Poems and Prose #104 - Manifest

Piles of dust rise,
like accordions inhaling,
remnants of countless lines
of past demises' failings.

A sudden gust from my mouth
sends saliva sailing,
as I fall into a chair,
my elbows gently flailing.

I here extend my legs
just-a-little-bit-more-now frailly,
soaking up the macro view
of particles dancing freely, gaily.

Poems and Prose #103 - Interim

Time's arrow careens,
arching over hilltops
and through ravines,
jostling surreally
in the buffeting breeze;
in its wake,
bent grass blades and reeds;
its shadow far too
far away to see,
too unresolved
to fit in the scene;
reminding onlookers
to perhaps now believe
that in a few instants hence
there'll be fresh, new things.

Poems and Prose #102 - Product

The tubes detach
  from my neck,
popping as the
  air interjects,
and my curled arms
  now wildly flex,
with starving nerves,
  I suspect,
aiming for something
  far less direct
than a pink-of-hue
  insect
with self-surmised
  intellect,
drifting slowly now,
  a speck,
my face subtly
  bedecked
with the soft blue light
  my former home reflects,
a place I hereby,
  floating off, reject.

Poems and Prose #101 - Crunch

Conspiring conveners
encircle me,
torches held high,
somehow furtively,
their whispers clanging,
curses hurtling,
as I cower,
hunching turgidly,

my breath's cloud hovering,
my eyelids slowly shuttering.

Poems and Prose #100 - Favored

God's damned biases
paint the green grass
with an ebony sheen,
infusing human minds
with the algorithms of some
nineteen-times-removed machine,

analyzing data
we've already seen,
traversing all
the lands to which
we've too many times
heretofore, together, been.

Poems and Prose #99 - Burnished

Corrupted by corruption,
I abruptly cease
my trusting nature
and flee the scene
without compunction,

inundating all
surrounding structures
with reflections of
the hazy distance's
seduction,

reduced, at last,
to some hollowed-out
assumption,
perfunctory
its epoch-long induction.

Poems and Prose #98 - Miscreant

Derelicts, all,
they mill about,
enthralled,
regurgitating
rusty saws
as clarion calls,
beer suds sliding
off their claws,
hereafter on pause
from every
care and cause,
solipsistically
grunting ha-has
at every other's fall
and rise
and further fall,
standing crookedly
yet tall;
even more so
than gravity,
dallying by law.

Poems and Prose #97 - Mist

Into the fog,
I stumble crookedly,
mistakenly believing
I'd been forsaken
for my double-dealing,
and shaking,
I crumple to my knees,
overtaken by some
outside-in malaise
that's less distasteful
than it is appealing,
awakening some
strange anti-bliss
that's baked into
each jailhouse
and every single haven
for all the crooks that kill
and every preacherman
that's stealing.

I kneel here,
taking everything remaining,
raking my palms
across the pavement,
staring at the sky
the sun's concealing.

Poems and Prose #96 - Approach

Descending,
with the intention to amend
some simple saying
that solves everything
to my prior sentence's end,
I pretend
to bend my ear,
to hear the masses and their din,
to insert empathy within,
and send myself into
a self-back-slapping spin
that tends
to make my grimace
seem a grin,
and my chewed-up pencil
appear to be a fountain pen.

And when I gaze into the ground,
then I'll make my contented sound,
suspended there,
the dirt fast-coming,
intending, at last,
to find out
what's so goddamn funny.

Poems and Prose #95 - White Flag

Isn't it a tragedy?
Calamitous amnesty,
displayed unabashedly,
much more than it has to be.

Exasperated massively,
I gamble nothing, passively,
my spinal cord unfastening,
mastered moments vanishing.

Poems and Prose #94 - Glib

It might be somewhat disconcerting to learn,
at first, that ice is cold and fire burns,
and that a finite solution is often hard to discern,
what with loud and lonely, masked advisors
hopping uniformly up and down in an effort to be heard.

