WE’VE MOVED!!

THE SPONTANEOUS PROSE STORE HAS FOUND A NEW HOME AT

WWW.THESPONTANEOUSPROSESTORE.COM

FEATURING THE LATEST IN SPONTANEOUS PROSE TECHNOLOGY: PROSE BY MAIL!

The Spontaneous Prose Store

One Day | One Image

I was wandering around, the way I do, taking pictures. I was on 6th Street when I heard the sound of…a typewriter. I can’t say for certain that was the first outdoor typewriter I’d heard, but it may have been.

And there, in front of the Driskill Hotel, I saw it: the Spontaneous Prose Store. The proprietor, Kaile H. Glick, was gracious about letting me take pictures while she wrote on a topic of my choice.

She typed on a label, with a piece of blue carbon paper behind so she can keep a record of her work.

Here’s what she wrote for me:

Be sure to stop by her blog. Oh, and look around – maybe you’ll see her in your town.

Austin, Texas
photographeyd 5.11.2013

View original post

The Spontaneous Prose Store

sonia scissorhands

In the changing winds of Toronto on a Saturday night, my friend Edith and I weaved in and out of the crowds of Nuit Blanche. It translates into White Night, an annual event where artists arrive internationally and set up their installations, the city’s veins swell with curiosity, and onlookers and passersby alike gaze and ponder on.

Buskers and independent artists park in-between registered installations and offer up their talents and one such artist caught my eye. Approaching her street setup, appropriately named The Spontaneous Prose Store, was akin to entering your favourite vintage shop — uncertain of what you’d find but knowing you’d leave satisfied.

View original post 192 more words

The Store In Action (Madison, WI)

C/O the Learning Curve’s spontaneous string band uprising

James H. Miller Is Blushing What A Genius

Sometimes Leonard Cohen plays

just because

you have to read these things out loud if

only to yourself

reading for a crowd changes

the timbre of

anyone’s voice

the snow

returned after new year’s day rain

good strong rain

& of all the voices

yours is the one begging

for absolutions

on the holiest day of the year

only its just a Tuesday &

I cant get a hold of you at all

I’m just sputtering

at strangers

in good dim light

while Leonard Cohen

is winning this battle

& rest assured it is one

I (Heart) Bag Ladies

Remember Grace Kelly’s patent leather valise

–     Rear Window! –

it carried everything she needed to survive?

I myself require a knapsack, which

may make me higher maintenance than

Princess Grace. But, being my own man

& never having Jimmy

Stewart offer me a cigarette

–     not once –

I require a backpack.

Being a student, I rolled my own

anyways & bought in bulk

to cut costs. Being a student

I carried a layer of shredded bits

with me always: the remains of library due

date slips, bus transfers, empty folders of

rolling papers & half a sandwich

I remembered to make & take with me

–       but not to eat  –

Remember Marry Poppins

furnishing a whole room from the contents

of her carpet bag? One day

I’d like to reach on to my backpack

& pull out a velvet covered chaise lounge

with Grace Kelly perched,

purse in hand.

We will trade glamorous survival tips as I

pick the detritus of my academic career out of her well coiffed hair.

Built

At the end of a glorious day that I have wasted

on feeling sentimental about myself

when I could have been hearing other peoples better ideas

when I could have been building a cabin in which to live

like my friend Pickle, who has a job that she loves

I sat by the fire while the dogs snored and the rains rained,

trying to build better metaphors.

I walked around in the rain and tried to feel

more at peace with the fact of mosquitoes,

kept hearing a voice that might have been mine

saying  “The Truth demands a tremendous lot

and years of homework besides”

I was feeling sentimental about myself,

and the rain, and the piece of land my friend Megan bought

so young punks like me could have a good cry

in the rain, while trying to make peace with the fact of mosquitoes.

I was musing wildly,

about the great shame of that great joy;

the fact of tears,

the profundity of rain,

that I am always hungry

when everyone else is just tired,

and that I think of glorious days

in terms of all the things that had to die

so I could walk around glad to be crying in the rain

that maybe Evolution is just a lot of small choices

and all the hyperbole that couldn’t possibly be.

I was trying to build better metaphors,

so that other young punks

could have something to feel profound about in the rain

while the mosquitoes buzz viciously

while their more industrious friends build cabins in which to live;

I was trying, demanding of The Truth that we may

not have to feel bad about being bad feminists

for getting hot about The Fountainhead

read while sardined in a subway car,

on the way home from jobs we hate.

At the end of a glorious day that I have wasted

on feeling sentimental about myself,

I am keeping my friend Pickle up, waving the flashlight

lent to both of us by Megan

who owns the land and everything under it

on which the cabin is now built.

