#prosepoem — Public Fediverse posts

#MastoPrompt
#gluttonous
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#creativewriting
#smallstories
#prosepoem
@stevencudahy

Made a Mural of Me

I have walked streets where the walls remember
better than the governments do.

I have stood beneath the painted faces
of the disappeared, the assassinated,
the catechists, the campesinos,
the students, the mothers,
the ones whose names were spoken once with terror
and now are spoken with flowers.

I have seen their eyes in plaster and pigment,
their halos done in cheap color,
their mouths half open as if the wall itself
were still trying to tell the story
of what was done to them.

In Central America,
I learned that a wall can become a gospel
when the newspapers lie.
A wall can become an archive
when the official files are burned,
when the generals call murder peace,
when the empire calls bloodshed stability,
when the poor are told to forget
for the sake of moving on.

But the wall does not move on.

The wall says: here.
The wall says: this happened.
The wall says: this child had a name.
This priest had hands.
This woman had laughter.
This union worker had a mother.
This martyr did not die in abstraction,
did not perish as an example,
did not vanish into a sermon illustration.
They were flesh.
They were breath.
They were somebody’s beloved.

And I have seen it elsewhere too.

Not only there, where memory was brushed onto concrete
beneath the long shadow of rifles and oligarchs,
but here,
in this empire’s marble reach,
in this capital of speeches and signatures,
in neighborhoods of D.C. where color rises up
against erasure,
where the dead look down from brick walls
and ask the living what exactly we are doing
with the testimony they left us.

I have walked those streets too,
where murals bloom like wounds that refuse to close,
where every face says both remember
and why again?

That is the ache of it.

Because a mural is beautiful,
but it is also an indictment.

A mural is what happens
when grief runs out of sanctioned places to go.
When cemeteries are too quiet,
when courtrooms are too compromised,
when history books are too polite,
when churches would rather canonize the dead
than stand beside the threatened living,
someone climbs a ladder with paint
and says:
You will not make us forget.

And yet even that holy act contains a heartbreak.

Because every new mural is also a confession
that we have failed again.

We say we honor the martyrs.
We paint them large.
We ring them with light.
We write their names in careful letters.
We tell their stories to our children.
We call them seeds.
We call them saints.
We call them witnesses.

But if we must keep making more walls,
if there is always another name,
another mother,
another child,
another prophet with blood on their shirt,
another journalist, another dreamer, another body,
then our memorials are not only songs of praise.
They are laments.
They are accusations.
They are unfinished prayers.

I do not want a world
where we become very skilled
at decorating the aftermath.

I do not want justice outsourced to artists
because legislators are cowards,
because police departments close ranks,
because borders harden,
because markets consume,
because nations baptize their violence
and then ask poets to clean up the silence.

I am grateful for the murals.
God, I am grateful for them.
For the ones who paint the saints with brown hands
and tired eyes.
For the ones who make a wall preach.
For the ones who turn an alley into a liturgy.
For the ones who refuse the second death,
the death of being forgotten.

But I am tired of needing them.

Tired of standing before another radiant face
and knowing radiance came at the price of a bullet.
Tired of admiring the colors
while knowing the color had to cover over grief
too large for speech.
Tired of telling the story again
because the engines that made the story
were never dismantled,
only rebranded, relocated, repainted.

That is the terrible genius of empire.
It learns to tolerate memorials
so long as the machinery of martyr-making stays intact.

Put the face on the wall.
Name the school after the slain.
Hold the vigil.
Light the candle.
Share the quote.
Then fund the weapons.
Protect the system.
Discredit the witness.
Fortify the border.
Ignore the neighborhood.
Silence the poor.
And when the next body falls,
commission another mural.

No.

There is something obscene
about praising the courage of the dead
while refusing the cost of solidarity with the living.

There is something blasphemous
about loving Romero on the wall
but not listening to prophets now.
About cherishing painted martyrs in San Salvador
and neglecting crucified people in Washington,
in detention centers,
in poor towns,
in Black and brown neighborhoods,
in places where the state still knows how to kneel
on a neck,
how to disappear a future,
how to call a human being illegal
before making them dead in spirit.

