Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts

Sunday, October 8, 2023

Trying not to ruin the apology



There should be something longer here.

But there isn’t.

I should have found the time to write it ...

But I didn’t.

The vagaries of life have struck me down, the minutiæ causing me to drown, hopefully I won’t have a breakdown ...

I’m feeling insufficient.

Perhaps next week will be much better.

Then again, perhaps it won’t.

I typically strive to produce some content.

But then sometimes I don’t.

Not that you should pity me (I’m not asking you for sympathy), I’m just sayin’, that’s all I have for thee: ’cause this is all I wrote.









Sunday, January 1, 2023

Prolly not all it's cracked up to be

Welcome to 2023.  Please keep your hands and arms inside the new year at all times.  Side effects may include drowsiness and upset stomach.  Not recommended for children under 5 years old.  Risk of electrical shock: only qualified personnel should service this year.  Max load capacity 300 pounds.  If ingested, do not induce vomiting.  Read and understand operator’s manual and all safety instructions before using this year.  Authorized personnel only beyond this point.  Avoid direct exposure to year.  In case of damage or leakage, please notify the CDC.  Please mind the gap, and supervise children at all times.  Not intended for highway use.  Thank you, and enjoy the rest of your stay here in 2023.









Sunday, October 30, 2022

Push Poetry (an addendum)

Some time back, in the beforetimes prior to the pandemic, I wrote about my ”push poetry.” You should review that post to see what it is and how it came to be.  As that was over 3 years ago now, you can imagine that I’ve pushed a few more times since then, and generated a bit more “poetry.” I thought I’d just take this opportunity to share a few more bits and bobs I’ve slapped together in the meantime.

Last time, I shared my most prized example, this cento:

once upon a time, when it lived in the woods,
and be was finale of seem,
the push machine past, the push machine future,
and the dreaming moment between.
tenders of paradox, tenders of measure,
tenders of shadows that fall,
black seas of infinity, most merciful thing,
my god, full of stars, all.

(For a full provenance, see the original post.)

Here are some others that I’ve put together in the past few years, and where they come from.


the sky was darkened, and a low rumbling sound was heard in the air.  there was a rushing of many wings, a great chattering and laughing, and the sun came out of the dark sky to show a crowd of monkeys, each with a pair of immense and powerful wings on his shoulders.  then, with a great deal of chattering and noise, the winged monkeys flew to the place where the push machine and its tender bots were working.

some of the monkeys threw pieces of stout rope around the machine and wound many coils about its chassis and control panel and caterpillar treads, until it was unable to roll or rotate or move in any way.

others of the monkeys caught the machine, and with their long fingers pulled all of the wires and hoses out of its logic circuits. they made its valve caps and control dials and gauges into a small bundle and threw it into the top branches of a tall tree.

the remaining monkeys seized the machine and carried it through the air until they were over a country thickly covered with sharp rocks.  here they dropped the poor push machine, which fell a great distance to the rocks, where it lay so battered and dented that it could neither extend its control arms nor generate any steam.

then all the winged monkeys, with much laughing and chattering and noise, flew into the air and were soon out of sight.

Obviously, this one is from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (the book, not the movie).


the figure turns half round, and the light falls upon the face.  it is perfectly white—perfectly bloodless. the eyes look like polished tin; the lips are drawn back, and the principal feature next to those dreadful eyes is the teeth—the fearful looking teeth—projecting like those of some wild animal, hideously, glaringly white, and fang-like. 

with a sudden rush that could not be foreseen—with a strange howling cry that was enough to awaken terror in the breast of every tender bot, the figure seized the exposed tubes and wires of the push machine, and twining them round his bony hands he held it to the riverbank. electronic whine followed the scream of grinding metal in rapid succession. the glassy, horrible eyes of the figure ran over that mettalic form with a hideous satisfaction—horrible profanation. with a plunge he seizes the primary coolant hose in his fang-like teeth—a gush of fluid, and a hideous sucking noise follows. the push machine has fallen still, and the attacker is at his hideous repast!

I loved researching this one.  This is from Varney the Vampire, often considered to be the first modern vampire story (preceding Dracula by nearly fifty years).


life is short
and pleasures few
and holed the ship
and drowned the crew
but o! but o!
how very blue
the sea is.

i dreamt a limitless machine, a machine unbound,
its gears scattered in fantastic abundance,
on every tooth there was a new horizon drawn.
new heavens supposed;
new states, new souls.

i dreamed i spoke in the push’s language,
i dreamed i lived in the push’s skin;
i dreamed i was my own tender bot,
i dreamed i was a tiger’s kin.

here is a list of terrible things:
the jaws of sharks, a vultures wings,
the rabid bite of the bots of war,
the voice of one who went before,
but most of all the push’s gaze,
which counts us out our numbered days.

o push machine,
my little one,
come with me,
your life is done.

forget the future,
forget the past.
life is over:
belch out your last.

a machine lies in wait in me,
a stew of wounds and misery,
but fiercer still in life and limb,
the push that lies in wait for him.

life is short
and labor steep
rusted the bots
and ruined the keep
but o! but o!
how very deep
the river is.

This one comes from gluing together some of Clive Barker’s poetry.  Though Barker is of course known for writing excellent horror stories (and is in fact one of my pentagram of literary idols), he does occasionally dabble in poetry, and he’s not too shoddy at it.  I believe all of these are from the Abarat series, though from different poems, probably in different volumes.


forward, the push machine!
and every tender bot unseen.
not though they all knew
someone had blundered.
theirs not to make reply,
theirs not to reason why,
theirs but to do and die.
into the valley of death
went the push machine unencumbered.

then from the bank it seem’d there came, but faint
as from beyond the limit of the world,
like the last echo born of a great cry,
sounds, as if some fair city were one voice
around a machine returning from its labours.

twilight and evening bell,
and after that the dark.
and may there be no sadness of farewell,
when the push machine embarks.

cannon to right of it,
cannon to left of it,
cannon in front of it
volleyed and thundered;
stormed at with shot and shell,
boldly it rolled, but fell
into the jaws of death,
into the mouth of hell
went the push machine, now encumbered.

thereat once more through the mud clomb the tender bots,
ev’n to the highest they could reach, and saw,
straining their sensors beneath the rolling door,
or thought they saw, the speck that bore the machine
down that long river opening on the deep
somewhere far off, pass on and on, and go
from less to less and vanish into light.
and the sun set, bringing on the night.

