in the recipe) to ‘double the crumbs’, ’cause it’s better that way! Very little cake… lots of crumbs… delicious.”
- Mum (on the family’s recipe for Streuselkuchen)
If you Ate a Proper German Crumb Cake
you would drown in crumbs:
you would breathe in dry, sweet cinnamon,
asphyxiate in sugary dust.
taste one hundred years of family
of fondness
of love
the rest of the cake forgotten
buried deep underneath the fragments of
glittering, silver bronze
another memory gone to bed
another word yet gone unsaid
stuck in the back of the throat
since swallowed
and washed down with cold ice water
then,
finally break for air, again
-
(2023)
German Potato Salad
The grandfather on my mother’s side was a cheapskate.
A real cheapskate.
One Christmas he gave me a used paperback book.
Something like “Jimmy Plays Baseball.”
It was written for a 7 year old child, and I was considerably older than that.
Still had “5 cents” written in pencil on the first page.
No shit.
Asked he, “You ever read that one?”
Replied I, “No granddad. Can’t say I have. Thank you.”
“Merry Christmas.”
I hated going to visit them.
In the row house in Baltimore city, where my mother grew up.
(‘Balmer.’ ‘Balmer, Merilan.’ “How you doin’ hon?”)
Me and my sister sitting on the wood floor in the living room.
Positioned dead eyed to the manger on the mantle.
Given board games to occupy our time.
My father loved talking to him, Leo, Leo Groeninger.
Because he was brilliant.
And he knew everything about everything.
A sedentary encyclopedia on the spectrum.
His second wife sitting dutifully next to him on the couch.
My mother sitting in a chair, the only one left in the living room.
“Maybe you kids would like to play checkers, or Parcheesi.”
(“Maybe you’d like to go fuck yourself.”)
But he had one saving grace:
His German potato salad.
The real thing.
Made with ham fat.
Five pounds of ham fat.
Or bacon, if you didn't have any ham fat.
Goddamn that shit was good!
Inspired by "If You Ate a Proper German Crumb Cake"
by @Glenn_Withawhy TheProse.com
ghosts of word
The reader stops believing
all rendered by the same hand that devastates and subdues.
Triumphant and trivial
bent to the keys all hell in her eye she write this:
Just give me ONE good window
Bare bulb
No blind or shade
Just a starved little kid burning out the old roaches stuffing their guts with history
To the streets men
On the blocks boys to the gutter…
I stand reflected in mirrored sheets of rain
My art falls onto paper
red like the devil and his skin
Lines people spoke but never heard of…
I am an everyday word in an everyday world mistaking magic caught in the jaws of light on stage behind bar stools and secret destroyers.
Set to confuse the dreamless sleep pregnant with headlights in only a sweater flirting with rivers I run with a saint yes- tired- along the banks, roofs - music note wires-
The opposite of enlightenment is an envied edge and weightless drop into the emergency of brilliance…
The truth the memory the indecisions
snap my fingers sharp and starve an echo.
Vanished in the ecstasy bouquets of faceless hopes stuffed inside pockets
I spy the world in tongues found dismembered at the base of Babels tower
Unshaved
Uncooked
Placed in a pot
Terrified
I’m just an empty ghost convincing you how time does not exist
As you read this in my future, your present is written in my past.