So yes,
I have walked among the murals.
And yes,
they have taught me.

They taught me that memory is resistance.
That color can be a form of defiance.
That beauty can tell the truth
when official language becomes a mask for murder.
They taught me the communion of saints
sometimes looks less like stained glass
and more like chipped paint on cinder block.
Less like cathedral windows
and more like public walls under open sky.

They taught me that the martyrs are still speaking.
Not only from heaven.
From brick.
From alley.
From barrio.
From the side of a building everyone passes
on the way to work,
on the way to school,
on the way to forgetting.

And they taught me to shudder.

Because sometimes, standing there,
I have had the strange and terrible thought:

One day they could make a mural of me.

Not because I seek glory.
Not because I imagine myself noble.
Not because I think suffering makes a person pure.
But because in a world like this,
where truth still threatens power,
where solidarity still has a price,
where loving the crucified too closely
can still get you crucified,
any one of us who dares enough
might end up as paint.

Made a mural of me.

Put me on a wall with the others.
Give me a background of sunburst gold,
or deep blue,
or the red of blood transfigured into witness.
Paint my face calmer than I ever was in life.
Smooth out my fear.
Make me look brave.

But if you do,
let the mural say I did not want this.

Let it say I wanted fewer murals,
not more.

Let it say I wanted children to know these names
without needing to inherit their wounds.
Let it say I wanted nations to repent
before artists had to remember for them.
Let it say I wanted churches
to become sanctuaries of the endangered
instead of galleries of the already slain.
Let it say I wanted the wall
to go blank someday,
not from amnesia,
but from justice.

That is my prayer now.

Not that we stop honoring the martyrs.
Never that.
Paint them.
Sing them.
Tell them.
Teach them.
Write them in the streets and on the doors
and in the marrow of the young.

But also:
stop making so many of them.

Let there come a day
when the painters have to find another subject.
When the ladders lean against walls
for festivals instead of funerals.
When color is used for delight
and not only for defiance.
When remembrance is no longer emergency labor.
When the living are protected enough
that martyrdom becomes rare,
and rare enough
that every new death shocks us again.

Until then,
the walls will keep preaching.

And I will keep listening
with gratitude and grief,
with reverence and anger,
with hope cracked open but not empty.

Because every mural is a promise
the dead make to the living:

We are still here.
We are watching what you do next.
Do not honor us
by becoming connoisseurs of tragedy.
Honor us
by ending the thing that killed us.

And until that day,
the paint will keep drying,
and the faces will keep multiplying,
and the walls will keep learning names
they should never have had to learn.

And I will stand before them,
heart broken open,
thinking:

this wall should be empty by now.

Made a Mural of Me

I have walked streets where the walls remember
better than the governments do.

I have stood beneath the painted faces
of the disappeared, the assassinated,
the catechists, the campesinos,
the students, the mothers,
the ones whose names were spoken once with terror
and now are spoken with flowers.

I have seen their eyes in plaster and pigment,
their halos done in cheap color,
their mouths half open as if the wall itself
were still trying to tell the story
of what was done to them.

In Central America,
I learned that a wall can become a gospel
when the newspapers lie.
A wall can become an archive
when the official files are burned,
when the generals call murder peace,
when the empire calls bloodshed stability,
when the poor are told to forget
for the sake of moving on.

But the wall does not move on.

The wall says: here.
The wall says: this happened.
The wall says: this child had a name.
This priest had hands.
This woman had laughter.
This union worker had a mother.
This martyr did not die in abstraction,
did not perish as an example,
did not vanish into a sermon illustration.
They were flesh.
They were breath.
They were somebody’s beloved.

And I have seen it elsewhere too.

Not only there, where memory was brushed onto concrete
beneath the long shadow of rifles and oligarchs,
but here,
in this empire’s marble reach,
in this capital of speeches and signatures,
in neighborhoods of D.C. where color rises up
against erasure,
where the dead look down from brick walls
and ask the living what exactly we are doing
with the testimony they left us.