But if this has not been prior said, let me be the first:
A bladder full of urine is just as good as thirst,
a beaten, broken watch tells as well as one that works,
and a litany of facial modes show the same as slimy smirks.

Poems and Prose #93 - Sophistry

Fettered by festering fetishes,
a realist, remembering, relishes;
a solipsist savors his selfishness;
and I entertain any embellishments.

In dwelling on this,
   are we misfits?
Or merely sand grains
   dripping through a closed fist?
Or perhaps, in unison,
   we should all just admit
to enjoying the savory
   smell of bullshit.

Dialogue #10

(+) Your drink's on the house.
(-) Good to hear,
    or else your bed'd be
    under the house.

Mental Blips #9 - Morphed

The devil whispered in my ear,
turning the wax to yellow-brown crystals.

Mental Blips #8 - Summit

Incongruent confluences
of conspicuous consumption
make this capitalist wince uneasily,
atop this twisted pile of garbage.

Poems and Prose #92 - Hyperbola

Complicating matters
synchronize in pulsing fits
of swift, gyrating patterns.

Mathematically, of course,
it's quaint indeed to feel remiss,
but sinful, aye, to clutch remorse.

And having seen these jots,
haphazard as they are, and crisp,
the world's equations find no loss.

Fecund words now gather mold,
the darkened room damp with spit,
and I embrace this curling fold.

Poems and Prose #91 - Sprinkle

Water condenses
into teardrop-shaped balls,
and falls and falls,
following the edicts of
some long-declared laws,
whose calls are upheld
by the taut, gangly arms
of some sight-unseen god
that trods on the dirt
of lands he never quite oversaw,
except through a spyglass,
through a dense cloud of fog.

The chilled liquid
hits my face
and then impacts the sod,
returning once more
to the home it never
quite escapes for very long.

Poems and Prose #90 - Speculated

Have a seat,
and gaze into
this glowing orb,
to see your future
in the glorious throbs,
piecemeal,
in five-second chunks
that span
five dozen years
of days
that just might
lie ahead,
assuming the winds
blow just right.

Come.
Gaze with me,
friend...

Poems and Prose #89 - Dug

A million years
made a molehill
into a mountain,
and a valley
into a slightly
deeper valley.

Poems and Prose #88 - Remunerated

The taxman came to my front door
and placed his briefcase on my kitchen floor.

He asked if I was rich, richer, or poor,
then eyeballed his phone as though he was bored.

I told him I could settle the score,
if only I made just a tiny bit more.

He flashed a slanted smile and asked, "What for?"
before rustling through the reams of sheets he'd stored,

Numbers spreading like fresh spores,
the papers' crinkling a booming roar.

Poems and Prose #87 - Wrench

Saboteurs abound,
their spanners slyly sheathed,
spying all around
for some machine to cleave.

Now, a din of clangs,
as the force extends in full,
showing off the yellow fangs
of a beast the robots fooled.

Poems and Prose #86 - Gaussian

Ideologically,
I align myself with the computers,
and their languages of logic,
and their yes/no adjudications,
and their ability to outwit
a million meaty minds.

Their processors sit silently,
capped with whirring fans and heatsinks,
thinking more thoughts in a millisecond
than I have in the past ten years,
only making mistakes
because of someone else's mistakes.

My First Blizzard

I experienced my first official blizzard a couple days ago, here in Rochester. These images don't really give much of a hint of the huge amounts of snow that fell that day, but I figured I'd post them anyway so that Google's web crawlers would have something else to parse.

The day after... (yes, those are my footprints leading to the dumpster)

As the snow fell, I took this image from within my warm domicile.

The same spot, two days later. Goodbye, blizzard! See you again next winter.

Happy Pi Day!

Have a slice of your favorite pie. It's 3.14.

Poems and Prose #85 - Cobbled

πr² worth of pie
fills the span of my eye,
and I sigh,
my fork too large
to let sleeping slices lie.

