never

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What a horrible nightmare last night: I dreamt I was writing prosepoems!  

Or rather in the run-on montage drift-shift of dreams I was sort of writing prosepoems and simultaneously viewing them on pages in magazines with my name plastered above them, printed out in the same magazines (I somehow knew) which had rejected my real poems, my verse poems, they were publishing these damn prosepoems purporting my authorship,

and in the dream I was consumed with feelings of ugh this is horrible, I hate prosepoems, why am I writing/publishing these disgusting things, and yet simultaneously I was feeling somewhat gratified and pleased by the sight of my name in these illustrious journals which had always shunned my work,

but the ultimate emotion I felt was bitterness as these never-to-be-written prosepoems appeared there in prestigious print to mock me  . . . 

I've had worse nightmares of course, dreams filled with fear and insecurity, but this one last night remains in my mind today as a particularly distasteful and miserable visitation . . .

/
I've written a few prosepoems in the past, though as I insist in the preface to the tiny chapbook of prosepoems I self-published under the title of "The I Hate to Write Prosepoems Book," every one of the twelve or so prosepoems I did write in my life seems to me to be a failed real poem, meaning a poem I was unable to turn into verse. 
 

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p.s.

There should be an app that lets you take a "prose poem" and instantly lineate it,

break it up into lines,

(syllabic or generic blank verse lines, for example),

so that it could then be read to ascertain whether there is indeed any poetry in it—

otherwise, how can you tell?

*

 

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