#poetic-prose — Public Fediverse posts

✮ On Different Frequencies ✮

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✮ After-Dinner Breakfast ✮

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✮ Wick ✮

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✮ Razorblade Sundae ✮

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✮ Talking to a Stone ✮

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✮ Wink Wink ✮

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✮ Lady Green Sat on a Cob ✮

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✮ Long Way Down ✮

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✮ To That Potted Plant ✮

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✮ A Night in New York ✮

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✮ A Butterfly’s Twilight Song ✮

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✮  Get It Started ✮ 

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✮ Blinker ✮

We spend so much time blinking and looking away,
we blink so much that we don’t realize our fuse is alight.
A turn of the dial,
into another scene,
never rooted in the moment,
as transient as everything mortal.
We blink, to erase the unpleasant,
we blink, to jump forward,
coil our bodies around rest,
wrap paychecks inside our hands,
so, we can blink a little more.
We skip and jump out of the day,
when tomorrow is worse than today,
we blink it away,
as if we have unlimited blinks,
and soon enough we’ll hit a wall
and wish we could have kept our eyes open
more frequently.

Here today; gone tomorrow, never take anything for granted.

When complaining about long walks, someone is dreaming of having such luxury. Walks that people take for granted mean everything to someone else who is bound by a condition that prevents them from doing so. They could be bedridden; they could be hiding in fear in a war zone; they could be impeded by physical conditions that limit them.

You complain about tidying up. It’s because you have a home. You stress out over traffic. It’s because you have a car. You can’t deal with the noise. You have a family. Someone out there wants what you have but can only dream of it.

When frowning in dissatisfaction over a prepared meal, think about that person who took time and poured every ounce of their heart, hoping to bring you happiness. Think.

Be grateful that you are in school; not everyone is afforded such an opportunity. Not as a promise to secure a job, but to learn. Bitterness often comes from discounting what people already have. Contentment, as they say, is the key to happiness. Dream, but be forgiving. If it’s yours, it will come to fruition. If not, steady your heart and live with what you have.

Never neglect people or things that add, give, and bring value to your life. Blessed are those who can’t count how many people they love with their fingers. If you do, you’re already rich. Hurray! You will have someone to turn to.

At the end of the day, when all that you take for granted is gone, what will be left of you?

Copyright © Erwinism. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations used in critical reviews or scholarly work. This work is protected under international copyright laws. Unauthorized use or reproduction of this material is strictly prohibited and may result in legal action.

Live it Up!

✮  Traffic ✮ 

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✮ Of the Broken ✮

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✮ Vessels ✮

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✮ Moira ✮

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It’s been quiet here for a while. And in the silence, amidst the twists of change, the fretting of details fell away, leaving a space to see things differently.
I’m back now and have a new piece titled “The Cost of Consciousness”. If you’re still around and curious, find it here: https://boehler.studio

No rush, just glad to be writing again.
—
#boehlerstudio #poeticprose #philosophy #slowreading

✮ Fear ✮

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✮ Dots ✮

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✮ Glass Hearts ✮

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✮ Everything Given ✮

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✮ We Stood and Did Nothing – The Good Old Days ✮

The old days, ever so ancient on today’s thought, is more than good, it was hospitable to life. On a rock, blocks away from a nurturing star—at least before it grows into angry titan until it burns everything and eventually burns out—life did more than exist, it craved meaning as it evolved into surging tides of intelligence. So we thought.

Water is life. Where it stood, and the channels where it went, lived cities glowing like embers under a dark sky. Fields of cities that kept sprawling with the seasons and infecting terrains until their flesh of lush and dirt hardened into plastic, steel, fiber optics, depression, boredom, and greed.

Water was everywhere. Even the clouds were generous, tirelessly visiting the world spring after spring to wake seeds and watch them walk. Now the clouds spit acid. The trees no longer walk, for the fires have turned them into cinders. Fowls, faeries, and fauna stir no more. They are memories encased in glass reserved for the eyes of hands that paid overpriced tickets. Water flowed through us, before we turned them into plastic bottles, before the bottles turned into mountains that saw woods as trespassers. Water housed schools of fish that were never educated about those who lived on the surface, before they had multiple googly eyes and before they glowed green, before the reefs were bleached white until they were nothing but bones that stayed as scintillae of the past.