I am knocking things over,

trying to build better metaphors.

After a whole glorious day of building a cabin in which to live,

Pickle is just trying to get some sleep.

Sweet Sweet Apricot Jam

I only heard

about the meteor shower after the fact.

He was wearing a black hat on the black couch.

 

This is a newly formed creation

this sound, right here in this room.

He tossed me the black hat. 

 

There is no red like this

in nature I don’t think. Red

like this carpet with its gold

& it’s blue.

 

Must be something about that small

town or how well they’ve

known each other, brothers after all.

 

 

            He stayed to drink and to look

somber. Oh nope, he is off to bed.

It is wall to wall slow songs.

A touch of the blues, barefoot

Canadian boys. Sweet

sweet apricot jam. 

The North Beach Letters

A Wednesday

Dear North Beach

I’ve got to kick you before you swallow me whole. The café loop is becoming some obscure circle of hell and I’m sick of hearing about that time everyone’s stars were aligning. You’ve made me bitter and apathetic. You took all my money too. Granted, I got used to throwing it at you. It’s a damned shame that your seedy underbelly sparkles at midnight because when the sun comes up it can be a horror show.

You make me prophetic, North Beach, and in the same sentence remind me that prophesy is the worst kind of megalomania.

So what now?

I’m still sitting here, thoughtfully stroking my hypothetical beard while you dance naked in front of me on half a centuries worth of nicotine spit and worse. I’d still follow you barefoot from Broadway to Union. All my socks are dirty anyway. The possibilities never seemed so homeless.

Could you forgive me for moving on? Could you let me remember you fondly – speak highly if at all? Or, better yet: just burn yourself to the ground so that I can collect your ashes.

When I look you in the eye I want to forget everything I’ve ever learned about myself. I want to be you when I grow up but I always want to be a little boy and to have fun. I must have got the beginning and the end mixed up some time ago, perhaps to come, because to me you will always taste like the middle.

With due affection,

khg

 A Thursday

Dear North Beach,

I miss you some times like I miss my mother when I have the stomach flu. When there is no one close at hand who will clean my sick and make tea like it is a job they signed up for.

I still visit though you can hardly pick me out of all these wide eyed passers by, what with all the sweaters and the hats. I am ever grateful for your nods of recognition. And my how your seedy underbelly has retained its shine.

Your denizens are dying, North Beach. No one bats an eye. I wonder if you’ll retain your questionable self preservation tactics when the old timers are all gone, if only for my own sake.

So now, North Beach, when I come by to claim my coffee and a story from that one time when everyone’s stars were aligned you hand them over without question like you know I never took you for granted.

Obviously broken, you let me melt into your background noise even if I can never really come back. You are a river and a rock at the silty bottom. A burial ground and a birth place; my favorite metaphor. The sky on your hills has stopped raining miracles, settling instead for literal rain, so picturesque on your windows and sidewalks.

You made me a machine made of words so many door-holding men.

So now when I get home exhausted to cultivate my solitude as you cultivate your crowded bars, when I miss the mass of storied people spilling out onto Columbus in great waves—the smattering of park people, the Trieste men, the hostel folk, the book keepers, the harmonica players, still I am grateful.

With due affection,

khg

At The Stray Cat Cabaret (transcript)

1.

It starts off with a trickle. A door opens .The people don’t yet know they’ve been invited in. With time they begin to appear out of the mist. One by one or sometimes in pairs the curiosity seekers find their way in, come to sit by candlelight.

We start off with an etymology lesson. Resurrection of languages unheard these many hundred years.

Then a man whose only problem is he plays too many instruments too well. Suddenly we are transported out of Galicia circa ages ago to some dingy roadside diner on a highway without a name or number. All us curiosity seekers become sad-eyed lonesome lovers looking for strangers to share our miseries with. We are dashing as fast as we can towards redemption under some long forgotten bridge, coal smoke billowing from endless chimneys behind us.

We slow as we approach the bridge to catch our breath a little. He takes the girl he loved by the hand and offers her a sip of whiskey. Throws a blanket down under the one gold leafed tree planted in that vast expanse of gravel.

We sit until we stop heaving. Stop tossing inwards like burnt stars. We are happy, riotous even. Sitting here tapping our toes. A spiteful kind of hope.

It is amazing how a voice can fill a room, change the air. “Two sad ones in a row” he warns us. We brace, each one, for tumbling melancholy. Benevolently, we are left with one last rollicking good time. We are racing back to that bridge again just to feel the air in our lungs, just to feel our legs stretch — sheer lust of adventure. 