These are all Tennyson poems.  The first and fourth stanzas are from “The Charge of the Light Brigade”; the second and fifth (final) stanzas are from “Idylls of the King: The Passing of Arthur”; and the centerpiece is from the classic “Crossing the Bar.”


twas a dark and stormy night
and the torrents fell like rain;
you may get there by candle-light:
the place where the push machine was slain.

no less liquid than their shadows
at night, the ice weasels come.
obsequious as darkness, under the gallows,
they came; consumed; now are gone.

as hollow and empty, in the bleak december,
as the spaces between the stars.
the ghost of each separate dying ember
illuminates the scars.

now the rain (like tears) is perfunctory;
i can assure you, there was exquisite pain—
fear is the mind-killer; blood is compulsory—
on the night the push machine was slain.

And here’s another cento; I really love writing these.

Stanza 1

  • Lines 1 & 2: The classic opening line of the bad novel Paul Clifford, which inspired the awesome Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.
  • Line 3: I’ve reused line 4 from my original cento; it’s a traditional nursery rhyme, though I first became aware of it courtesy of Neil Gaiman’s Stardust.
  • Line 4: Original.

Stanza 2

  • Line 1, line 3 (first half): “Cats,” by A.S.J. Tessimond, contains one of my all time favorite opening couplets, and I often reach for it in cento writing.
  • Line 2: This is from a quote from Matt Groening’s Big Book of Hell.  Fun fact: I wove this exact line into a wedding speech I gave once.
  • Line 3 (second half), line 4: I can’t quite remember where these came from, but at least some of it is original, I’m pretty sure.

Stanza 3

  • Line 1 (first half), line 2: This is a line from The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler.
  • Line 1 (second half), line 3: From “The Raven,” by Edgar Allen Poe.
  • Line 4: Original.
Stanza 4

  • Line 2: A classic line from “The Forbidden,” Clive Barker’s short story that was the basis for Candyman (just slightly rearranged).
  • Line 3 (first half): This is part of the Bene Gesserit litany against fear, from Dune.
  • Line 3 (second half): The penultimate line from my favorite speech of Richard Dreyfuss’ character in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.
  • Line 1, line 4: Original.


That’s all I got for ya this week.  Tune in next time for a more substantial post.









Sunday, January 9, 2022

A Second Cento


Time ... Isn’t

I have lived to see strange days.  Which side are you on?
Have we reached the point where time becomes a loop?
Somebody must have said nobody.  When you’re laughing, nothing matters ...
but inspiration is hard to come by: time is a weird soup.
You see, time is an ocean, not a garden hose,
and when (or even if) it stops, no one really knows.

Now, some say time is a circus, always packing up and moving away,
or that there’s a time to every purpose, and that everything has a season.
But what if there’s no tomorrow? (there wasn’t one today ...)
Because time is a flat circle, the dreaming eyes of a demon.
Some say you can’t step into the same river twice, but those people are imposters:
time is not a river; time is a jungle, filled with monsters.

Time is a storm, liquid and simultaneous; time is a feathered thing, a jewel;
the whole design visible in every facet, yet all moments quickly run away.
Still, an unperceived dimness in thine eyes makes me believe in yesterday,
and that we are all lost—though it can be loved, the truth is cruel.
This is the school in which we learn; its sword will pierce our skins.
This is the fire in which we burn; it doesn’t hurt when it begins.

Perhaps I should say that I accept Time absolutely.
that here or henceforward it is all the same to me and my designs,
or perhaps I should observe, even more astutely,
that I reject linear time and all the other lies of the beforetimes.
Is it merely a period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments?
Or is the future is never truly set: our fate defined by countless choices?

You run to catch up with the sun, but it’s sinking; the time is out of joint.
We are thrown down here at random, between the stars and matter’s profusion.
The day is done, and the darkness falls from the wings of ... look, that’s the point:
Night’s whatever you want it to be.  Time is an illusion.
It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.
Dear beautiful eternal night: no sun outlasts its sunset, but it will rise again.

But time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures.  Time ripens all things.
There is no difference between time and any of the three dimensions of space,
except that our consciousness moves along it, and you can hear the sound of her wings.
Time makes fools of us all.  Our only comfort is that greater shall come after us.
Day and the angel Life circle the worlds of air ...  Yes, life is fleeting,
but also eternal; it will always find a way to begin again.
Our sole purpose to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.


The Story of a Cento

I’m hardly the first person to notice that, since the pandemic hit, time has gotten ... strange.  In fact, so many people were making note of it that it became hard not to think it significant when you come across some piece of culture referencing the weirdness of time, even though many of them predate the pandemic itself.  I’ve no doubt that the fungibility of time during the pandemic was top of mind for Ashley Johnson when she made the brilliant observation that “time is a weird soup” in episode 1 of Exandria Unlimited, but then surely it was a coincidence that shortly afterward I decided to rewatch John Dies at the End (a movie that plays with time quite a bit), or that I finally got around to season 3 of Legion (which features a time travelling mutant), or that our family rewatch of Steven Universe just then hit the episode where Sour Cream (voiced by the brilliant Brian Posehn) makes his own observation on time ... surely just coincidences, but they started to feel like more, and I started to jot them down in a file, along with other observations about time—Worf’s, from STNG; Rust Cohle’s, from True Detectiveand I started to become intrigued at how they seemed to fit together, to form a narrative ...

The last time I did one of these, I talked about what a “cento” actually is.  Go read that again if you need a refresher; basically, centos are the found object art of poetry.  I took the pieces that matched up and put them together; took the pieces that didn’t match to anything and found things to match them to; I even filled in a line here or there to add ryhthm or rhyme.  But I kept it very loose: the meter is very irregular, and the rhyme scheme fluctuates from stanza to stanza.  (In the latter, I am quite inspired by J. Patrick Lewis, a much better poet than I; if you haven’t read The La-Di-Da Hare, I highly recommend it.  While it’s ostensibly a children’s book, the poetry is very sophisticated.)  In many cases, I used slant rhymes instead of perfect ones; sometimes this was necessary (because those were the quotes I had), but sometimes it was just fun.