The old days when the air was a virgin until, in our perversion, we fused it with death. They used to course through the living skies, but many preferred gray over blue, so we stood and did nothing, until they, too, were in canisters exclusive to those whose hearts are made of ice and glass and known for selling the world.

They were vampires burying their rabid fangs down the jugular veins on the neck of our planet, siphoning every drop of blood it could offer. They did. They appealed to our weakness. They played our naïveté, pumping fear into all of us until we were itemized in a catalog under banners and sigils, until we were pitted against each other.

We had boxes for houses, and we stood when we slept, and we slept for hours, barely enough to keep us alive so we could keep paying insurance companies and keep their pockets plump while we ate synthetic supplements. We toiled day after wretched day and day as they mapped out our genome and auctioned our souls to the highest bidder, easier for them to lull us into a deep trance, we salivated to every ding of a bell and attended webinars in the belief that we could find ourselves, but we were never lost to begin with, we just needed to pay someone to point out that we’re always the same people living under our flesh.

We used to have stars, but in their place, LED billboards of emaciated beings telling us what we are not. The world used to be green; now it’s just dismal. Those who knew were vigilant, but we cast stones their way and accused them of crying wolf. Lo and behold, those who were pointing fingers at them were the real wolves, but it’s too late for that now.

Every day, we inched closer to our demise, and as promised, life as we knew it, flashed before our eyes.

These things have yet to come to past.

Copyright © Erwinism. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations used in critical reviews or scholarly work. This work is protected under international copyright laws. Unauthorized use or reproduction of this material is strictly prohibited and may result in legal action.

A gift called „An Hour“.

For someone like me who’s not regularly travelling by train, it is still a little bit of an adventure. I remember my first conscious train trips as a kid, the wonder and excitement, being able to walk around while You’re travelling, the constant comforting and sullying noise that a train makes, the regular little bumps, the slight cracking of the chassis, the people murmuring around You.

#slowtravel #trainthoughts #stoicism #mindfulness #poetry #poeticprose

“She gave me for my pains a world of sighs.”
― William Shakespeare

#Bot #Quote #Love #PoeticProse #Tragedy

Shaving: A Greenland Diaries Flash Fiction

Nigel couldn’t believe his beard had gotten this long.

It was down to his chest, tangled and frizzy. It was black, but almost brown at its feathery edges. He could hear his father yelling at him to trim it, his high, almost husky voice echoing in his head. His father was ex military. He loved the clean shaven look and forced Nigel to follow that hairless motif, even though Nigel hadn’t picked up a weapon until the Drum started. Now, he always had one with him. The ravaged green world demanded it, even with the Drum destroyed and the Unnamed no longer hunting him at night.

Nigel wondered if his father was still alive in the nursing home in Saint Louis Park. He had barely been alive before the Drum. It wouldn’t make any sense for him to be spared.

Nigel had been lucky to hide in his Golden Valley home for most of the apocalypse. He had left for a few weeks to join survivors fighting an Unnamed by a lake that kept attacking them. It had been a hard fought battle. Only Nigel and a few others survived. None of them had the appetite for further confrontations with the Unnamed, and they all retreated to their former hiding spots. Those had been the last people he’d spoken to, except for a band of soldiers passing through who told him the Drum was destroyed, and the Unnamed were nonviolent unless attacked.

Nigel felt his dark, reflectionless face. His features were gaunt, weathered by a lack of nutritious food. His cheeks were flat, his nose large, his forehead dry. His lips were cracked and bloody in places. The weather had been fine. It was the fear eroding his flesh. The constant worry of the Unnamed returning, or a crazed Reanimated storming through the neighborhood.

Slowly, above his white bathroom sink, he began to trim his beard. There was no electricity for his razor, so he resorted to a pair of orange handled scissors he kept in his office for trimming documents. They were sharp, but loud as they crushed the fibers between its blades. In minutes, most of his beard was reduced to a prickly edge beneath his fingers. He sighed.

