Am I on the right path?

Will I look back and laugh?

At the fact that I thought this

Is how I'd find joy and bliss

Down one path is what I love to do

But the other seems like a short cut through

To the dream of what I want my future to be

But in return will I lose the joys that set me free

See I am split between

Being realistic or following my dream

Being practical or creative

To which will I look back at and say "I lived"

See the realistic

Will make life simplistic

Is structured and reliable

A support so I'll be able

To build what I've always pictured

Killing the present for the unknown future

Is that entirely absurd?

And on the other hand

Is a completely different plan

It is bringing my dream to life

Doing what I love, but it's quite

Shaky, will sway and maybe even tumble

Living in the present and gambling the future

Is it worth the risk to go for double?

Its just a giant game of tug of war

I don't know which I want more

So overwhelmed and unsure

Either way I'll look back and wonder

I don't understand why, why you chose to lie

You were all about me then upleft and gone

How could you just move on

You played me again like a fool

I felt so much like a tool

I believed you had changed and you actually wanted me

I've dine everything for you how could you just leave

Why do you think its okay

To sit and ignore me and be thus way

I was your best friend I was always there

Now I'm like nothing, like you don't care

You truly hurt me this time I thought I could finally calk you mine

Now I'm hurting and your just fine

I hope your happy with how you broke me heart

It was better when you were states apart

I'm upset I've even cried

I still can't believe you lied

He was the perfect devil

With haughty eyes he looked down upon the people of Earth

Acting as if he were God

His tongue spun lies to ensnare their senses

Then his hands shed their innocent blood

His heart devises wicked schemes

His feet are quick to rush to evil

A false witness with his silky lies

He throws every town into upheaval

Email after email after email

Lies after lies and so it goes.

Accusations of being a scumbag

by a man that sold fabricated stories

to papers for millions.

This from a man who has one than one

facebook account in different names;

a man who reviews his own books

using pseudonyms but the same style.

How he writes is always the same.

To intelligent people, it all reads

as the rantings of a troll. That I know.

My crime: sending a parcel by a

courier who then lost it.

Weeks spent chasing were not enough.

Neither was the insulting compensation

they offered. But I’m still the culprit.

It’s all there, on screen, tracked to the

point it vanished. But I ‘stole’ the

contents. And yes, they were irreplaceable.

Surrounded by enablers he spins his yarns,

until he, himself, believes his words.

But it will all go away. He won’t turn up

on my doorstep if I pay two thousand pounds.

The fear I feel for my family and myself

all disappears for that princely sum.

The price of a parcel, and the harassment,

the extortion and the hate campaign.

It all stops. But it won’t. The man is cancer.

One hill dig on Nothing Grave

An eye for eye whom no one gave

A tooth for tooth, oh simple hand

Good graces fun it's truth to plan

The gambler holds tight a hollow game

"Stands I alone, who dared to gain"

World of splattered wooden dollars

Their sullied fortunes built of cowards

A lightning game of pick-up-sticks

Sure fast chance to make it rich

To kill it clean of pomp and worry

The Lightning Man, The Sure Fast Story

In another year we can be friends

Behind the times of original sin

In a hut on an edge

Of a 40 foot ledge

Stands a woman who never could fend for herself

Can she fly to maybe run away from self-worth?

She spread her wings and leaned in

To hear the canyon winds sing

Then dropped and hit the ground

They lay where they're found

However much we cry

For the lost desert sky

Turn away, walk away

Twas a sure fast way to die

As we grow up we begin to fear silence

Afraid to be alone with ourselves

As kids silence was a time for imagination

Now it's an internal examination

Ever wonder why so little take the time to pray

Probably because we're trained to keep our thoughts at bay

We are constantly staring at screens

Or engaging in shallow conversations

We hardly notice the time fly by

Rarely stop and ponder "who am I"

So worried about our image that the surrounding eyes reflect

That we don't self reflect and behind our own eyes inspect

With others opinions we'd be less concerned

If we took the time to look within and learn

Who we are and who we want to be for ourselves

And quit letting others determine our self wealth

Let me first take you back a few years. I was young, around eight years old, and my sister and I were lounging around on the grass by a fence. We were with our Dad on the slopes of a golf course on the outskirts of a town called Royston.