I also did something quite different this time around (vs my last cento, I mean): I rearranged the quotes.  Not all of them, but I didn’t hesitate to twist things around to make them fit my form and flow.  For instance, the actual line from “The Raven” is:

And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming,

which I rearranged to “the dreaming eyes of a demon” (because that way I could use it to rhyme—sort of—with “season”).  And French historian André Malraux actually wrote:

The great mystery is not that we should have been thrown down here at random between the profusion of matter and that of the stars; it is that from our very prison we should draw, from our own selves, images powerful enough to deny our own nothingness.

which I condensed and rearranged to:

We are thrown down here at random, between the stars and matter’s profusion.

because I needed something to rhyme with “illusion.” In this case, I actually started with the word “profusion” and searched out quotes containing it.  Why?  Hard to say, really ... I knew I needed something to fit that rhyme, and I wanted a word that might be somewhat unexpected (not “conclusion” or “delusion” or “confusion”), and I thought that surely somebody had once said something about “profusion” that would fit this theme, and I found it.  I had no clue who André Malraux even was before I started; but now I do, and that’s a good thing.

My most ambitious rearrangements were in the third stanza, where the first line is actually 5 small pieces pieces of four different quotes, strung together to seem like they are all cut from the same cloth.  The bulk of those four quotes—the meaty bits, if you will—are then shuffled back in: the first half of line two matches the 3rd and 5th parts of line one; the second half of line two matches the 2nd part; the first halves of lines three and four match the 4th and 1st parts, respectively.  Then lines five and six are just two rhyming couplets (practically doggerel) spliced together.

I think my favorite rhymes in the whole piece are in the fourth stanza, where I rhyme Walt Whitman with B. Dave Walters, two sages separated by nearly a century, and yet their words contrast so beautifully.  (Note that this is a favorite phrase of B. Dave’s since the pandemic started; my link below is to but one example.)  I had to tack on a new ending to Whitman’s quote and write a whole additional line for this one, but I’m happy enough with it: I think it works well, in context.

About the only thing I’m not happy with here, other than maybe wishing I could tighten up some of the places where I just threw the meter completely out the window, is that I’m not sure I’ve got the order of the stanzas right.  I think each one is good on its own, and I think there’s a narrative that they form, but I’m not sure I’ve nailed the progression of that narrative.  Then again, given the nature of the subject matter, maybe telling the story slightly out of order is just par for the course.

Anyway, it’s not a first draft, but it may not yet quite be finished, so I once again ask that you be a bit gentle with it.  Still, if you have thoughts or comments, I’d love to hear them.

Credits:

First Stanza: Second Stanza: Third Stanza: Fourth Stanza: Fifth Stanza: Sixth Stanza:









Sunday, May 12, 2019

Push Poetry (a history)

It started with one word.

At my last job, there was this computer process that would go rogue and the team would get an email and someone would have to go manually kill the job.  It was considered good form to reply to the email, letting the other team members know that you’d killed it, and that way none of them had to worry about doing it themselves.  After a while it became a weird competition as to who could kill the job and report back the fastest, so naturally these reply emails were inevitably brief.  Just the single word: “Killed.”

Now, obviously we should have just fixed the damn problem and then no one would have had to do anything manually at all.  But we were not allowed to fix things at that job without having a properly prioritized ticket (which, as you can probably guess, is a big reason I no longer work there), and besides: we were having fun.  It was always a big race to see who could kill it first, and report back.  “Killed.” “Killed.” “Killed.”

Of course, eventually we got bored with just saying “killed” over and over, so some bright soul replied one day with something like “Squashed.” And then someone else went with “Crushed,” and there was “Executed,” and “Exploded,” and so on.  Finally I was interested.  Here was a competition I could really get into.  Here were some of my entries:

Hunted down while shambling along, sloughing off rotten pieces of itself and moaning “Braaaaiinsss!”, and decapitated with a chainsaw.

In the parlor, with a candlestick, by Colonel Mustard.

Shrunk down to bug size by an experiment gone wrong perpetrated by a bespectacled, absent-minded scientist who looks suspiciously like Bob McKenzie, accidentally taken out with the trash and dumped out in the yard, chased by the cat, and finally gruesomely decapitated and eaten by a praying mantis.

Those are just a few I saved.  There were many many others: I remember one where I actually looked up the model number of a sniper rifle so I could write a long paragraph about tracking it down through the woods and putting a bullet through its left eye.  When I wrote this one:

Taken to the vet, told it was too late, loved and petted and comforted while the injection took effect, and ... dammit, I’m going to miss that little guy! <sniff>

a friend of mine told me he actually thought my dog had died for a minute.  Obviously I had to write these ahead of time so that I could manage to be the first to kill-and-reply, so I always had a few in the chamber and ready to fire.  I always thought it was super-fun, and considered it a personal challenge.

So, fast-forward to new (and still current) job, and there was no such weird runaway job to worry about killing, and no chance to write insanely weird missives to my coworkers.  It was a bit of a bummer, but I figured I’d survive.

Not right away, but eventually, I became the person who pushed our code to production, affectionately (I think) called the “pushmaster.” To do this, I utilized a creaky old collection of ancient scripts, command snippets, and glue-and-duct-tape bits, which I began to refer to collectively as “the push machine.” When initiating the push process, it was necessary to let everyone know what was going on by posting in our local tech channel, because there were things you really shouldn’t be doing during our push: probably if the whole process was a bit smoother and/or more idempotent that wouldn’t be an issue, but it ain’t, so it is.  The very first message I can find in the old logs is this one, from November of 2014:

okay, firing up the push machine ...