I have walked those streets too,
where murals bloom like wounds that refuse to close,
where every face says both remember
and why again?

That is the ache of it.

Because a mural is beautiful,
but it is also an indictment.

A mural is what happens
when grief runs out of sanctioned places to go.
When cemeteries are too quiet,
when courtrooms are too compromised,
when history books are too polite,
when churches would rather canonize the dead
than stand beside the threatened living,
someone climbs a ladder with paint
and says:
You will not make us forget.

And yet even that holy act contains a heartbreak.

Because every new mural is also a confession
that we have failed again.

We say we honor the martyrs.
We paint them large.
We ring them with light.
We write their names in careful letters.
We tell their stories to our children.
We call them seeds.
We call them saints.
We call them witnesses.

But if we must keep making more walls,
if there is always another name,
another mother,
another child,
another prophet with blood on their shirt,
another journalist, another dreamer, another body,
then our memorials are not only songs of praise.
They are laments.
They are accusations.
They are unfinished prayers.

I do not want a world
where we become very skilled
at decorating the aftermath.

I do not want justice outsourced to artists
because legislators are cowards,
because police departments close ranks,
because borders harden,
because markets consume,
because nations baptize their violence
and then ask poets to clean up the silence.

I am grateful for the murals.
God, I am grateful for them.
For the ones who paint the saints with brown hands
and tired eyes.
For the ones who make a wall preach.
For the ones who turn an alley into a liturgy.
For the ones who refuse the second death,
the death of being forgotten.

But I am tired of needing them.

Tired of standing before another radiant face
and knowing radiance came at the price of a bullet.
Tired of admiring the colors
while knowing the color had to cover over grief
too large for speech.
Tired of telling the story again
because the engines that made the story
were never dismantled,
only rebranded, relocated, repainted.

That is the terrible genius of empire.
It learns to tolerate memorials
so long as the machinery of martyr-making stays intact.

Put the face on the wall.
Name the school after the slain.
Hold the vigil.
Light the candle.
Share the quote.
Then fund the weapons.
Protect the system.
Discredit the witness.
Fortify the border.
Ignore the neighborhood.
Silence the poor.
And when the next body falls,
commission another mural.

No.

There is something obscene
about praising the courage of the dead
while refusing the cost of solidarity with the living.

There is something blasphemous
about loving Romero on the wall
but not listening to prophets now.
About cherishing painted martyrs in San Salvador
and neglecting crucified people in Washington,
in detention centers,
in poor towns,
in Black and brown neighborhoods,
in places where the state still knows how to kneel
on a neck,
how to disappear a future,
how to call a human being illegal
before making them dead in spirit.

So yes,
I have walked among the murals.
And yes,
they have taught me.

They taught me that memory is resistance.
That color can be a form of defiance.
That beauty can tell the truth
when official language becomes a mask for murder.
They taught me the communion of saints
sometimes looks less like stained glass
and more like chipped paint on cinder block.
Less like cathedral windows
and more like public walls under open sky.

They taught me that the martyrs are still speaking.
Not only from heaven.
From brick.
From alley.
From barrio.
From the side of a building everyone passes
on the way to work,
on the way to school,
on the way to forgetting.

And they taught me to shudder.

Because sometimes, standing there,
I have had the strange and terrible thought:

One day they could make a mural of me.

Not because I seek glory.
Not because I imagine myself noble.
Not because I think suffering makes a person pure.
But because in a world like this,
where truth still threatens power,
where solidarity still has a price,
where loving the crucified too closely
can still get you crucified,
any one of us who dares enough
might end up as paint.

Made a mural of me.

Put me on a wall with the others.
Give me a background of sunburst gold,
or deep blue,
or the red of blood transfigured into witness.
Paint my face calmer than I ever was in life.
Smooth out my fear.
Make me look brave.

But if you do,
let the mural say I did not want this.

Let it say I wanted fewer murals,
not more.

