Tag: Poetry
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I’m looking forward to punching outside my weight again with some more outlaw poetry soon. I’ve been busy on three different novels over the last number of months – and it’s time to get back to my roots.
I picked up this bad boy to remind me to write more brass knuckle poetry and get hardcore again. Looking forward to it.
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Hypertext and #IF were the first games back in the 80’s when computers were just a gleam in the eyes of many. My first gaming experience was in a parser story trying to figure out which way to go typing in terse little commands – go left, open door, pick up whatever – and I found it frustrating trying to figure out syntax and orient myself in this new space.
Cut to 40 years later and I find a scene that has richly evolved using software like #Twine to develop a whole creative narrative stream outside of RPG quests and inventory stacking.
As a writer, as an artist – hell, as a poet, I’m always expanding and exploring and looking for that next high. I’ve always been an addict looking for that personal hit. Cinema did it forever, live-action and animation and my entire professional output and career have been in service to this form. And now writing, third-person novels, first person poems and other flash stories, short-story journeys and even a memoir mashed up with a drug dealing murder mystery/ crime spree that reinvents my history as a farcical fatal fantasy fiction.
Yet – it’s still wanting my work, that is. Or at least still not the ‘droid I was looking for. Cut to #IF – interactive fiction – a ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ platform that doesn’t have to be about actually RPG questing. There are poets, storytellers and writing visionaries creating next level mutable fiction that twists and warps and changes as the reader navigates the interactive links – and it’s glorious. I’m attaching links to a couple recent IF favorites that I played/read/engaged with this weekend and a link to a rabbit hole of content that is a constant source of inspiration and imagination.
IF has come so far in 40 years and I have so much to learn and contribute and play and read and enjoy. And I choose this new path happily. No longer confined to just one meaning or view, I can explore and provide deeper dives into my characters, location, meaning, intent, opinion and even change my own mind halfway through or allow the reader to have the agency to do whatever they want with the story. This can be glorious or frustrating or engaging or stupid or funny or sad or (make a choice) which leads me further on. It’s up to me. Or you?
Turn the page for links to the wonderful Springthing 2020 IF contenders and two separate linked games – ‘Gunbaby’ and ‘Sabbat’ that a) blew my mind b) changed my creative life c) encouraged me to learn even more about this creative wellspring.
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So, I’m falling in love with working with #twine as I publish my poetry prose and alternative fiction exercises. It’s a wild and sensitive and personal world out there in IF – interactive fiction – and the possibilities are endless.
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He wasn’t happy.
His bean cans were 4 cents more
Abandoning them
I should have paid for his food
Instead of letting him leave.
In the grocery store today, I watched an old man frustrated at the prices of his food. Three cans of beans and a box of Saltine crackers. The bill was only $2.49 and he fought with the cashier about the pricing. She checked, he was wrong and I missed the chance to help.
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Old Man running hard
Shirt off, feet slapping the dirt
Breath locamotive
Panting in lockstep rigor
He races to stave off death
Every morning at 7:30 am, a senior jogger runs topless down my street eyes focused on a finish line only he can see.
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At a funeral
Dollar bills in corpse’s hand
For Grandpa’s stripper
“He gets table dances still,”
Said his grandson to me there.
I was at a visitation last week for one of my wife’s colleagues from the flea market. She’d lost her husband to cancer and he was decked out at a local funeral home. Open casket visitations are never my favorite but they were proud of how good he looked. Dressed in a t-shirt (‘I love my grandkids’) and red baseball cap, his coffin draped with the US flag, he held a handful of dollar bills to pay for his lap dances in Heaven.
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Raise high the bridge and the gate
We don’t want to ever be late
Whip the horses much faster
We must serve the Master
And deliver him right to his fate
I love limericks and word play. Here, a familiar is delivering his Master to his fate/fete. As a devotee to ‘What We Do In The Shadows’, (both TV and cinema), I love how they portray the relationships between vampires and their human servants.
Outlaw Poetry 