From there, it gradually got more descriptive, and began to reflect my growing suspicion that our push process needed some serious work that nobody on the team had the time to concentrate on.

push machinery winding down.

the great push machinery is waking back up ...

push machinery shutting down.  sounds of settling mettle and trailing steam.

and the great grey-green grinding gears of the push machine slowly settle into the sludge.

the strain of the mighty push machinery lowers in pitch as the metal grinds back into motion after being held in place by its backstops and giant rubber bands ...

and the push machinery settles down, its plaintive whine gradually decreasing in pitch, until one final burp of steam and electronic squeal puffs into the air.

and, with that, the foul, fetid fog of the push machinery and the choking, charnel chaff charcoal from its charcoal chimneys, located on the banks of the great, grey-green greasy limpopo river, slips sluggishly into slothful slumber once again.

You can see where this is going.  I no longer had the competitive angle, but I was now engaged in an bizarre attempt to one-up myself by getting weirder and more surreal as I went along.  (You may also recognize my theft of some of the imagery from Rudyard Kipling’s “The Elephant’s Child.”)  Here’s a few of my favorites plucked at random from the logs:

the push machine stops its ceaseless, frantic dashing around and slowly starts to melt, greasy black smoke and the horrific stench of burning plastic oozing from its slowly disintegrating form.

the push machinery lets off a final blast of its steam whistle.  it’s quitting time, and all its robotic parasites scurry back to their flap-enclosed maintenance bays.

the push machinery carefully folds its aluminum aprons and puts away its tin pots.  some steam still spouts slowly from a few scattered pressure vents, but the humidity is dissipating, and the whining and grinding of cogs and gears is fading in the soft summer breeze.

the push machine gradually slows its motion and begins poking out its sensors aimlessly in random directions for a while, but is soon reduced to accosting various woodland creatures.  they hurry away, avoiding eye contact.

the push machine sits in its rocking chair, looking longingly out over the water in the fading light.  condensing steam forms on its metal flanks, rolling down the sloping planes underneath its dimming visual sensors.

la machina del empujón cerra sus ojos metálicos y piensa de la pérdida.  la noche está tranquila ahora, pero la soledad tiene un filo plañido que casi se escucha.  agotada, la machina gira y roda despaciamente de regreso a su caverna.

the push machine stutters gradually to a halt, its jittering metal pincers still intermittently drumming on the soft banks of the misty river.  the soft susurrus of a large body sliding surreptitiously into the water is barely noticeable amidst the fading whine of gears and pistons winding down.

the push machinery freezes.  for several microseconds that seem to stretch on for eternity, there is absolute stillness.  then it explodes in a burst of sound and fire, sending out a hail of clattering metal fragments which rain down incessantly, making soft plopping noises as they land in the mud.  as the sonic echoes fade away, a small beeping begins, and each tiny piece of metal begins laboriously converging on the blast epicenter.

the push machine walks along the shore of the limpid river for one quiet moment at the end of its labors.  hearing a sudden sound, it freezes, straining to keep its metal limbs from scraping against its rusted chassis and giving away its location.  then, startled by its own reflection in the water, it suddenly bounds off, clanking and squealing, to seek refuge in its muddy den.

the push machine begins to hum and spark.  soon, bright fizzles of light are shooting from its metallic body accompanied by long, sizzling splashes of sound.  with a long, whistling scream, a jet of smoke shoots straight up into the gathering gloom, and, then, with an ear-shattering bang, the twilight is turned back into day as the green fire of an enormous catherine wheel spirals across the sky over the riverbank.

the push machine color-shifts slightly; were there any eyes here to see it, it would seem to be viewed through a broken prism.  slowly its edges grow fuzzier and its center becomes more translucent.  after some amount of time which seems to stretch forever but is probably very brief, punctuated by whistles and hisses which are simultaneously lowering in both tone and volume, it has vanished completely.

the push machine begins to jerk and stutter.  there is a loud whine, sharply ascending in pitch, then a sound of large metal gears grinding against each other in a disturbing fashion.  as its echoes die away, all that remains is the soft hum of a servomotor rhtymically interuppted by the quiet click of the push machine’s many limbs resetting to start positions.  tick ... tick ... tick ...

the push machine aims its ocular sensors at the disappearing visual indication of the nearest plasma spheroid.  a single drop of cooling fluid rolls down its front-facing planar surface.

the push machine slowly begins to crumple, drawing inward upon itself until nothing remains but an ever shrinking metal ball, which gradually becomes a brief, glinting period before winking out of existence entirely.

the push machine suddenly begins belching thick, purple smoke.  an alarm which has the exact pitch and tone of a whooping gibbon begins to sound.  chartreuse lights blink in morse-like patterns, and the intertwined smells of sandalwood and stinkbug slowly drive all the surrounding fauna back into their hidey-holes.

the noises from the push machine start to fade, as if coming in from a distant radio station as the tuner moves farther and farther away from the source.  its metal body gets smaller and smaller, its colors fading out to a grainy sepia tone, until eventually it can neither be seen nor heard at all.

the push machine ends its wash cycle and goes into the spin cycle.  shortly, scraps of metal are being flung in all directions.

the push machine thumbs its olfactory sensor at the overseer unit, which re-emphasizes its electronic call that, while the push machine does not necessarily have to return to its den, it may not remain in its current position.

the flames bursting forth from the push machine are quickly extinguished by the foaming chemicals sprayed by its attentive minders.  clouds of thick, oily smoke roll away on the evening breeze, accompanied by the smell of burning plastic and the popping sounds of cooling metal.

the push machine slowly sinks into the bubbling tar.  lonely electronic beeps and whistles grow fainter as the lights dim and more and more of the rust-flecked surface is consumed by the grasping pitch.

the push machine begins to liquefy, shedding bits of its metal hull in great, shining globular beads of teardrop contour and plasmic consistency.  after a long period of squelching noises and oily black smoke which drifts away on the breeze, there is nothing left but a large puddle of goop in the muddy riverbank.

the push machine shudders, shimmers, then seems to drift slowly out of focus, its disintegrating image seeming to distort as if reflected in a funhose mirror.  with one final blinding flare of color, it winks out of existence.

the push machine slowly topples over onto its back; the motorized treads on its undercarriage rotate feebly, seeking purchase and finding none.  emitting a series of irritated electronic chitters, the maintenance bots surround it and drag it slowly back to its docking bay.