Let it say I wanted children to know these names
without needing to inherit their wounds.
Let it say I wanted nations to repent
before artists had to remember for them.
Let it say I wanted churches
to become sanctuaries of the endangered
instead of galleries of the already slain.
Let it say I wanted the wall
to go blank someday,
not from amnesia,
but from justice.

That is my prayer now.

Not that we stop honoring the martyrs.
Never that.
Paint them.
Sing them.
Tell them.
Teach them.
Write them in the streets and on the doors
and in the marrow of the young.

But also:
stop making so many of them.

Let there come a day
when the painters have to find another subject.
When the ladders lean against walls
for festivals instead of funerals.
When color is used for delight
and not only for defiance.
When remembrance is no longer emergency labor.
When the living are protected enough
that martyrdom becomes rare,
and rare enough
that every new death shocks us again.

Until then,
the walls will keep preaching.

And I will keep listening
with gratitude and grief,
with reverence and anger,
with hope cracked open but not empty.

Because every mural is a promise
the dead make to the living:

We are still here.
We are watching what you do next.
Do not honor us
by becoming connoisseurs of tragedy.
Honor us
by ending the thing that killed us.

And until that day,
the paint will keep drying,
and the faces will keep multiplying,
and the walls will keep learning names
they should never have had to learn.

And I will stand before them,
heart broken open,
thinking:

this wall should be empty by now.

Excommunicate Me

Excommunicate me, then.
Ring the bell if you have one. Draw the line in ash. Nail the notice to the chapel door. Speak my name in the flat voice reserved for weather, death, and disappointment. Tell the saints to avert their eyes. Tell the children not to ask questions. Tell the old women in the kitchen to lower their voices when I pass. I have grown used to doors closing with the gentleness of those who think themselves righteous.

Excommunicate me for loving too widely, for asking where the missing ones went, for lingering too long at the edge of the map where the heretics, addicts, doubters, dissidents, and queer-eyed prophets make their fires at night. Excommunicate me for saying that Christ still wanders there, coat smelling of smoke, hands warm from other people’s wounds. Excommunicate me for suspecting that the kingdom keeps being born in places your committees have not approved.

Cast me out for refusing to confuse your fences with holiness.
Cast me out for noticing how often your purity is purchased with somebody else’s loneliness.
Cast me out for believing that a table is still a table even when the wrong people find bread there first.

I know how this works. First comes the sorrowful meeting. Then the careful language. Then the phrases dressed in prayer like soldiers dressed in hymnals. We say discernment when we mean fear. We say order when we mean control. We say peace when we mean silence from those already bruised. We say love while measuring who may enter it. We say truth with our arms folded.

Excommunicate me because I cannot keep pretending that the wound in the Body is healed by cutting off another limb.

I have seen too much of the outside to fear it now. I have seen the banished making soup for one another. I have seen the condemned share coats in winter. I have seen those denied the sacraments become sacraments for each other: bread in famine, oil in sickness, a hand on the shoulder in the long vestibule of grief. I have heard better theology whispered on back steps than shouted from polished pulpits. I have watched the Spirit climb out the stained-glass window and go where she is not expected.

Excommunicate me, and I will go down among the unclaimed.
I will kneel beside the ones your footnotes could not save.
I will keep company with the mothers whose prayers embarrassed you, the children whose questions outgrew your answers, the men who wept when they were told to be strong, the women who spoke and were called dangerous, the wanderers who could not make your narrow gate into a home.

And if you shut me out from your sanctuary, I will make a sanctuary of the road.
If you deny me your blessing, I will learn the blessing of crows at morning, of rain on rusted tin, of strangers who still know how to share fire.
If you call me lost, I will answer that some of us were never meant to be found by empires.

Do not threaten me with the outer dark.
I have met God there.

Not the tidy god of minutes and motions, not the well-behaved deity who always sides with the CEO, but the God who haunts the threshold, who leaves the ninety-nine to go where the crying is, who touches the unclean and is not diminished, who slips through locked doors and still carries wounds, who keeps raising what the pious have buried.

Excommunicate me for this: I no longer believe belonging is yours to ration.
I no longer believe grace requires your seal.
I no longer believe heaven trembles when your vote is taken.
The veil was torn without your permission, and it has never been properly mended.

