Prose is supposed to be clear and concise, revealing and lovely and somehow graceful—or so I’ve heard. Prose is not poetry, or song, or loose in structure. Right? You can’t mess around with structure in prose. I think. The rule is sentences, I assume, sentences with words and those whatchamacallits—yes, punctuation, plenty of proper punctuation and grammar to go around. So, what exactly is prose? Is it an essay? A paragraph? A sign on the side of the road? Perhaps a sentence, or questions like this one? What about a novel or a newspaper? And is that all there is to literature? You have your poetry, and that seems easy enough to identify, with stanzas and weird form and it doesn’t fill up the whole page because it’s written in lines. And everything else is prose? That’s it? Seems like a sad way of categorizing to me, like prose is a leftovers dish. But isn’t prose more common than poetry? I don’t read poetry that much, but I read other stuff all the time. And the “other stuff ”, we just called that prose, right? Prose sounds a little prissy if you ask me. Hard-hitting journalism and news pieces, important literary and academic essays, those god-awful dissertations or overly flamboyant theses and books that grad students write and that I fear I may one day have to face—we call that stuff prose? Really? The word is far too flowery, too delicate and sweet and like I’m-sitting-in-a-garden-readingand-everything-is-just-whimsical. No, no I don’t like this idea of prose at all. But I must confess that although I’m sure someone’s explained it all to me before, I don’t actually know what it is,
Notes
or what the word means, or where it comes
on
Prose
from. So I suppose my views really aren’t valid. I guess I should just Google it
the 5-7-5 Solid rock, bloodless Yet wide, welcoming, alive The strength that I seek  Do a little   dance Eat some buttermilk pancakes And take a long nap Oops, forgive me please I find myself insulting An ancient art form Oh but I promise I was sincere, even if Just for one stanza