the push machine’s seams are venting steam at an alarming rate.  the fact that it no longer appears to be leaking oil may just mean that all its oil has now leaked out.  the squeal of its internal belts has almost reached a pitch only audible to canines.  it may be trying to stagger back to its maintenance bay, or perhaps it’s just shaking itself to pieces where it stands.

the push machine begins to pitch, then to yaw, then to roll.  its rotations and revolutions blur into a complex möbius strip while its minders look on, motionless, as if pondering what support mechanism allows this particular range of motion.

the treads of the push machine roll slowly through the mud as the drizzling rain continues to come down, and slowly, ever so slowly, it sinks deeper and deeper into the muck, the treads desperately trying and failing to gain purchase in the viscous mire, until, eventually, the highest points—the tips of the radio receiving antennae—are the only parts of the machine still visible.

the push machine fades to monochrome and rotates 90° in all dimensions, causing it to effectively disappear.  its confused maintenance bots scurry hither and fro aimlessly, beeping forlornly in a fruitless attempt to locate it.

the push machine moves so fast that its rust and faded chrome are only a blur.  at some point the oily smoke of its dirty engines and the stinking cloud produced by the friction of its metal parts rubbing together become indistinguishable, and the glow off its body is reminiscent of a rocket on re-entry.

the push machine settles into the sludge as the sun slowly sinks below the great, grey-green greasy horizon line of the limpid limpopo river.  as the flaming fiery sphere fills the darkening twilit sky, a single drop of oil leaks from the ocular sensor of the quiescent quasicontraption, then all is quiet, and quelled.

the push machine freezes for a fraction of a second, then immediately resumes its frantic movement.  this only lasts for a few more seconds, however; then it halts again, quivering slightly, then bursts into motion for perhaps a full minute, only to stall once again.  small scurrying robotic tenders hover on the outskirts, waiting for the frenzied motion to resume once again, but it never does ...

the push machine slowly grinds to a halt with various ear-grating creaks and groans.  various multicolored fungi begin to grow out of the cracks where its metal plates no longer fit together seamlessly.  rust spreads preternaturally quickly across its pitted surface, and what little paint has not already chipped away steadily fades to a sun-bleached gray.  in mere moments the accumulated aging of a hundred years appears complete on its frame.

the oily steam from the push machine begins to coalesce in the cool night air, its surface tension gradually forming a vesicle which surrounds the shuddering metal body.  slowly, ever so slowly, the heat of the atmosphere inside this utricle achieves sufficient differential to cause the whole to lift, and eventually the push machine floats gracefully away on the billowing breeze.

the push machine keels over dead.

Over the past 5 years or so, I’ve pushed to production, by my count of searching through the logs, 168 times.  I’m pretty sure every one of these was accompanied by some sort of message, although many of them of course were simpler than the ones above.  But, as the years went on, it became harder and harder to come up with clever messages.  I started to paraphrase bits and pieces of popular culture:

the push machinery downshifts to idle, and reflects:
from there to here, from here to there, funny things are everywhere.

the push machine keels over and clatters into a million tiny little pieces.  and each of those pieces bursts into a million tiny pieces.  and, although at that point i stopped counting, i shouldn’t at all be surprised ...

the push machine runs screaming into the murky woods.  the crying tires, the busting glass, the painful scream ...

the push machine rides slowly off into the sunset, slumped forward in its saddle, ignoring the slowly receding cries of “push machine! push machine! come back!”

here, at the end of all things, the push machine is glad just to be done.

the push machine slides the rounded chunk of metal the final foot, reaching the apex of the incline.  suddenly its forceps limbs slip on the mud-slickened surface, and its visual sensors track the downward progress as the large obstacle rolls back to its origin.  after a short, low blast of steam, it begins to caterpillar down the slope to begin again.

as the push machine becomes motionless and start its soft blinking, its maintenance bots slowly gather round it in a circle, stretching out robotic limbs to connect with each other.  is not the spirit of the holiday within their grasp, so long as they have pseudopods to grasp?

That’s Dr. Suess, The Young Ones, “Last Kiss”, Shane, The Lord of the Rings, Sisyphus, and Dr. Suess again, respectively.

I’ve also experimented with drawing from several sources and combining them in unique ways.  Here’s one that combines references from Colossal Cave Adventure and the Zork series:

the push machine is lost in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.  it’s pitch dark.  the shiny brass lamp is turned on, but flickering fitfully.  eventually, the push machine will be eaten by a grue.

This one begins with The Scarlet Letter and somehow ends up in “Shaft”:

the push machine knows not of what you speak.  do not talk lightly of a learned and pious conveyor of code like the push machine!  shut your mouth.  i’m just talkin bout the push machine.

Many of my coworkers refer to these messages as “push poetry,” although one of them has more correctly pegged it as “purple prose.” Still, there can be a certain poetry in it, and, more recently, I’ve decided to try my hand at writing some actual poetry for these push messages.  Now, as I’ve talked about before, I’m not much of a poet, really, but I dabble.  And I tend to like structured poems.  Here’s an attempt at a haiku:

grey drizzle on riverbank,
the push machine waits there forlornly—
a barren tree in winter

Note that I subscribe to the point of view that haiku is not defined by the number of syllables, but rather by its contrasting images, generally using nature imagery, separated by a full stop of some kind.

Then I tried rewriting existing bits of poems to recast them as push messages.  Here’s a bit of “The Hunting of the Snark” by Lewis Carroll:

the push machine engages with snark, every night after dark,
in a dreamy delirious fight;
is served with greens in those shadowy scenes,
and is useful for striking a light.
but after meeting with boojums, by day,
for moments (of this be assured),
it softly and suddenly vanishes away—
and such a notion cannot be endured.

And continuing with the Lewis Carroll theme (he’s one of my favorite authors), here’s a longer piece drawn from several verses of “The Walrus and the Carpenter”:

the push machine and tender bots
were walking close at hand.
it sweated grease and fluids green
upon the slimy sand.
“fear not, machine!” the bots cried, “your
performance has been grand.”

“if seven suns with seven stars
shone for half a year,
do you suppose,” the tenders asked,
“that all this mist would clear?”
with forlorn beeps, the push machine
shed an oily tear.