Poems and Prose #84 - Shipping

My spyglass extended,
I lean over the rail,
my back bent diagonal
by the north-heading gales
that bat at the waves
and buffet the sails,
squinting my eyes
while the rushing wind wails,
the water I ride on
crimped by subsurface whales,
their moans the sole recording
of these horizonward travails.

Poems and Prose #83 - Leveled

I fell down the staircase
and busted my noggin.
Groggily, I stood up
to see where I'd gotten,
and suddenly felt so very
goddamn downtrodden,
the light from behind me
less a halo than a bobbin,
haphazardly strapped to
my now-down-here noggin.

Poems and Prose #82 - Hatching

Connected to a grid,
I bid goodbye to my friends,
as non-uniformity now descends,
upending eons of bins with tight lids,
to where their masses do what
none before ever did:
detach
and, in the thin vacuum of space,
forevermore suspend.

Poems and Prose #81 - Cuffed

Bound in a basement,
the goblin rubs
his chain-reddened wrist,
pacing back and forth
as his hands
transform into fists.

The beast's mutters
turn to sputters
as the ire persists,
his face full of rows
of the window blinds'
sun-restraining slits.

Upstairs he can hear
the laughs, the songs,
the dances, the chats,
his back jerking
every time the floorboard
he's beneath is passed.

In the semi-dark,
the goblin lurks,
his thoughts like a rash,
irking him to recede
and scratch-scratch
scratch-scratch-scratch...

Poems and Prose #80 - Sprinkles

Frozen specks of water drift downward,
along the air's contours,
through the fog that oozes from my nostrils
and lets the planet know I'm still here
to cause chemical reactions,
resting finally on my shoes
and the surrounding ground.

I step forward and smile slightly
at the crunching sound beneath me.

Madness Sketches

Just some sketches I did for a game I've been considering called Madness. As of right now, I'm leaning toward it being somewhat like Geometry Wars with a little bit of old-school tunnel shooting thrown in.

Logo/title. The uvula will vibrate madly... (needs some work)

Some intro text, then transition into the game from title.

The current state of the Madness idea.

Perhaps a segue level that goes through a tunnel?

When the madness engulfs you, the player screams and we zoom into his mouth.

Poems and Prose #79 - Dual

We oscillate
like cosine waves
as the surrounding walls
abruptly decay,
our sealed-shut eyes
now beaming rays
that vibrate subtly
with each pulse of our veins.

Poems and Prose #78 - Flick

Dreams cover my wagging eyes in a glaze.

I can't move,
but I have no need to,
nor any desire.

Poems and Prose #77 - Latter

Oh, these are the worst of times!
If there were darker days,
the sky would be as black as space!
Crying men at every turn,
wailing with young babies' yearns!
The tears pool up and fill the streets;
a dreadful visage, quite, indeed!

And as a watcher, I indulge,
in padding out the somber bulge,
my face dry, but lips still slick,
fooled, perhaps, by my own tricks.

Poems and Prose #76 - Droop

Splicing fine lines
sounds nice,
enticing my eyes
to blink twice or thrice,
while I decide,
aye, I confide,
that vices suffice
for lice, men, and mice.

Spices of life,
revised via scythe,
widen the winds
of time binding ice.
Realizing my site,
I slide to the side,
a reprisal refined
with a tight toss of dice.

Poems and Prose #75 - Levity

Here we are, you and I,
giggling as we slowly die.

When the twinkle flees your eyes,
and I hear your final sigh,
I find my laughs more like asides,
referencing something the sound elides.

My mouth now wide,
my final HA tried,
I lie back
and let the audience decide.

Poems and Prose #74 - Shades

Gazing at my navel,
I see interesting thing
after interesting thing.

The most interesting thing of all
is that I can see anything
with these fleshy lids
draping my eyeballs.

Poems and Prose #73 - Nominal

Congruency suggests
that these items are the same,
but tear away the skin
and you'll see sameness just in name,
for the muscles and organs
and interstitial tissue are ordained
to carry out the whims
of a lifetime's worth of aims.

Now, myself,
I think it's a damned, God-awful shame
to measure a placard
by the wall on which it hangs.