 

2.

Enter the poets. This is, after all, a room for story tellers. A place to share genuine bootlegged mythology normally stored in newspapers to keep it from scratching, keep dust out of the grooves so you can hear the warm crackle of heartbreak months later, decades, good to eat a thousand years. 

Together we recollect dances danced miles away from anywhere, where the flick of some nameless beauty’s wrist rings out in eternity.

It gets dark then. Dream space. Ominous illusions to shit and piss and sex acts you wouldn’t dare euphemize with your mother around. We all have our fevered hash-cloud dreams of Morocco.

 

3

We are brought back to the old town. Nowheresville that could be anywhere. Still dreaming, still hopeful, still determined as gravel to hold the shape our bones make against the endless roll of gravity.

Sad songs, but we’ve come to love the lush progression of melancholy. It is a cold night outside these walls. We remember but are protected. Wishing and wishing on starts and stars and stars and falling leaves. If ever there was a voice for telling stories it’s his that sounds like gravel, all that centrifugal force flying in the face of gravity.

We dream and soar and dream and soar. The song doesn’t care, it soars too. And since were flying why not flip the bird at all those clueless cruelties below. Let’s trail a big red banner that says something clever, something true enough to draw blood and laughter from the crowd we’ve gathered. All it takes is one uplifted face, one hand pointing.

4

Re-enter the poets. They are trailing healthy skeptics and some admittedly sickly looking soldiers twirling guns. These are all true stories. Only the poets remain happily unmoved. Still as stoics but (I’m told by an actuary) ten times as likely to react to pain.

Slowly the uninterested I’ve been fabricating trickle back in again. I want to build an island with this poet, just we two plus pets and loved ones. We will colonize the pacific garbage patch. A free verse anthem will be written anew and sung daily by the ghosts of boy scouts past. The unidentified human animal clutching the catfish in the front row can come too. Together we can abolish benevolent cotton, punch another hole in the earth, tell more true stories by candlelight or otherwise.

 

5

There are two kinds of sky: the word sky and the song sky. One is made of clouds and the other is just an illusion protecting our brains from the explosion-inducing reality of unadulterated eternity. I cannot guess which is which.

 

6

We anticipate the accordion player. When I am surrounded by old folk songs I want to be an astronaut a thousand years in the future hearing these sounds perfectly preserved in time and space.

It is amazing how a voice can fill a room, how faces concentrate in candlelight, in repose, rapt and glowing or mid chat flickering like old film strips of conversation recorded without sound.

 

7

Technical difficulties notwithstanding, before the wires got crossed there was a son and his father. Singing together for the hell of it, for our enjoyment, for the first time in too long. “We are only young for a little while” he says. And technical difficulties notwithstanding, we can always save our days for night time. Drink while we’ve still got out livers. Here we go, and we do, another true story.

Walking around an old city flights and flights from here. Gathering fictions, getting the details just right like the light in this bar, while that crunching gravel voice paints in the angles.

This is an entirely different room. Most of the candles have gone out now. Everyone has come to listen and be moved. These are new songs and now our ears are new, having drunk until their bellies filled then drunk some more. A giant holy wail of a song.

“A little less epic but no less sentimental’ she says.

 

8

Again I am in the presence of something bigger than myself: The Professionals, who are a different kind of big than the crush I had on the girl who opened for them. With that flush still fresh on my cheeks They say “a lot of trendy bohemian poltergeists in here” but I am too keyed up to learn a damn thing.

We press on after a moment of mustache fright. Even without candlelight there are still glowing faces. A whole slew of wide eyed lovers, curiosity seekers. We have all trickled into this room. Our hearts are waltzing through a marble foyer while the party rages behind heavy doors. Our hearts are waltzing while the prohibitionists bang down the heavy doors of the party. We escape unscathed riotously recounting a story of near misses.

 

9

I want to be so much more than this mustache, though it tickles my nose so tenderly. Suddenly I know you are going to hear this, all of you assembled in this room. I want to collect these rooms, use beautiful sounds to make them shimmer, bring them back all wrapped in this mustache and offer them up like a gift. For all who widened their eyes in search of curiosities.

 

10

First the piano strolls around like it owns the place. The troubadour weaves his magic over our illuminated faces. His song shuffle-ball-changes, half moon half crazy. Don’t we all have a little more than a little fight in us some times? “The angrier we get, the funnier we must become” The Troubadour tells us.

The set changes, and the crowd, and the mood too. Two musical children of musical parents conjure flames. They are floating around the chandeliers of this room, and we float too, ready as ever for something completely new.