“oh, push machine,” bemoaned the bots,
“you’ve had a pleasant run.
shall we be heading home again?”
but answer came there none.
and this was scarcely odd, because
the push machine can’t talk.

Tired of Carroll?  How about some E.E. Cummings?

push machine lived on a pretty how bank
(with up so greasy many miles dank)
mist cloudy rainy mud
it clanked its didn’t it dripped its did.

Maintenance bots(both spat and hissed)
cloudy rainy mud and mist
guided gently and back to den
rust slime grit grim

But here’s my absolute favorite, and the reason I wanted to write this post in the first place:

once upon a time, when it lived in the woods,
and be was finale of seem,
the push machine past, the push machine future,
and the dreaming moment between.
tenders of paradox, tenders of measure,
tenders of shadows that fall,
black seas of infinity, most merciful thing,
my god, full of stars, all.

This is another combination of disparate sources, and it’s probably the closest to my previous attempt at a cento, although obviously much smaller.  Here’s where the lines come from:
  • Line 1: Cheating a bit and reusing the same opening as my previous cento; this is from Peter Straub’s Shadowland (although he was merely codifying a much older meme).
  • Line 2: This is paraphrase of a line from Wallace Steven’s “The Emperor of Ice Cream.”
  • Lines 3 and 4: This is a phrase by Clive Barker, describing the dream-sea Quiddity (probably from Everville, but I suppose it might be from The Great and Secret Show).
  • Lines 5 and 6: This is a lift from Blueberry Girl by Neil Gaiman.
  • Line 7: From the opening of The Call of Cthulhu by H.P. Lovecraft.
  • Line 8: This is a fun one.  Pretty much everyone has heard this, and thinks it comes from 2001: A Space Odyssey.  But in fact, it isn’t in the book, and it also isn’t in the movie.  When Arthur C. Clarke did the original screenplay for the movie based on his book, so the story goes, he included this now infamous line (“My God! It’s full of stars!”), but it got cut in later drafts.  But somehow the line survived into popular culture despite never actually appearing in any publicly released medium.

I really loved how this one came out, and I felt it was a bit of a shame to consign it to the fleeting ephemera that is our #tech Slack channel.  So I wanted to move it somewhere more semi-permanent, and I also wanted to share it with you guys.  So now I have.

So there’s a sample of my so-called “work poetry.” Hopefully there will be several more years of push poetry to come, and perhaps I’ll do another post about it once I’ve accumulated some further examples.









Sunday, February 17, 2019

Snailing on the Railing


About 5 years ago now, I took a picture of snail climbing one of the handrails at my then-office.  One does not expect to find such a thing on the way in to work, so I remarked on it, took the picture, and thought to myself: “snailing on the railing ... heheh.”

A few weeks later I took this lame piece of doggerel and turned it into a whole lame poem.  Now, understand: I believe that I’m a pretty good writer.  But that doesn’t make me a good poet ... in point of fact, I’m a mediocre poet, and even then my college poetry professor might call that bragging.  But every once in a great while I’m struck by ... something ... and I write a smaller piece, nearly always something with a definite rhyme scheme but playing fast and loose with the meter.  None of them have ever been any good, really, although I’m quite fond of the very first one of these I wrote, although my poetry professor called it “trite,” or “overblown,” or possibly both of those, or something else equally soul-crushing—my poetry professor was a bit of a dick, really, and made more than one person in the class cry, but he taught me quite a lot about what poetry really ought to be, and what it has to say, and what it needs to convey to people other than its author (i.e. to its audience).  He would often say something along the lines of “if you’re pouring out your emotions on the page, and it makes you feel better, that’s lovely, but that’s a diary, not a poem.”  He told us right at the beginning not to bring that stuff in, but people often don’t listen, so, you know: tears.  But he pushed us, and some of us actually were good poets, and I learned a hell of a lot in that class, and one of the main things I learned is that I am not a particularly good poet.

But I’m okay with that.  I don’t write poetry very often anyway.  I don’t read poetry very often either (probably those two things are connected).  The poems I like are typically not free verse: they have boundaries, even if they push them.  I like “The Walrus and the Carpenter” by Lewis Carroll, and I like “The Raven” by Edgar Allen Poe.  Perhaps most relevantly to the effort below, I like “anyone lived in a pretty how town” by E. E. Cummings.  But perhaps before we start deconstructing my piece, we should take a look at what it looks like when it’s all constructed.  Below is the picture, and the poem.



there’s a snailing on the railing and I cannot help but think it’s a failing of the trailing having once been on the brink what one decides as he resides here—it makes me wonder more what he’s tailing unassailing what he even came here for was he unhappy? home life crappy? thought he’d see the great wide world? was he ailing? and now prevailing with his destiny unfurled? does he regret it find it fetid the universe beyond his sill p’raps he’s wailing even flailing wishes to be back there still then again heightened completely unfrightened maybe all along his goal this peak he’s scaling grit unfailing to match the soaring of his soul I wish to draw it full even if implausible to slake my yearning fancy to add more detailing than only mere surveilling or traipsing off feeling antsy because otherwise (if I may summarize) this image is just too plain and it’s merely a snailing here on the railing and that would seem a shame


This is not much changed from what I originally wrote, those 5 years ago.  I fixed a few clumsy word choices and cleaned up the meter slightly ... which is not to say that many of the word choices are not still clumsy, or that the meter is now untortured.  But it’s better than my initial off-the-cuff effort (just take my word for it).

