Prose Poetry

A somewhat thorny category, prose poetry is a third pole relative to both prose and poetry. Basically, it's poetry in sentences and paragraphs rather than lines and stanzas, unlike free verse, which is poetry without strict structure and rhyme.

Poems

  1. 2025-12-10
    Cities & Age • 1

    The people of the city of Samurna build great sloped houses on the side of their dormant volcano, each floor successively occupied by elder members of the family, the nursery in the attic, the children's room below that, then adolescents, then parents and uncles and aunts and so on, ending with the elders plotting in the vast, interconnected basement, among lost wine-barrels full of secrets and the corpses of burglars.
    For the preservation of dignity and industry, all those who dwell in the city are foresworn from moving between these floors and conduct all familial business by an intricate ritual of calling-pipes and dumbwaiters, with two exceptions: firstly, visitors may move freely, provided they have the permission of their hosts; and secondly, the deathbeds are all by the nurseries. Each child's first duty is to carry the dying on pilgrimage to their rooftop necropoli when they feel their end approaching.
    In this manner, Samurna ensures its continuity, reliant on the charity of strangers and the love and care of those barely born and soon to be dead. In this manner, it has existed for at least a thousand years or a decade, and in this manner, it will continue to exist for at least a day or an aeon.

    Re-read Invisible Cities and had, you know, the urge.

  2. 2025-11-28

    The incumbent clouds hold long in their position—watching, judging.

The wind tries to shuffle them off. The sky runs on a schedule, you lech, you grey-brained city-fathering clod!

Lurid thoughts race through rain as it plunges to our impure Earth.

    I wrote this shortly after waking up, then re-wrote it as a tetractys.

  3. 2025-06-08
    Opening My Wallet for Metaphors

    I'm at the department store, checking out the best lanterns for seeking honest men. I want something rugged, yet personable. Something that says “trying hard”, not “tryhard”. Something that'll steal the attention of atlas moths, and the worlds between their wings.

  4. 2025-04-29
    Durance

    The Authentic Pantheon keep billing me for overtime, even though I'm the one working for them. They insist it's for luxury air. I'm not sure I buy it, but their debt collectors are taller than the treetops and twice as wild—paper durance made flesh—so I really don't have a choice. Still, I doodle an obscene effigy on the back of the return envelope. It's the least I can do. I hope one day I'll be my own god.

  5. 2022-05-16
    With Angels After the Nightmare

    After I awoke I rotated his final words in my mind, trying to catch some glint of optimism in the apocalypse.

You will not be saved. But…

You will not be saved. But…

You will not be saved. But…

    After Stephen Vincent Benét's Nightmare, With Angels.