So do it.
Write me out.
Strike my name from the roll.
Erase me from the minutes.
Tell yourselves the garden is safer now that one more wild thing has been removed.

But listen: roots work in secret. Seeds pass through the beaks of birds and are planted in their shit. Wind ignores decrees. What you cast out does not always die. Sometimes it takes hold beyond the wall and flowers in the rubble, and those passing by say, I did not know beauty could grow here.

Excommunicate me, then.
I will go with Christ among the cast out.
I will go where the lepers still ring their bells, where the scapegoats stagger into the wilderness, where the rejected stone waits in the dust.
And when at last you come looking for God, breathless with your censures, your keys jangling at your side, do not be surprised to find us already inside the feast, the doors flung wide, the music loud, the wounded laughing, and every empty place at the table set for one more.

𝑭𝒓𝒐𝒎 𝑾𝒂𝒚𝒘𝒐𝒓𝒅𝒔: "𝑬𝒗𝒆𝒓𝒚𝒕𝒉𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒃𝒖𝒕" -

A good day, he decided. A shift, a movement. He could not possibly predict now who he would become, only that watching his thumb press across that stray glop of Gillette and thus reveal a little more blue in the vanity countertop . . . .

https://waywordsstudio.com/fiction/everything-but/

#fiction #flashfiction #originalfiction #prose #shortprose #prosepoem #doublet #wordladder #introversion #mentalhealth #isolation

𝑭𝒓𝒐𝒎 𝑾𝒂𝒚𝒘𝒐𝒓𝒅𝒔: "𝑬𝒗𝒆𝒓𝒚𝒕𝒉𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒃𝒖𝒕" -

A good day, he decided. A shift, a movement. He could not possibly predict now who he would become, only that watching his thumb press across that stray glop of Gillette and thus reveal a little more blue in the vanity countertop . . . .

https://waywordsstudio.com/fiction/everything-but/

#fiction #flashfiction #originalfiction #prose #shortprose #prosepoem #doublet #wordladder #introversion #mentalhealth #isolation

𝑭𝒓𝒐𝒎 𝑾𝒂𝒚𝒘𝒐𝒓𝒅𝒔: "𝑬𝒗𝒆𝒓𝒚𝒕𝒉𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒃𝒖𝒕" -

A good day, he decided. A shift, a movement. He could not possibly predict now who he would become, only that watching his thumb press across that stray glop of Gillette and thus reveal a little more blue in the vanity countertop . . . .

https://waywordsstudio.com/fiction/everything-but/

#fiction #flashfiction #originalfiction #prose #shortprose #prosepoem #doublet #wordladder #introversion #mentalhealth #isolation

𝑭𝒓𝒐𝒎 𝑾𝒂𝒚𝒘𝒐𝒓𝒅𝒔: "𝑬𝒗𝒆𝒓𝒚𝒕𝒉𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒃𝒖𝒕" -

A good day, he decided. A shift, a movement. He could not possibly predict now who he would become, only that watching his thumb press across that stray glop of Gillette and thus reveal a little more blue in the vanity countertop . . . .

https://waywordsstudio.com/fiction/everything-but/

#fiction #flashfiction #originalfiction #prose #shortprose #prosepoem #doublet #wordladder #introversion #mentalhealth #isolation

𝑭𝒓𝒐𝒎 𝑾𝒂𝒚𝒘𝒐𝒓𝒅𝒔: "𝑬𝒗𝒆𝒓𝒚𝒕𝒉𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒃𝒖𝒕" -

A good day, he decided. A shift, a movement. He could not possibly predict now who he would become, only that watching his thumb press across that stray glop of Gillette and thus reveal a little more blue in the vanity countertop . . . .

https://waywordsstudio.com/fiction/everything-but/

#fiction #flashfiction #originalfiction #prose #shortprose #prosepoem #doublet #wordladder #introversion #mentalhealth #isolation

Meet me at the intersection
of Love and Affection

This prospective relationship
will be a dynamic #synthesis
of all our strengths and weaknesses
we are destined to share

