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There is so much I don't know about the world, and I will say that ignorance is a bliss for knowledge often hurts.

This prose poem was written last night inspired by brilliant @faimam and her poem Gory Piece of History, a tribute to Saadat Hasan Manto, the greatest short story writer in the Urdu language.

An extract from my poem
"A Fable of a Flower ":

"The tears fell on the grass. The tears that felt so comfortably warm, and as a friend in silence, gave comfort handing the pain to the wind that was drying her tears.

The world she knew was a fable made by the people that loved her.
Every fable has an end, and every end marks the beginning of something else -
The choices we do not get to make, the pain we cannot escape."
. . .
~ Iva

#ProsePoem #poetry #writing #medium #inspiration

https://medium.com/literary-impulse/the-fable-of-a-flower-e89364d66120?sk=41950944c9f4bddb886236b2f0feef08

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. . .

A white light and papered walls,
the smell of sandalwood
and a melody of a waltz.
He stood before me and bowed,
took my hand and smiled.

In his eyes I could almost sense
the hues of the Danube
as we waltzed the night away.

. . .
~ Iva

#poetry #fiction #ProsePoem

https://medium.com/scuzzbucket/a-half-smoked-cigarette-ae07ae9201eb?sk=39b9f9e65709d26047170ed102f16dfd

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Just before the light
spread upon Earth for the first time
she was there - watching, waiting
for it all to begin.
She knew that aeons later songs will be sung, and stories told
of how it all began.
There is nothing special about life,
nothing sacred the way it was done,
but then again flesh was just cells
and what inhabited the body
was still a mystery even to them.
...

~ Iva

#MastoPrompt #FlashFiction #ProsePoem #Poetry #photography
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" She bowed her head to love
but held no regrets.
She was just a whisper in the wind,
a grain of sand in a desert of tears.
Yet she shined so bright
that even the darkness had to flee
for she was the grace of magic,
within the life, she was given to lead."
. . .
~ Iva

The whole poem you can read here:
https://medium.com/literary-impulse/gratitude-in-despair-c4d245b2b5fc?sk=d26d6a78bcd81b2852ae7d1546384ea9

#poetry #ProsePoem #Medium #LiteraryImpulse #photography
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I wrote a haibun on my write.as about the stumpy end of winter.

#winter #haibun #ProsePoem #poem

https://write.as/niallosullivan/haibun

IF GODEL MET WHITMAN

“I’ve always been jealous of mathematicians that are able to see the poetry and music of numbers. Whether by genes, embryology, diet or culture, I’ve not been able to tune into that frequency. I sometimes think that art happens when useless things become useful but the opposite is also true. Things become symbols and symbols become things. The well formed equation that speaks its own negation. Its logic is sound. It contains multitudes.”

#poem #ProsePoem #ClockCard

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An extract from my last poem "I will embrace" ...

"Will my journey be denial and lies I tell myself
in order to keep breathing for one more day? —
Playing with illusions that fit the most,
the mindset that will keep me whole."

#poetry #ProsePoem #writing #illumination #Medium

https://medium.com/illumination/i-will-embrace-5fb6e8eac1f5?sk=5d22515cf77c3aa26c30295df3997b23

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It was in those few seconds each day
just before sun sets down to rest
that she would let her spirit fly
and kiss the hues of a twilight sky.
Endings are not the end
for life is like a Phoenix
rising from its ashes over and over again.
One last kiss to the orange and blue,
one more look at the beautiful twilight hues
before she returns to her shell,
and waits for another ending of the day.
...

~ Iva

#photography #TwilightPhotography #poetry #ProsePoem #writting

A brand new #poem #poetry #ProsePoem #writing
https://josephshooman.blogspot.com/2022/12/criminally-bad.html

HIGHER LEARNING

“Pondering the possibility of giving a lecture to an empty classroom. for the purpose of making a recording, obviously. But still, a moment to ponder the value of knowledge when nobody listens? There is always one who listens, even when we identify as the one who speaks. Where do the words come from and where do they go? Does speaking aloud make the intrinsic extrinsic? Any questons?”

