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Rare Free Prose

I live in the past. I take everything that has happened to me and arrange it. From a distance like that, it doesn’t do any harm, you’d almost let yourself be caught in it. Our whole story is fairly beautiful. I give it a few prods and make it a whole string of perfect moments. Then I close my eyes and try to imagine that I’m still living inside it. – Jean Paul Sartre

First off, Forest Life is still ten percent off on Amazon, for those of you who haven’t purchased it yet. I’ve just wrapped on the Tabula Rasa novella, and I will be working on a new script for the story to deliver it in another medium, but I must remain nebulous regarding that project for now. In the meantime, I can say that I’ve begun work on my next literary novel, which will take me two-thousand miles through Mexico into San Gervaiso. I will break the recent shackles of domestication to research the novel and I’m looking forward to documenting the journey for everyone.

This post is mostly an opportunity for me to share some free prose that I’ve been jotting down in my notebooks. I know it can be rather lengthy between my projects so I’m going to attempt to share more writing on here to fill the void. Enjoy.

The rain fell most of the night. We slept on the floor. In the wake of wailing wind, the dusky dark, I watched you breathing. And when I woke I worried about the little ones, swept away by the junky and the conman, and we held out as long as we could, but they came to the house. It was money that they wanted. In the candlelit dark, the static hummed. We watched I love Lucy reruns on the television with the tinfoil wrapped around the antenna, wrapped in a scarlet blanket. We scooped noodles and broth from a plastic bowl.

You said, “I don’t ever want to leave this house. Let’s stay, just me and you.”

The thunderheads chased us as we drove away.  

Recent Reads

Occasionally I like to share some of the books I’ve enjoyed reading. Here’s a short list. I highly recommend all of these. I particularly enjoyed Pig Earth.

1. Being And Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology by Jean-Paul Sartre

Being and Nothingness is without doubt one of the most significant books of the twentieth century. The central work by one of the world’s most influential thinkers, it altered the course of western philosophy. Its revolutionary approach challenged all previous assumptions about the individual’s relationship with the world. Known as ‘the Bible of existentialism’, its impact on culture and literature was immediate and was felt worldwide, from the absurd drama of Samuel Beckett to the soul-searching cries of the Beat poets.

2. First Love and Other Shorts by Samuel Beckett

‘First Love’, a man’s musings about his youth occasioned by his visit to his father’s grave, was first written by Samuel Beckett in French in 1945, but it wasn’t until 1973 that he completed this the English translation.

3. Pig Earth by John Berger

The author of the famous “Ways of Seeing” and the novel “G” (winner of the 1972 Booker Prize) has now published a collection of short stories, poems and sketches about the life and culture of a French peasant community, its gossip, its memories and its relationship with the land.

National Poetry Month – Tadeusz Różewicz

April is national poetry month so I wanted to post one of my favorite poems from one of my favorite poets. This poem is titled A VISIT and was written by Polish poet Tadeusz Różewicz.

I couldn’t recognize her
when I came in here
just as well it’s possible
to take so long arranging these flowers
in this clumsy vase

‘Don’t look at me like that’
she said
I stroke the cropped hair
with my rough hand
‘they cut my hair’ she says
‘look what they’ve done to me’
now again that sky-blue spring
begins to pulsate beneath the transparent
skin of her neck as always
when she swallows tears

why does she stare like that
I think I must go
I say a little too loudly

and I leave her,
a lump in my throat