Myth and Survival
Prose poetry II: When reality wobbles
Since 2022, I’ve been writing one fifty-word poem every day. Each poem departs from a single word. The project was created with a built-in constraint of three hundred characters, imposing a pressure that forced the thought to reach completion before the space closed. Said pressure is syntactic, narrative, associative, visual, and structural. This is the second installment of selected poems from September 2025-26.
September – bare
What a bare world it would be, were we to walk past and not look when life gifts us its garden of curiosities. In the here and now, a circle of secret hows and whys flows in and around our sight. Hear the words on the wind telling you to color time with your instincts.
escutcheon
The illegible escutcheon, caked with salt and rust, belonged to the Dutch East India Company. This is all they knew from the emblem embossed in the metal. A hazy insignia, lost in the fog and trembling sea foam, along with the violence and terror of its story.
quiver
When the quiver was empty, the dagger blunt, his sword arm undone, he mounted an orphaned horse and took the mountain road that led away from the dying. From the heights he surveyed the field where his life was extinguished and continued upwards forever grateful, forever chastened, forever.
October – beautiful
The eye of a child is not blind but myopic to ugliness. We admired a beautiful thing when it made us laugh, said something sweet or strange, or made a pattern of meaning—we saw it as such, we felt it inside. As children, it was everywhere, beauty unnamed, unintentional and free.
November – myth
It was whispering and gasping the recognition formed from the body of this god. What were these secret spiraling threads but skeins, destined to be an enveloping myth that wraps truth in swirling fancy? And the god opened its eyes and stretched the sinews that bound it to those who believe.
December – soliloquy
The hermit makes of the days what the heart speaks in soliloquy. He does not rue solitude. It is a country of many leagues, all his. His peace is as deep as his erudition. His existence is a wilderness where thunderous beasts roam free. You will not pry him from it; its hold is too powerful.
February – pale
There, a pale bauble, a color-drained world gives us pause, struggling to recover a connection we only felt when the balance tipped in favor of the deep red of pomegranates. When the warm gesture and the unstudied remark gave us something to smile about and did not telegraph some strategy.
ache
A hollow space marks where an ache once was. The suffering is over, and you, suffused with a sensation of peace, the healing itself forgotten. Yet a memory of pain secretly converts to a fear of its return, and this too is overlooked for now. It will return someday, rampant and unpitying.
miniscule
She sang the Diminium, and the problem became miniscule, ineffectual. She could have sung the Eradicum, but this was dangerous. The songs were potent, not to be misused—nor were voids allowed to stand. She took a breath, and the Burgeonat filled the continuum with opportunity.
enchanted
Cottony clouds under a straight-razor contrail, the neighbor sings as she hangs laundry. Construction drilling in the distance crosses the birdsong of late winter.
Unexplicably, the moment is enchanted. The ordinary vaults over some invisible threshold and quietly earns its sublimity.
March – bonny
bonny
Oh my bonny boy, my baby dragon, how your breath warms my thoughts. You circle the fortress, impenetrable and closed to your fiery discourse. You scorch the stone and trumpet your latest declaration of love or war. I can never tell which is which. The terrified peasants piss themselves.
revolve
I am an artifact of unfathomable beauty, found in a cave and brought to the surface. By secret design, l revolve around this notion: that from my center I may spiral outward, passing hand to hand and generation to generation. Deathless, I persist, untainted by the calamity of men.
sand
Jewels of many hues glinted in the sand. The waves stretched out to claim them, but they became the eyes of laughing women who sprang up and wrapped themselves in the silken mists of evening. I followed them to a blood wedding, a wreath of flowers given me, for I was to be the groom.
hand
A hand seeks mine. The laughing women dance arm in arm, encircling us. She of the ruby mouth stands unfazed by the injunctions of the village. Come to me, she whispers, and I go. We hear screams and heed not, smell flame, but our eyes are fixed on each other. We belong now to the wind.
April – sink
I will not sink unless my pockets bulge with stones. In the down deep, there is a cave where I like to paint the birds and beasts I give death. I hide day and night from man and the gods until the buoyancy and hunger force me to the surface. I eat when I kill again, the circle unbroken.
water
Salt cakes myriad paths to what water is left. Cracked lips whisper what we can’t hear out loud: this is all there is. We tried to create it from the air, but no child has ever seen a cloud. Precious water we squandered, or ‘they’ I say, because we have always, though powerless, known better.
seafoam
Wind rakes across the sky and kisses the quivering seafoam. I walk the sands and hum the plinkety tune of the box where my secrets hide from the world. I am happy for reasons I share with no one, not even the waves that break and are gone. A plainness marks my footsteps with mystery.
May – undersea
Take me to the undersea. Be our father and mother; be where we can find you, hidden under the ferns with the octopus and the damselfish. Stay until the boats are gone. In my cave I will paint the stars and birth a culture; you will recount the legends, so we do not forget who we once were.
jade
Along the river, Jade sat weaving the many strands of amethyst into a cloth of a thousand night blooms. When it was finished, she would attach the pennies she earned at the Chrysanthemum Fair and drape it across her shoulders to call good fortune. Her fame increased with the seasons.
fishing
When you fish, you are one with the water. You listen for the infinitesimal signs of life vibrating down the line. Your patience may be rewarded, but today the fishing goes hard against you. Your prey’s seen the bait, and it’s swimming away, leaving you with stillness and an empty basket.
July – letter
“Burn the letter, burn it.” These were his last words, his last wish. Yet no, in a locked wooden box inlaid with the silver sigil of his house it lay unseen and untouched for two and twenty years, until I caught the wasting fever. “Don’t burn it,” said l, but they put flame to everything.
depart
To depart, you need the map of your own reckoning. The motive blinds you to objections with its silent clarity, but the world is taken for a turning water wheel, grinding bones to meal. You are no miller of carnage. You go to green reds and blue violets, to sing river chants, to find life.
August – fertile
We knew our mother's fecundity. The dark loam where she birthed us and spiraled nut that burst open, the rushing streams that fed us, and the bastions of granite where she kept us safe until we ourselves became fertile. We have broken the cycle and abused her patience. Now she burns.
chaos
So much chaos can be called that while being something else: inevitability. Granted no pattern, the mind made system sees bewilderment, wild noise without purpose. To the one who straddles the world's contradictions, it offers the refuge of endless intervention, potentiality and power.
descend
Where the others sank, simply fell or even plummeted thirty-two seconds per second, we would not float but descend, with the grace of a winged dreamer, never seen nor touched by mortal beings. This was the promise made when the summit was young and we needed no help to ascend once more.
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Previously:
Next up: Fiction · August 19