#ClockCard #poem #ProsePoem #education

NOTES ON BRIGHTNESS

“Low sun and old snow. Dirty red fox pads across the icy path, rock salt stinging its tender paws. Perfect zero. Equilibrium of mercury. I inwardly dismiss a philosopher's schtick as Coldplay poetics and hit shuffle. The world hasn't been this bright for a while. Beautiful mornings intrude on bad times. Heating stays off while the kids are in school. I forget who's on strike today. Solidarity, always.”

#ClockCard #poem #ProsePoem #nature #strikes #solidarity #winter

SHRINKING PAINS

“Ageing is a type of adolescence where the end outcome is not a flowering into adulthood but a consignment to the compost heap. Not the promise (or threat) of sprouting hair and swelling appendages but a slow reveal of the scalp and wherever our pecs end up traveling to. No school disco pangs but some awkward, civic indignites. And yet the outward gaze still crackles as is beams from bleary, vein-spackled eyes.”

#poem #ClockCard #ageing #ProsePoem

SHRINKING PAINS

“Ageing is a type of adolescence where the end outcome is not a flowering into adulthood but a consignment to the compost heap. Not the promise (or threat) of sprouting har and swelling appendages but a slow reveal of the scalp and wherever our pecs end up traveling to. No school disco pangs but some awkward, civic indignites. And yet the outward gaze still crackles as is beams from bleary, vein-spackled eyes.”

#poem #ClockCard #ageing #ProsePoem

TAKE ONE

‘Just spent over an hour recording a podcast which went pretty well apart from the
"hit record” part. So it turned out to be a cosy chat and poetry reading for myself. I could consider this a form of therapy, a different kind of shouting into the abyss than the worldwide web. A crow croaks beyond my window and the traffic swishes. The glory of one's own incessant noise.’

#ClockCard #poem #ProsePoem #poetry

UNCOMPLETED WORKS

“I'd love it if everybody was forced to list every unrealised goal and abandoned project. We spend our days surrounded by finished things while our minds rattle with frayed ends and broken chains. But every finished product is haunted by a platoon of fallen prototypes. All the budding branches that never became boughs blossomed and flowered regardless.”

#poem #ClockCard #ProsePoem #failure

MIDLIFE AUBADE

After waking, I sometimes sit upright at the edge of the bed in the dark. My age makes me prone to "this is how things turned out" thoughts. Things didn't turn out bad at all but there's something about a few moments of pre-coffee/light wakefulness that changes "this is how things turned out" to "this is how things are”. It's enough to keep the "'turned out" thoughts from turning in their little prayer-wheel barrels. Coffee's for closers.

#poem #ClockCard #ProsePoem #midlife

BOT DYLAN

A few days after writing that a person cannot be digitally replicated I read that Bob Dylan used a machine to sign 900 limited copies of his book. His mea culpa referenced covid and vertigo. No details were given about the machine. I imagine a series of rods, pulleys and cylinders leading from Dylan's wrist to 900 books on 900 tables. A few wrist flicks and he's done. Nobody shouts "Judas!'

#poem #ClockCard #ProsePoem #BobDylan

“It takes a while for the stories to assert themselves. Sometimes they spin into motion a few seconds after waking and other times it takes a strong coffee or a pre-commute shock to kick it off. Some of us head for jobs that help us to forget the stories for a moment like a few hours sat at an industrial lathe or looking for invisible poems in cascades of numbers. Some even forget all of their stones or truly see them as such. They are truly happy. But fucked.”

#ClockCard #poem #ProsePoem

SUNDAY MORNING

“Rather than place an object of desire into a box, the thrill of ownership dissipating into familiarity, I would make you unbox yourself. For everything that surrounds you to be suddenly apparent. The suburb transfigured by fog or the low winter sun. The wide fraternity of the living and the grudgeless dead. A pinprick spotlight specks the vast rule of time. Sunday morning.”

#ClockCard #poem #ProsePoem #ProsePoetry #unboxing #sunday

HUSK DADDY

“Being a Dad is great. It means that I have permission from the cosmos to be a bitter begrudging husk of a human. To stew in the acrid soup of my dashed aspirations and murmur dry-throated lamentations for my freeze-dried virility before my kids shuffle into the room and love just erupts, blasts my skull and ribs to smithereens before I drop them to school, cool off, become a husk again.”

#ClockCard #poem #ProsePoem #ProsePoetry #fatherhood