Our Dad had divorced from our Mum three years earlier and would have squeezed in a multitude of magnificence that day already. He had us at the weekends, and we so looked forward to that time with him. In that moment we lounged with bellies full of the once great fare of the Little Chef over the road and we bloody loved our Dad on that golden, hazy summer day.

A bit clichéd, I know, but the divorce had hit me hard at only five years old, and I had developed an intense stutter. Like anything in my life, if I do it, I do it “balls to the wall” and that was certainly the case with my stammering.

Sometimes it would seem like days dragged by between the start and the end of a simple sentence, one which I was painfully aware would take those around me mere seconds to deliver, effortlessly.

A proud boy, I had refused to go to speech therapy. It was the seventies, and back then, it just wasn’t the done thing to have any kind of therapy despite my parents saying I should. I wasn’t stupid though, and even as a child I had noticed that certain sounds, particular combinations of letters would be the culprits that tripped me up on my linguistic journeys. The susurration of an ‘s’, followed by a ‘t’ midway through a word, were just two examples of a myriad of phonetic possibilities that brought forth my mounting dread as I saw the sentence stretch out ahead of me, knowing the blockage in my throat was coming.

What felt even worse was the patient and sympathetic looks on people’s faces, watching me struggle, desperate to finish my sentence but knowing they shouldn’t.

I had made the conscious decision to arm myself with the very things that were my enemy. Words. I began to read voraciously, immersing myself in other worlds to avoid the shitty parts of mine. Each book I read offered not only an escape, but also alternatives to the standard limited vocabulary of a child of my age. I began to negotiate my way through the stammering pathways, planning ahead of each sentence and using language that avoided the pitfalls I had learned were there.

My love of linguistics was therefore very much underway as we lay on the grass on that golf course, replete with burgers and pancakes as our Dad pulled out a battered paperback with a sly smile on his face. On the front cover of the book was a picture of a huge black rat, fearsome teeth and evil eyes staring out, daring you to enter its world. Bold, bright red writing screamed out that the book was called The Rats, and the author was James Herbert. Dad began to read a chapter to us. There was blood, gore, swearing and sheer horror. I was absolutely, entirely consumed; obsessed from that moment on.

The stutter remained a slow work in progress, but it steadily waned as I read more and more books written with older audiences in mind. My teachers marked my works warily, with big marks for spelling, punctuation, grammar and writing style; whilst commenting upon why a nine year old would be writing about zombies, ghosts and murder. Poetry was flowing out of me too, mostly about the darkened corners of life. All this from such a cheerful little chap. Words were my escape, my love, my friends and they garnered praise, albeit tentatively, even in the ‘anything goes’ seventies.

By the time I hit my teenage years, my stutter only appeared when nervous or excited. Certain words would still need a mental run-up, particularly if I was to receive a ‘special certificate on a Saturday’, but mostly I coasted through. Cursed with a very late development, where other teens would be down the pub with fake ID, I’d spend entire days in book shops. New books were great, second hand books so much better. The smell, the heft, the feel. I could while away hour after hour flicking through the variety of paper slabs of history and worlds, all holding the secret of a hundred anonymous hands. All I wanted to be was a writer. I wanted my own works on the shelves I poured over for so long.

Confidence had never been my strong point. Outwardly, everyone would think I was the most gregarious a person could be, but the reality was quite the opposite. The speech impediment, the height issues (4’11” until I was 17), braces on my teeth and a wanker of a stepdad all made for an inner turmoil that would NOT let me have faith in myself enough to share my work.