Looking back on it somewhat critically, it seems to have some things in common with Cummings.  The lack of capitalization is the most obvious—Cummings somewhat famously played fast-and-loose with case (and punctuation), to the point where there’s still a good deal of controversy over whether his name should be rendered as “e e cummings” or not (Wikipedia says not).  There are of course varying opinions on why he did this, but I personally have always felt he wanted to challenge our preconceived notions of grammar; to make us think about why we use this or that convention, and what they really add (or don’t add) to our conversation.  I wish I could claim to be as thought-provoking, but the truth is that I find poetry really difficult to punctuate.  I nearly always know exactly what to do in prose, but the very compactness of poetry is part of why I suck at it so much.  When given a lot of words to play with, I find it easy to write, and easy to revise: the freedom to replace 5 words with 2—or with 10—gives me a lot of options, and I can play with those options and figure out the best choice.  But the nature of poetry (especially poetry with meter and/or rhyme) means that many options are automatically lost, because they just won’t fit, and you need to agonize over every word.  In fact, my poetry professor used to say exactly that: in prose, some words can ride along for free.  In poetry, every word, no matter how seemingly insignificant, has to pull its weight.  And the same goes for punctuation, but it becomes worse: not only does every punctuation mark have to have a definitive purpose, but it messes with the flow.  In prose, punctuation directs the flow.  As a prose writer, I use punctuation to tell the reader when to breathe, when to anticipate, when to pause in thought.  But poetry has line breaks, and that is its own flow.  Punctuation, it seems to me, is often fighting with the line breaks to direct the flow, and it usually loses.  Sometimes, like the work above, I just throw up my hands and toss the majority of it out altogether.  So, while I wish I were being provocative like Cummings, the truth is more like I’m just being lazy.

Well, mostly.  I’m sort of telling you to let yourself be guided by the line breaks: the lack of punctuation and capitalization is just a way to say, hang on to the flow of the individual lines, because there’s nothing else to hang on to.

The message of the piece is pretty obvious, because my poetry is not good enough to be subtle.  It’s just a brief musing on the human desire to assign meaning to things, even when they probably don’t mean much of anything.  But, more than anything, I’m just having some fun with language.  This is way more inventive with rhyme than I’m prone to; rhyming (or perhaps I should say attempting to rhyme) “implausible” with “draw it full” is way more ballsy than I normally am with poetry.  But, hey: you gotta take chances in life in order to find out what works and what doesn’t.  In this case, it probably doesn’t, but I’m glad I made the attempt in any case.

So I’m being a bit self-deprecative, obviously, but I guess I must be a little bit proud of it, or I wouldn’t have resurrected it after 5 years, and subjected it to public scrutiny here on the blog.  Or maybe I just ran out of time and didn’t have anything else to give you this week.  Either way, I hope you’ve enjoyed it.









Sunday, May 27, 2018

Crossing the streams


Some things should never be mixed.  Different sets of refrigerator poetry magnets, for instance.  We have two on our fridge—or, more accurately, the remanants of two, since the majority of both sets have been scattered to the winds.  One is Dr. Seuss themed.  The other is from ThinkGeek.  You probably see where I’m going with this already.

You know, the interesting thing about having little leftover sets of poetry magnets is that having extremely limited word choice makes you come up with constructions and combinations that are ... shall we say, unusual.  Here’s one.

Rain and eggs,
   I would conjure within.
      Like you, am
yellow, and random automagically.


And here’s another:

Would you thank Sam with ham?
Do I conjure, like rain and eggs?
Say! random yellow mouse: blow in with microsoft sand ...


I had to cheat a bit on that last one by combining a stray “s” (which is really there to help make plurals) with a leftover “and” to make the “sand.”  But I’m okay with that.  We’ll call it poetic license.

None of these actually mean anything, of course.  And yet, I feel like a properly motivated English major could easily wring a thesis or two out of ’em.  Note the curious repetition of the phrase “rain and eggs” in both works.  And why is the mouse yellow, do you suppose?  Perhaps the artist was trying to make a statement about cowardice.

Or perhaps the artist was just running low on adjectives.  Hard to say.

Next week, a longer post.









Sunday, November 24, 2013

Everything Old is New Again


I was looking for a poem today.

It was the first poem that I ever wrote, or at least the first I can now remember having written.  It was nearly fully-formed in my head when I woke up one morning, and I remember the experience very clearly.  It was after I dropped out of college and after I moved out of my parents’ house, in that first non-familial dwelling where I lived with countless roommates whose faces were constantly changing.  The quality of light in my bedroom was strained: the sun had no doubt lightened the sky as best it could before actually emerging above the horizon, but there were also curtains to mute the brightness even further.  Everything in my room seemed to have a grainy quality, like a badly filmed movie.  I got up and grabbed one of my college notebooks, which I had not thrown away because there were still blank pages in them, and I wrote it all down.  I believe I had to make up part of it, so the last few verses aren’t nearly as good as the intial ones, which were a gift from my subconscious.  I can still recite the first two stanzas nearly perfectly, after all these years ...

But now I can’t find it.  I know I still have a copy; probably more than one.  I transcribed it several times, in different media.  (No doubt it exists on a few dead hard drives as well.)  At the very least, I should have the copy that I submitted for my poetry class, during my second tour of college, since I saved nearly everything I ever wrote for any of my writing classes: two semesters of fiction, two of non-fiction, one of poetry, and one of advanced writing.  My poetry professor said it reminded him of Poe’s poetry.  I said, thank you.  He said, that wasn’t a compliment.

I never cared much for poetry.  It’s dense, and difficult to parse.  Fiction has a flow to it; once you get properly cranking, you can just write it forever.  Or at least I can.  Poetry is more about agonizing over every word.  It’s spare, and exacting, and needs to communicate one thing while saying another.  If you’ve ever wondered if poetry is as difficult to write as it is to read, the answer is yes.

Oscar Wilde once said, “All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.”  My poetry professor certainly believed that.  His attitude was, if you want to pour all your personal feelings out on paper and call it poetry, that’s fine.  But, as soon as you bring it into my classroom, you give me permission to tell you it’s crap.  He made at least one person in the class cry, that I recall.  I made sure that any emotions I tried to capture in my poetry weren’t my own.  Much safer that way.

While I couldn’t find my first poem, I did find the first poem I submitted for that class.  Rereading it, I suppose it isn’t terrible, though it certainly isn’t great either.  It was based on someone I’d met my first year back in school, and it was an attempt to capture a more complex emotion than just the simple one-word things we typically use in our everyday speech.  I don’t know how successful it was at that, but at least it recaptures that emotion for me, as I reread it.  But then I knew what I was trying to say in the first place, so it may not work as well for you.  But judge for yourself:

I am not in love.
I mean, he’s a sweet guy and all, but
it’s just a fling.
A brief encounter.
A few weeks of passion.
It’s just shallow.
You know?

