Hello, Writers and Dear Readers.

Just a quick video on our channel to introduce a writer new to us, and a mind we

really shouldn't do without. Link is just south and left of this sentence.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEh_rcSbed4

And.

As Always...

Thank you for being here.

-The Prose. team

the paparazzi swarmed all over Einstein

after he said make sure where the rope is tied

before you kick over the chair

he wrote his own scripts now

Further Adventures in Archaeo-Astronomy

tonight the constellation Vertigo

a place of no equilibrium

a hell of uterine contractions

even though his head was elfin

a little bone crushing ceremony

and bingo you are out on bail

I didn't mean to hurt anyone went the 911 call

they finally brought him down with magnets

the dilemma meters were going purple

only minutes away from a fatal lap dance

that could blacken the portals of infinity

hauled before the cosmic court of opinion

sentenced to prompt and urgent expungement

they failed to contend with the absurdity

of Al's relativistic social barometer

smuggled in by a derelict ex-stockbroker

his obsidian blade plunged like a fang

into the bailiff's waiting eyes

and the jury of inflatable sex dolls

made obnoxious leaking air sounds

until all that was left was a talking skull

divulging Al's General Theory of Anathema

flip the law of averages on its back

and your troops are in the citadel

paradise being a system of payoffs

on the origin side of the lens

yes the light is tricky in there

images fall feebly on the big screen

Al's life was now a gravitational anomaly

no plot no narrative no story

he was ready to sack a city

his Igor hissed let's asteroid the planet

but the mouse pad Ouija opened a channel

to the vortex of utter charm

and he stamped and splashed singing

through the seven sewers of humiliation

wearing his we're going to hell pants

with only a mother's love for protection

and managed to lose all his pencils

somewhere between hand and ledger

being that his hands were missing fingers

almost all of them actually

lost in a departmental budget cut

allegorically left him all thumbs

unleashing a pandemonium of vague redemption

it was a close shave but Earth was saved

From "Engine of Didactic Beauty" available on Amazon

The rich are committing suicide

and taking us along with them

the prosthetic limbed bastards

Fort Darwin tottering on fewer stilts

once the Masters of the Universe

presently picking through garbage

looking for an Icarus to pilot

some way back among the clouds

their telepathic goon squads

armed with the hard on of God

squat in the darkness of doorways

lightning strikes all around them

even their telephone poles were clairvoyant

several thousand watts went up my leg

shorting out the only attention span I own

left me perforated but far from lacy

wearing all my masks all the time

fragments of self are selves

in a bulemic deconstruction

where form and content

mud wrestle incessantly for attention

on the crazy train to 3 color 3 finger hell

apparently the ancient gods still rule

in their madhouse heaven

ambivalent petulant flatulent gods

brandishing sword point conversions

wielding gun point perversions

the protagonists the antagonists

fornicators masturbators liquidators

pariahs and unlicensed poets

preaching hellstone and brimfire

now their carcasses are steppingstones

it's psywar out there kids

better find where they hid your dossier

mesmerized of the world unite

you have nothing to lose

but your failed methods of addressing reality

said his slowly twisting tongue

struggling for ratings like any media

the soul cannot erase it can only go sightless

a phantom trapped in melancholy

when we were built to dance

with the twinkling summer stars

he finally learned to undestroy memory

being an ascended master of non sequitur

carried aloft by the wings of Mother Goose

his metabolic hurricane of why

an inferno of intrigue and superstition

our embryo-headed UFO ruling class

have me inside their fence of skulls

an investment in diagram futures

the idiots

From "Engine of Didactic Beauty" available on Amazon

one day there won't be an edge kids

just a hole in the ground for the suicidal

do a bacteria count of your spring water

while tossing down a few useless conventions

why do anachronisms live so long die so hard

and cause no embarrassment he mused

musing had become his compulsion since

the holy ghost serpent handling incident

their medicine man pronounced him dead 7 times

his own ancestors sent crows to peck out his eyes

the fortune cookie antidote worked off and on

then hell ascended under his smoking feet

their vanguard toes now on fire

one thing is bog certain in the lust for truth

contemplation will not buy you serenity

but yes your unbriefed life can be lived

without a prison cell oath of allegiance

if the universe demonstrates intention we’re it

the battle between sequence and simultaneity

may be good for another 10 cubed generations

in this hypnotist hunch monger demolition derby

where a legendary and enormous ignorance

complicates matters for no apparent reason

well maybe for the following reason

all explanations have been oversimplified

in a panorama of benign efficiency

arise you yuppies and management level trainees