That was, until I was in my thirties. Having been royally screwed over by an ex, the dangerously dark seething mass that was my rage needed an outlet. I wrote seven chapters of vicarious violence and venom, got it out of my system, and then buried it while I got on with life. One or two people read it and liked it, but no, for me, it just wasn’t good enough.

Twelve years later I read it again. By now, social media was a platform that was still used by some for positive means. Facebook was yet to be bloated with adverts and a generation of selfie obsessed narcissists. I put it out there to a selection of my group of friends, those that were readers, to tell me what they honestly thought of my seven lone chapters. I craved honesty. I dreaded honesty. I really needed it, though, as my go-to emotion was always that it was never good enough. What came back blew me away. After asking for my bluntly honest friends to clarify that they weren’t just blowing smoke up my arse with their kind words, they all reiterated how much they loved my work and thusly spurred me on to write my first crime/horror novel.

I gave up work to finish it, and it was published to great acclaim. That novel now sits on my bookshelf and has nearly 120 five stars across a variety of platforms. I am writing the sequel to it and have just finished ghost-writing a biography. I write bespoke poetry, I write copy, proof read and do just about anything that keeps me from the mundanity of the industry I’d stumbled into and hated for twenty years. Now, I work for Prose and could not be happier in a job that will never be ‘work’.

So, again, why Prose? In my mind, Prose offers the thing that was lacking in my life when I most needed it. If Prose had existed when I was a teenager with zero confidence in myself, then I would never have wandered down a banal career path. If Prose had been about in the eighties, the nineties or even the “noughties,” I would have had the platform to share my words, my stories, my poetry and would have received the feedback that gave me the confidence to open up myself to the world, to bleed on the page.

I would have realised that yes, it IS actually pretty good and that I should sit down and write more. I possibly would have taken advantage of a cheaper world, and venture forth not into estate agency and recruitment; but instead follow the path of my first love: words. The words that had been my enemy. The words that I had wrestled to the ground and conquered, slaying my stutter. The words that were my constant, my evergreen, my life.

Prose would have galvanised within me what I needed to know, and it now exists for all the levels of all types of writers out there. Embrace it, use it, love it. Prose and Prosers will support you and pump positivity into those gaps you creatively stuff negativity into. Prose rejoices at the sound of a keyboard in the midnight hours and the scribble of the pen on the pad on the bus. Prose where you can open up safely.

Why Prose? Because words have the power to heal, to support. Words can start wars and reconcile a lifetime of differences. Because words can provide salvation for a stuttering little boy and offer an alternative outcome.

That’s why.

Pardon me for being so plain, but plainly speaking, said plainness, painfully, is such by virtue of being default. So you see it isn't my fault for appreciating the essence of this symbolic set's aesthetic aura. Orally I prefer circles and squiggles and curves and spirals but textually, I prefer squares and arrows and lines and more lines. I prefer a good suit and tie to sweatpants and a t-shirt even though I'm hypocritically wearing the latter now.

Being popular.

Being known.

Being liked.

Being accepted.

When you’re popular life is great.

You have so many friends and trendy clothes.

And best of all everyone accepts you.

But when they accept you,

They don’t accept you as you.

They accept the person you created.

The person you changed yourself into.

You changed everything that made you.

Everything all your true friends loved.

The people who truly care are now gone.

They don’t understand how you can just change.

How you can just stop being their friend.

They wonder why you weren’t happy with them.

Why you had to get new friends that don’t care like they do.

But now they don’t care anymore.

You left them for a group of people.

People that don’t actually like you.

This group of people who feed on the fear of others.

They have nothing better to do with their life.

Seeking the weak and vulnerable.

Making them change, only to be disappointed.

You realize they were just playing a game.

Just messing with your mind and life.

Ruining everything.

But your true friends see what they’ve done.

They take you back with one condition.

Don’t make the mistake of changing.

Changing to please someone else.