1. Carefully designed rhythms.
2. Alliteration.
3. Assonance.
4. Rhyme.
5. Figures of speech
6. Recurrent images.

The prose poem as a distinct genre first appeared in Aloysius Bertrand’s Gaspard of the Night (1836).  This work influenced such as, Baudelaire, who wrote,  “Little Poems in Prose” (1862).

For further enlightenment on the genre read the poems in prose of Oscar Wilde, “The Artist”, and, “The Disciple.” Also read Margaret Atwood’s collection, “The Dark Murder”, and Michael Ondaatje’s “Anil’s Ghost”, and, ”Collected Works of Billy the Kid”.

This one is called, “The Biker”, by Robert S. Hayes

Once upon a time, when I had been many years a biker in Winnipeg, I found myself yearning for the prairies.    Don’t get me wrong.  Although I was well acquainted with Southern Manitoba and Saskatchewan, I felt a strong burning from within to meet the prairies on a different level.  I always had a phantom, in some respects,  accompany me on my different jaunts  around Winnipeg; the apparition would pull at me, not physically, but soulfully, so to speak, to get in touch with this huge land of silence.   Side roads, not main drags, sanctified my thoughts and curved my purpose.

As I watched ideas pass, at a rate the light clipped my retinas, I would became quickly tired riding the prairies.  It was the energy used on my previous life. Soon I was overcome from my present self.  I’d be calmed into stopping along the roadside, stand the bike up and look into the distance.  Summer months I saw wheat fields stretch my mind;  I became a hearer born of prairie wind.  It told me many things as it bent the wheat or rushed the corn.  Winter months were different, I snowmobilled to touch the earth.  But I was able to enter a realm of unconditional acceptance.

Standing in the middle of prairie, is to stand amid ideas.  While standing quite still, on roadside or in the middle of a snow covered field, there carries to me more delights in spirit, more pleasant sensations about the world, than I could ever get from shooting pool, or doing drugs.  Sunrise is the death of me.  It brushed the fields with light and dark with the same brush – a phantasmagoria of beams and shafts; in some, the fields are not defined but still the nourishment begins.  In truth I stood waiting for something, at the time I knew not what.  The side roads were overhung by the intertwining branches, it was so green, and peaceful.

Yet it has come to this, my ego road the bike, was involved in gang fights, bar brawls, and loose living.  From the North End of Winnipeg, to the troubled spots of prairie towns,  my ego ran the lights.  The prairies offered insight and access to a power I have only just begun to know.  The helmet is placed on the seat, my flesh bound earthly senses and the self-serving values are slowly falling away, when I hear the faint rumble of distant bikes.