you have all the tools of cognition

you will ever need right in your head

every act begins with an estimate

let's put Humpty back together again

feel relevant that's all there is to it

since a monopoly on endless pleasure

is yet to be fully achieved and moreover

the Great War in Heaven is officially boring

and furthermore the iris is a sphincter

just thought you'd like to know

sorry a lung obstruction makes my voice whistle

one fucking homophone after another

making the undead radar in on me

my wings have been clipped so many times

they fall off at the sound of grinding teeth

thanks to the dogs of innuendo and pantomime

we anthropomorphize absolutely everything

no beanstalks on the horizon he noted

just a marsupial orphan with an Aladdin's lamp

charmed into the gesticulating arms of Venus

by the secret patty cake handshake

then a magic thing happened

there is no magic

only unknowing

From "Engine of Didactic Beauty" available on Amazon

Hello, Writers and Dear Readers.

One day until the fireworks, unless you're in my neighborhood, where they've been constant for the last three nights... Speaking of beautiful things ascending, check out the winner of last month's CotM, whose story is featured in the new video on the channel, published just now, and linked below the new Challenge of the Month, number 41, or XLI, in numerals of Romans. Look just below the sentence that completes this paragraph to you.

https://www.theprose.com/challenge/14122

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuzwS08NIU0&t=10s

And.

As always.

-Thank you for being here.

-The Prose. team

I was youngish. Ready to die. Impulsive. Sporadic. So filled with self-loathing. A deep, deep hatred for myself and anyone who dared to say anything nice about me. Look at me with anything close to kindness in your eyes and I would belch venom. People liked me anyway. Called me friend. Looked out for me. Wore out their knees saying prayers. I pushed and pushed until they went far enough away I didn’t feel threatened by their caring.

And then I met him. Dreadlocked and haunted, broken but pretending to fly. I knew he couldn’t hurt me. I let him in. Unprecedented access. Except my past, my sorrow, my trauma, I hid all of that. It was easy back then. I was so checked out from reality, so far from caring about myself and detached from my inner truths, any sense of grounding, that it hardly hurt at all.

I had to go away for a while. Couldn’t call him until the day I was released. He took a bus to where I was and we stayed in a hotel that night. Made a baby. Not on purpose. I wasn’t allowed to take my birth control where I was and I wasn’t smart enough to insist on protection.

Y’all I was so lost. I was so close to death every day, and I wanted it so badly. Not enough to take an action, but enough to not prevent harmful action and to put myself in danger at every opportunity. Then I figured out I was pregnant. It changed, well, everything.

For the first time in my life, I cared for myself. I cared about what I ate, how much I slept, how I felt. I cared about making amends and building bridges over the skeletons of the burnt. I mentally and physically transformed into a vessel worthy of bringing another human onto this earth. Thank god I had 9 months. That’s not some overnight shit.

This isn’t my birth story, so I’m going to skip all that and get to my first time seeing and holding this little man who took a self-absorbed, nihilistic asshole and turned her heart into more than a muscle that pumps blood. He is the reason I am alive today, he is my everything.

His name is Abacus. And he’s not talking to me right now. He’s 20 at the end of August. And every moment of every day I regret not doing a better job of letting him know that he is my everything, because it feels so lonely, to have everything and then watch it walk out of your life. It feels so empty, but he is my son. I am his mother. And nothing will ever change it. That’s forever.

Dying, for me, was a beautiful experience.

I know that sounds crazy, blasphemous even, to describe such a tragic thing, a viscerally sad thing, in such a dissonant way. You might wonder if I was depressed. And truly, I wasn’t. In the end, despite everything, I was stupidly happy. Still, if I was being completely and truly honest, dying, the actual act of it, not the pain or the ragged breathing, no, the actual process of letting go… that part. That part was bliss.

Let me tell you about my life, before I ask you to celebrate in its ending.

It wasn’t a particularly spectacular existence, some might even call it boring, run of the mill. A life that could be mistaken for a thousand others. Of course, to me, at the time, it was everything, the only thing.

I was born in a small Midwestern town, raised in typical Midwestern niceness, by a father who was strict and distant but did his best, and a mother who was a tad too religious but who did all the mothering things with unmatched fervor. I was clothed in clean clothes, my feet adorned with shoes that were sensible and fit well. I was loved and scolded and hugged in all the typical ways. I had two sisters I constantly squabbled with, banging on the shared bathroom door, hastily getting ready for the day in a panic, somebody always holding up the one hairdryer, using up all the hot water.