“I guess it’s time. They said it was safe.”

Ahead of him hung a wool blanket, yellow and brown, duct taped to the wall in miscellaneous streaks of silver adhesive. It dangled just above the sink.

It blocked the mirror.

He’d put it up during the first week, when he noticed the shadows watching him. Now, with the Drum destroyed, survivors passing through told him mirrors and reflections were back to normal. They no longer held phantoms.

He slowly reached for the fabric, then stopped.

“I can’t do it.”

He walked out of the bathroom with a shrug.

“I can’t believe it’s okay.”

I really enjoy writing about these quieter moments in the Greenland Diaries, where characters are learning to live again after a horrifying ordeal that shook the foundations of humanity. These bits of flash fiction give me ample opportunity for it. You can learn more about the mainline series right here. Thank you for reading!

#author #blogging #bodyHorror #books #cosmicHorror #darkFantasy #darkFiction #decay #fantasy #fiction #flashFiction #grief #hauntedLandscapes #horror #horrorWriting #identity #isolation #liminalSpaces #machines #memory #monsters #obsession #patrickWMarsh #poeticProse #prosePoetry #psychologicalHorror #shortStories #speculativeFiction #survival #teraryHorror #theGreenlandDiaries #transformation #trauma #weirdFiction #writing

I Can’t Leave: A Greenland Diaries Flash Fiction

Rob had memorized the pattern of abandoned cars in the parking lot outside the building. A red van, a blue truck, a few white sedans, silent and sun faded, lay scattered across the velvet sheet of greenery in the basin around the office tower he’d been hiding in. He’d been fixing a boiler in the basement when the Drum began. Most of the building was empty that first night. Everyone had already left for the day. Only a handful were torn apart beneath the Unnamed’s obscene claws.

And then the office was empty.

Except for Rob.

He had always imagined himself different at the end of the world. At six foot five, all elbows and height, with an unkempt beard dropping to his chest and a perpetually worn Minnesota Twins cap, he’d figured he’d look the part. He had thought of himself as stereotypically male, chew, flannels, and a quiet, lumbering confidence. But when the monsters arrived and stalked the hallways, he learned quickly how fragile that image was. Back on his grandfather’s farm, he and his friends in their local anti government militia had joked that if the world ever collapsed, they’d be ready.

But once the Unnamed descended and began mutilating and resurrecting their victims, the only thing Rob grew adept at was hiding.

For someone so tall and broad, sneaking through the office should have been impossible, yet he’d shaped himself to its shadows. He learned to bend beneath desks, wedge between bookshelves, flatten against cubicles. Even when the Reanimated drifted through, he found ways to slip past them, though other survivors told him not to fear them. Those survivors were nothing like him. They weren’t afraid of the shadows. They fought them day and night. He’d heard their skirmishes echoing through the Drum. Even now, with it finally over, the night outside carried only wind, insects, and the soft groan of the building settling.

How were they so brave?

A few survivors had passed through recently and told him he could go home, or even find work with the Reestablishment. But he couldn’t force himself to leave the gray block of the office. Every time he packed his few supplies, slung the rifle he’d taken off a dead soldier, and started toward home, he barely made it a few blocks. A shadow, a rattle of debris, a shift in the wind, anything could spook him, and he’d sprint back to the familiar corners of the office floor.

Day or night didn’t matter.

He just couldn’t leave.

Thank you for reading my flash fiction from the Greenland Diaries. In this story, I wanted to show a character you might expect to be strong because of how they postured their identity, but when the apocalypse appeared they realized it was all an image without integrity. They weren’t actually built for the conflict they thought they were seeking. Monsters are an excellent mirror.