I met him
where I work.
He comes in a lot.
The stale, smoky air,
the cool green felt,
the constant clack of the balls—
it has an undeniable attraction for some.
Like him.
I remember noticing him.
I liked the easy way he moved,
his long, blonde hair tucked under a hat
or a bandana.
His intense concentration,
his confident style:
he was like an artist at work.
He has good hands.

We never really spoke, he and I,
until that night.
I was drunk and he was drunk
and we were together
and he was intelligent
and witty
and charming.

And I was surprised.
I mean, a lot of guys wear their leather
and their long hair
and play their boyish games,
and they think they’re cool.
But they have no substance.
But he ...
he was different.
He is different.

What?  Yes, I know.
He has a girlfriend.
But she’s far away,
and it doesn’t really matter because
it’s just shallow.
You know?
Am I wrong?
Don’t sit there so quietly,
tell me what you think.
You won’t hurt my feelings.
It’s not like I love him.

The other night I was alone.
It was the first night I’ve spent along since
that first night.
But I didn’t miss him or anything.
I sat around, I did some homework,
different stuff.
And I dreamed ...
I dreamed I was a little girl
and I was standing in a field
and the field was full of beautiful flowers
and the sun was shining—
I remember how warm it felt on my skin—
and birds were singing ...
it was really pretty.
And off in the distance,
way far away,
was a tree.
It was the most perfect tree—
it was a maple,
with perfectly shaped green leaves
and strong, straight branches
that started close to the ground and went up
almost like a ladder.
It looked so cool and inviting,
and I wanted to climb it so badly,
so I started running
and I ran and I ran
and the tall grass whipped my legs
and the wind tugged at my hair
and I was going faster and faster
until everything around me was a blur of sound and motion
but that tree never moved.
It never came any closer.
It was exactly as far away
as it was before.
And when I woke up,
very suddenly,
I felt out of breath
and my legs ached.
Isn’t that odd?

He’ll be over again tonight.
I’ll be glad to see him,
even though I wonder
sometimes.
He’s going away for the summer.
He’s going to saty with his girlfriend.
And by the time he gets back,
I’ll be gone.
Didn’t I tell you?
I’m moving.
To Vermont.
It doesn’t really matter anyway—
it’s just shallow.
I hear him on the stairs now,
so you’ll excuse me.
The time we spend together won’t last long,
so it’s very special.
I treasure each moment.
But, in a way,
I’ll be glad when summer comes.
One can only take so much intimacy.
After all,
I am not in love.


From the condition of the copy I found, I suspect this was a first draft, so it might have gotten better; I can’t recall.  But it still has a certain quality that I like, despite the fact that it was written when I was young and foolish, and (to plagiarize They Might Be Giants) I feel old and foolish now.  It could have almost been a prose piece, but I think the linebreaks actually add something to the flow (or non-flow) of it that makes it more interesting than it would be if it were just written in paragraphs.  But of course I’m biased.

I’ll keep on looking for the original poem that I actually wanted to share with you.  Or maybe the rest of it will come back to me.  In the meantime, I revisited my cento from a few months ago and produced a key for the original references.  I was starting to feel bad about not crediting the original authors.  Plus it’ll save you some Googling, if you really wanted to know the sources.




Sunday, September 29, 2013

A Cento for a Sunday


When I was in college, I took a Shakespeare class where we had to do a group project.  For our group’s project, one of my fellow students suggested that we put on a short skit, talking about the plays, but using the Bard’s own words.  We carefully culled bits and pieces of dialogue from the plays, put it in the mouths of our characters, and, by putting exisitng things into new context, we created new meaning.  I was fascinated by this process and have occasionally found myself doing it for other occasions.  One of my best friends asked me to do a reading at his wedding, of anything I liked, and I cobbled together several different quotes on love and fashioned a complete speech out of it.  It was generally well-received.

I’ve also tried my hand at creating poems like this.  It turns out that poetry created thus actually has a name: it’s a cento.  I’ve done a few over the years (despite the fact that poetry isn’t truly my forté), but none of them were particularly good.  Today, I give you a new cento that I “composed,” which I think is better than my previous efforts, although perhaps still not great.  The lines (or in some cases half-lines) here are mostly quotes from other poems, books, songs, or movies, although some are old things other people have recycled before me.  Most are quotes that appealed to me and ended up in my quote file, but a few I had to hunt down specifically to fit parts of the “narrative.”  All I personally added were a few connecting words here and there, and the first half of the title, which doesn’t necessarily mean anything (contrast with the second half, which is rather deliberately chosen not only to offset the first half euphoniously, but for its meaning in its own source).

I thought of listing all the sources here, but I’ve decided against it, mostly because it’s more fun to let you discover them on your own.  I’m pretty sure that judicious Googling will turn them all up, so I don’t worry that the original authors will fail to be attributed.

Consider this a first draft and be kind to it.  It’s new, and doesn’t much know what it’s saying yet.




Cobblestone Fray, Cottleston Pie

Once upon a time, when we all lived in the woods,
on a dark and stormy night,
all of the animals are capably murderous—
still, you may get there by candle-light.

You got devils living in that head,
watching the whites of your eyes turn red
by the pricking of my thumbs.
Where’er we tread ‘tis haunted holy ground,
like someone trying not to make a sound.
At sunrise, there is the sound of drums ...

It’s all sex and death as far as I can tell,
drinking the blood-red wine.
Fear is the mind-killer; blood is compulsory.
And I’ve made an enemy of time.

No less liquid than their shadows, speaking with the speech of men,
Satan must be our cousin, and does his crossword with a pen.
What noisy cats are we,
with the perils of being in 3-D,
and why the sea is boiling hot?  He’s won a lot of friends ...

There’s no such thing as the real world, but
there’s a hell of a good universe next door.
Little things are infinitely the most important.
Respite and nepenthe: to die, to sleep no more.

We’re all alive for a reason.
People need good lies.
Thou wast not born for death, but
when you stop dreaming, it’s time to die.

I recommend pleasant, but we’re all mad here.
I am the king of the cats!
Dance like nobody’s watching,
cry, ain’t no shame in it,
and that is the end of that.