I loved, oh yes, I loved. Roman, that was his name. I remember thinking his name had that unique way of rolling easily in the curl of my tongue, passing effortlessly through my lips, like I’ve said his name all my life, or that I’m meant to, for the rest of it.

He was brilliant, my Roman. I met him at university, studying astrophysics. He had grand ideas and even grander dreams. He loved life but at the same time was disillusioned by it. He said to me once, using his hands to gesture into space: “It’s not possible, you know, that this is it. There’s more to this, more to everything, we just can’t see it.”

You would think it would hurt, the way he said it, the way he longed for something more than us, more than what I could give him, but it didn’t. Because I knew what he meant, I felt it too.

There was something in between the empty spaces, he told me, between the tiniest of particles. An answer to everything.

I never found out what he meant, neither did he. He died shortly after his twenty-fifth birthday, before he was able to finish his research, before he got to meet his daughter, at that point still the tiniest clump of molecules gestating inside me.

I remember the pain of that moment. How the world became dull and gray. How I went to sleep too many nights hoping to never wake up again. But day after day I woke up, and I would go through the motions, and I would go to work and my prenatal appointments, smiling at my doctor, telling him yes, yes, I’m doing okay. It’s hard, but I’ve got my sisters, you know, and my mom…

Then I had my daughter, and at once the world had color again. She had Roman’s eyes, almond shaped and deeply brown, thick dark lashes swooping downwards at the sides. I swear she looked at me in the exact way Roman did, with that exact slight raise of the brows, the slight curl in the lips, and I remember weeping.

I named her: Aster. Star. The only one that mattered in my universe, my sun.

We had a simple life, our little family of two. We fought a lot, in the way all mothers and daughters do, Aster having the quick wit of her father, the stubbornness of her mother. She broke my heart a million times when she was a teenager, which we mended as we both grew older. Then as quickly as she came into my life, she left. I understood. She had to build a life of her own, having met her own star, her own universe.

And it was good.

“Mom?”

She’s finally here. My star. “Aster.”

Large dark eyes stared down at me. She was older now, my star, smile lines having formed at the corners of her eyes. Have those always been there? They must have. Aster always smiled with her eyes.

“Hey mom, it’s okay. We’re here.”

We. I couldn’t see well these days. She must have brought her little boy, my grandson. I squinted at the small blonde head on her lap. She named him… Roman.

I wanted so much to smile, but it hurt to even breathe. My chest muscles struggled to expand. I saw the nurse put a hand on my daughter’s shoulder, shaking her head.

Yes, there was pain, every single muscle hurt, the air caught uncomfortably in my chest, but there was also something else… something light. Suddenly I felt weightless. I knew then it was time to go.

Time at once contracted then expanded, and I could see everything, the future, the past, all possible choices and universes all at once. I finally saw it, what my Roman was talking about, the space in between the tiniest particles, the invisible energy that connects all of us together, in every universe, in every possible dimension. My universe, my stars.

I died then.

And it was beautiful.

Life is being sucked out of me as the days go by.

Memories of your existence replay over and over.

When the baby cries, I cry.

Starvation eats me from the pit of my intestines.

Your life, as well as three others, copied on my fifteen inch screen.

Portrait and horizontal.

Memories of their lives in 4k resolution.

I cry, when the baby cries.

What if one day it’s her reliving my good times.

Will it penetrate her heart as it does mine?

Four years in this chair, I never realized that I can adjust it.

The pain has become part of me.

The feeling of discomfort is part of me.

My back carries the pain of the ones who grieve.

My posture is no longer poise.

When the baby cries,

I cry.

The scent of her innocence keeps me alive.

A new frame to work on while she closes her sweet eyes.

I remember a time when I knew not of this trait.

Just like everyone else, waiting to see.

But now, I recreate the past.

I have the power to make it look happy or sad.

Music notes have the impact that one only experiences in the cinema.

I’m so drained.

I don’t even write anymore.

What was I doing before this?

I can’t even remember.

Stories left unfinished,

Frame left unedited.

Coworkers wondering how I can keep my headphones on for so long.

“just let her work” my boss says.

I cry.

Like a baby.

In this uncomfortable chair,

I'm heavy, and,

I cry.