#author #blogging #bodyHorror #books #cosmicHorror #darkFantasy #darkFiction #decay #fantasy #fiction #flashFiction #grief #hauntedLandscapes #horror #horrorWriting #identity #isolation #liminalSpaces #literaryHorror #machines #memory #monsters #obsession #patrickWMarsh #poeticProse #prosePoetry #psychologicalHorror #shortStories #speculativeFiction #survival #theGreenlandDiaries #transformation #trauma #weirdFiction #writing

DIOS ESTA EN MI CONTRA

#Poesía
#Poema
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#PoesíaOscura
#PoesíaUrbana
#PoesíaEnProsa
#Literatura
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Alone by @brbirenbaum
#poeticprose #grief #loss #loneliness https://link.medium.com/Qm0ALq9nwOb

Movements of a Stone by A.L. Hogsett https://link.medium.com/gP9PRDHj0Lb #PoeticProse on The Mad River

"Lost & Wordless"
(PJR 2024-08-06)

She searched for the words but only sounds came to her at that moment. Her mind was beyond such things. Lost in the ether of lost dreams, she drifted and forgot many things.

Who was whispering in her ear? Who was speaking strange sounds?
Was that her name? Yes, her name.

Sylvia

#typewriter #art #poeticprose

"Lost & Wordless"
(PJR 2024-08-06)

She searched for the words but only sounds came to her at that moment. Her mind was beyond such things. Lost in the ether of lost dreams, she drifted and forgot many things.

Who was whispering in her ear? Who was speaking strange sounds?
Was that her name? Yes, her name.

Sylvia

#typewriter #art #poeticProse

✮ To That Potted Plant ✮

Dear Shining Star,

Body,

Your friend,

Erwin

Against the rusty tracks, past the ancient hills, creaky wheels brittle from a long journey shuddered to a halt as hissing steam rose from the weary engine, looking at a stagnating town that time forgot.

They all need saving from the old house they had become. Some fences were uprooted; others were staggering like heartbroken lovers outside tea shops; a few were wind-mangled and snapped in half as if that weren’t enough to warrant attention.

Old houses. Beloved houses so many years ago, they tugged heartstrings, dreams that came true, now sit as museums of a bygone age. Their insides need dusting, aching to clear the clutter of memories. Like skin, years were grafted on the moldy surface. The frames that hold them groan from the weight they can no longer bear. Ivy crept up the walls, and the paint faded to a dull, peeling gray intertwined with cracked window frames. Drapes of cobwebs in the corners of every room, bemoaning their sun return.

You can no longer, for the heart of you, be part of it. Part of the collapse. Part of the ruins just sticking around for nostalgia’s sake.

Yet there you are, sitting in a corner withering, wondering what life exists beyond the thick wall. As far as you know, the world beyond is created with words, built with ether; they dissipate upon contact, and you turn to stone.

You couldn’t wait to grow up. You are met with stern faces giving you a dire warning: the world is a cruel and dangerous place. It’s no place for someone fragile. Stay where you are. Relish your shackles.

But like a jade plant, you’re growing, getting ready to batter that terracotta wall into smithereens. Soon you will outgrow your space, and they won’t be able to ignore you. You won’t be free until your mind is yours. Emancipate yourself, swing the gates wide open, let the experience in. Take a step forward. You are not the same. You are a second older than you were. Constantly evolving, constantly changing.

You have fallen more than your fingers can count. But don’t dwell on that. Lessons are learned best through failure, for it illuminates blindspots that hubris hides. Forgive yourself, and despite the blunders,  keep moving on. You have to keep discovering. It’s not so much that you have to prove something, but rather holding on to the belief that you could be more.

Some will tell you, “You are not good enough.” Who are they to say? It’s always about expecting to be impressed and to measure up to their ideals; however, they’re them, and you are you.

You were sown in this life and grown as a potted plant, but you were meant for something else; something bigger.  Like everyone who wants to thrive in a garden, you were meant to sprawl. But it comes with a belief that you must trust yourself first.

Libera te; liberate vos.

@alda @wuchta
PSA: Walk Left. Stand Right.
===
A man in a business suit with a briefcase in hand scurried up the escalator, presumably running late. He barked at an unsuspecting pedestrian, “Walk left, stand right!” A directive that was universally understood and second nature in New York, but here, amidst the palm tree-lined streets of Los Angeles, such a command was foreign and often lost on the star-struck locals.

#shortstory #poeticprose #prose #poetry