When we connect
the whole of us
will exceed
than the sum of our parts

#vss365 #poetry #poem #ProsePoem

I have two speculative poems in the July/August issue of Sublimation: "Body after body after body" and "Thursday, June 20 to Sunday, September 22" (both ebook and print editions) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FR2H1463
#specpo #prosepoem #sonnet #poetry

Transmission #28 – From the Head of Sericulture
Transmission from: Briony Ash, Head of Sericulture, Luxembourg Base, Copernicus D Crater, Moon
Earth Received Time: 12 June 2045, 10:13:49 UT

The latest report from Project Abeona, a small group of poets living off-world in a speculative future

(Transmission #28 by Pippa Goldschmidt)

https://projectabeonapoetry.substack.com/p/transmission-28-from-the-head-of

#Scottish #literature #poem #prosepoem #scifi #sciencefiction #speculativefiction

It's not about getting everyone to agree with only you since "you're infallible."

Remind people that disagreement exists and is palpable.

Do what you can, of any "amount" or "worth".

You exist, therefore you impact this Earth.

#OortArtCloud #poem #ProsePoem #poet #Poetry #PoetryCorner #couplet #rhyme #encouragement #try #effort #do #DoTheThing #activity #activism #ArtActivism #activist #spoonie #ChronicHealth #LongHaulers #LongCovidKids #LongCovid #MECFS #FibroMyalgia #news #world #human #HumanCare #people #MastoCraft #petition #change #pragmatist #interaction #FindComments #connect #connection #social #SocialNetwork

My poetry collection is now available on Amazon 👻👻👻

https://www.amazon.com/Ghost-House-collection-prose-poems-ebook/dp/B0CQG61ZBS/ref=monarch_sidesh

Pastiche & beat words & imaginary correspondence. Ghosts of what was & what wasn't & what might have been & mythology dragged flailing & cursing into the present

#PoetsOfMastodon
#Poetry #Poets #poetsandwriters #Writing #PoetryCommunity #Poetstodon #PoetryLovers #HybridPoetry #ExperimentalPoetry #ExperimentalProsePoem #Dadaism #Dadaist #ProsePoetry #SurrealNarrative #ProsePoem #CollagePoem #CollageProsePoem 

#ProsePoem #EpicPoetry #EpicPoem #Postmodern #PostModernLiterature #Poetry
#Novella #Blog #Writing #WritingCommunity #Fiction #BLog

So This has been what I have been working on most of the last week. I feel like I have found my voice with the realization that #GravitysRainbow is a prose poem and I am writing in the tradition of Jim Dodge and Richard Brautigan by way of that realization.

all constructive criticism is welcome and appreciated.

The link is to my blog

https://m1a1-thesockmonkey.blogspot.com/2023/10/wayward-bound-or-warped-piano.html

We are open for subs of PROSE POEMS until midnight (GMT) tonight only!

Our Games Room is open for submissions until Mon midnight GMT for prose poems <400 words that inc the word 'full' or 'house'

Submit via Submittable: https://fullhouseliterary.submittable.com/submit

#prosepoem #prosepoems #prosepoetry #microfiction #flashfiction #amwriting #openforsubs #poetry #poetrycommunity #writingcommunity #writers #poets

Last #Poem of the day.

This one was written about #JimDodge and how much his #Poetry means to me.

It is a #ProsePoem and I did a second draft two years after writing the original (been working on it for about an hour).

This link leads to my #Blog hosted by #Blogger.

https://m1a1-thesockmonkey.blogspot.com/2022/12/tender-as-sanity-revision.html

when my nose bleeds I try not to move. frozen in space and time on the edge of a dream. silence and blue lights. capillary crime scene. failed Time Lord, I watch a red drop fall to my pillow in slow mo. not the good sheets! then I spring into action, innocence lost. shuffle to the bathroom, commune with toilet paper. I win the war but lose the battle. the good sheets no more.

#NoseBleeds #AmWriting #ProsePoem #microfiction inspired by #sniffles but am averse to the word #MastoPrompt #poetry