# 83 at Winklings & AP Friends: The Prose Poem

The prose poem has one foot in prose writing; one foot in poetic utterances.

http://www.webdelsol.com/tpp/pg124.htm   The Prose Poem    

DO NOT WRITE FREE VERSE IN THIS CONTEST! THE TWO ARE VERY DIFFERENT. THE PROSE POEM IS WRITTEN AS PROSE BUT THE SENTENCES ARE PERMEATED WITH FUNDAMENTAL, POETIC LANGUAGE. FREE VERSE IS WRITTEN AS VERSE AND NOT PROSE!

P.H. Liotta ~ a prose poem.

THE BLUE WHALE

Back then, no one knew if she were male or female. "She" might glory in the sand while "he" grew fetid and fell away, waiting for dissection. The skeleton would be buried in the dunes, in secret, when it was done. Like the odd doctor in Marlow’s darkness, who measures the crania of those who drift "out there" and "up the Congo," with caliper-like things, "in the interest of science." Oh, I never see them come back, he says.

By the time I get there, cubism has set in. A thousand faces circle the cadaver. The dead remains: a wishbone bent toward nothing, her inverted jawbone jabs at sky. Mist fizzles into rain. The organs splayed out in the drift sizzle like the sound of crackling bacon. Each fleck of water slices at the desiccated blood. Thousands flock to thrill at absence. There’s still enough to feel the loss. A river of baleen. A disembodied fluke.

Two days on, the ebb of human flotsam has washed clean. "He" and "she" are going now - into the gloam. A bulldozer grumbles in the downpour: a single beacon, tachistoscopic, flaming red. And when the three of us arrive, everyone and thing are gone. My daughter turns in wind and keeps on asking, What does she look like? Why did she die? Just face the order out to sea, the pictures of a floating world: the subject sees but never speaks. The way you fear the menace left unsaid - the natural convergence weighing down. You dream alone.

Out there, what difference between what stretches ahead and what is past. The Acropolis and Parthenon streaming into view. The ruined Balkans, hope and slaughter. Breadlines in St. Petersburg. Kurds fleeing from the bombing runs. Head for the Kyrgiz steppe. See for yourself: the free spillage of Tajik blood or the chaos-order of the Taliban. The black sturgeon, up from Caspian depths, flashing through air. Diamond in darkness. Behold the nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

I don’t know about you. But for me, we’re drifting still. I see the wreck of a whale, watch it going, going . . . like seals in the outer harbor, who tumble in brine and do their best ignoring death, like the one tied to the mast with wax in ears who was forced not to listen, what good could come in reading the runes of a ruined life? O lantern without bearer, you, too, are drifting, to spite your course.
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(i) Write a prose poem of a minimum of 150 words on any subject. 

(ii) If no more than five enter, the contest will be abandoned.

(iii) If enthusiasm prevails, good points for quality will be available for Silver, Bronze and HMs.

(iv) We wish you all the best!

(v) This contest, # 83, is open to all Winkling Groups, The Rose Garden, AP Friends.