on prose

I never really learnt to write prose. Or at least, practised writing prose. My medium of choice has always been poetry. I think and exist in line breaks. I perceive my world as an assemblage of fragmented moments — a mosaic of places with travel time overlapped, hidden beneath the layers. I never really understood what it means to see. By this, i mean seeing beyond the most minute details that catch my eye: the red glow of a traffic light amidst the night scape, the rainbow shine of oil-spilt roads, the speckle of displaced gravel. Even writing this is just a compilation of fragmented details, shoved together to compose what's supposed to be a picture of what I see. I never really understood imagery; the way I choose to paint with words over a brush, when in the latter I've been technically trained; why I wilfully choose the oddest of sentence structures that make sense in the moment in my head, but I'm completely aware will syntactically disorientate my reader. My dissatisfaction with my inability to end the previous sentence with 'disorientate' to satisfy my penchant for rhyme. The way I write about writing, using meta as a lame excuse for having nothing to write about. The way my sentences are still short, just like I would in a stanza. The way I use repetition to match my ruminating, and use articles like silicone sealant between my fragmented words — a futile attempt to stop them from slipping.