Thought Palace

Call the roller of big dice,
The long-haired one, and bid him whip
On kitchen tables consecutive 18’s.
Let the fighters dawdle in such armor
As they are used to wear, and let the mages swap
Delicious spells from last month’s Dragon.
Let a fumble be finale of its caster:
The only emperor is the dungeon master.

Take from the manual of monsters
Painted with three crude beasts, that sheet
On which I enumerated his stats once,
And spread it so as to cover his face.
If his bag remains, rifle his hoard
To see who gets his precious +6 sword.
Light the lamp to run away faster.
The only emperor is the dungeon master.

{ after Wallace Stevens }

I really don’t know how long I’ve been lying on the couch, watching the men on the TV. I don’t remember things so well anymore, since the accident. I don’t remember the accident either, but my friends tell me it was pretty bad. I have healed about as well as I’m going to, and though I don’t get around well, I can still think. In small doses.

The men on the TV gesticulate about some crisis or other; I can’t tell what, because the sound is off. They look angry — at me, at all of us, at themselves. Small text crawls across the screen above and below them. The TV men look very tired, too, as tired as I feel, and perhaps lost and afraid. I feel such sympathy; I would like to turn up the volume and learn more of their situation. Maybe I could ask one of my friends to.

The last paragraph of the poem “Systems” by Kristy Bowen:

“… I try to write a poem I wouldn’t want to sleep with. Would kick to the curb, wrap my thumbs around her slender neck and snap. This one’s still babied, blinking, wondering if it wants to be a skirt or a tire iron. Licking the perimeter of opened envelopes for a tiny bit of sweet. My nouns go awry every time I stop paying attention. Fall pretty like dimes on the sidewalk. My friend Melissa, whose name means bee-like, has a theory about systems. For every change in variable, the outcome shifts toward constant decay.”
—From Brief History Of Girl As Match

I just ran across Invisible Games, a website of short and enigmatic fictions. One of them, The Loneliness Engine, reminds me of my own short-n-enigmatic We [Had Black Boxes]. No spooky synchronicity or anything, but they seem to belong together somehow … which itself fits in with the themes of both stories. Neat.

We love to play the Hero — exploring dungeons, grabbing treasure, saving the world from evil. But I started wondering about the reasons behind some of the actions in such games, and especially about what my Heroic deeds looked like to the ordinary people of the lands I passed through. (As my wife once put it: “Why isn’t there a Hug button?”) The result is this story.
I don’t normally write this sort of antiquated prose, but the genre does require it. It was actually a fun exercise, and I’ve tried to affect more of a James Branch Cabell or Lord Dunsany voice, rather than the tiresome faux-Tolkien of most current heroic fantasy.

2001

Figs cover the ground
The children step over them
Or sometimes they don’t

A hug and a kiss
A heart outlined with fingers
And a wave goodbye

To the very end
of the quivering green branch
clings a black squirrel

So much depends on
a red Mario beanie
left out on the lawn.

Yellow leaves dancing
in the air, two stories up
against green windows.

I cannot get up.
I am excused from all work:
Cat purrs on my lap.

2002

Hunting millipedes;
Earthworms and a defunct grub
Are all our trowel found

A caterpillar
tiny … bright green … wriggling
floats by on a thread

The cardboard stove box
lawn parallelopiped
packed with my children

Squirrels found a ripe fig
All the ones I see are green
What do the squirrels know?

With my big pushes
she swings high on blue chain links.
Above, figs ripen.

A huge durian
hidden on the tile rooftop.
Kick it, Mario!

A surplus mouthpart
transmuted into silver
beneath his pillow

Outside the window,
Past my feet and sleeping cats,
Trees are shivering.

2003

Outside: balcony.
Two hundred forty thousand
miles above: the moon.

green surface stretches
’round a smaller volume now:
four-thirds π r cubed

2004

On November lawns
The rain and shade have planted
A mushroom forest

Prufrock 2K4:
“I have measured out my life
In eggnog lattes.”

My Java haiku / Are funny because they’re true / But rather geeky

(Circa 1998)

I got an Object
I was sure it was a Point
ClassCastException

Garbage collection
The unused objects are gone –
Knew you wouldn’t [...]

I’ve always picked at my nails, bitten them, the cuticles too. A sign of nervousness, I know, and unsightly and unsanitary. Can’t help it, though. The nails, fingertips, are always growing, always in different configurations, and some of those configurations are just wrong, asymmetrical, with sharp bits sticking out. And I can’t leave those alone: I always think in the moment that I can peel off the wrong part and leave the nail smooth and right. But I really know that it almost always makes it worse.

Suggested background music: Frost – Steelwound
[audio:Steelwound.mp3]

I dreamed once, in high school, that my fingernails had turned to bone: spongy like the inside of a broken chicken leg, thick and jagged-edged. I didn’t touch them for a week after that, but the lesson didn’t last. I never learn, a fact that has become only too apparent in college.

I kicked open the door and stumbled into the bathroom; the door shut behind me, bringing relative stillness, and I realized how wasted I was. It always comes on gradually, and I’m at a party and there’s loud music and loud people and everyone’s inhibitions are lowering in synchrony and the drinks are simultaneously cold and burning going [...]

My friend Tanya asked her friends to write her a short bit of Slash fiction as a birthday present. Which is not something I’m accustomed to, but here goes…

>N

The Troll Room
This is a small room with passages to the east and south and a forbidding hole leading west. Bloodstains and deep scratches (perhaps made by an axe) mar the walls.
A nasty-looking troll, brandishing a bloody axe, blocks all passages out of the room.

Your sword has begun to glow very brightly.
The troll swings his axe, but it misses.

>SWING SWORD
Whoosh!
The troll swings, you parry, but the force of his blow knocks your sword away.

>INVENTORY
You are carrying a brass lantern, a key, an elongated brown sack smelling of hot peppers, a bottle, and a heart-shaped box of chocolates.

>GIVE BOX TO TROLL
“For me?!” The troll grunts in disbelief as he eagerly pulls off the lid and eyes the Super-Deluxe Truffle Assortment of the Frobozz Magic Chocolate Company (By Royal Appointment To Lord Flathead). Unable to make up his mind, he stuffs all the chocolates into his maw at once and chews noisily.
The troll has dropped his axe.

>GO EAST
Too late—the magic chocolates have done their work, and the troll’s attentions now return to you, although [...]

Not pink yet, she: bloody red.
Not one to be held back, she, even by the host’s noose,
even by constraints of brute geometry.
Her universe distended, tore and bled for her.Thus the advent of the smallest unstoppable force:
wee Alba hurled through the plate glass into life,
now fixes us with a blue gaze,
her raised arms encompassing it all,
and says “I am an old soul. I’m back now.”

This was appended to one of the rare spams to make it through Mail’s filter. Perhaps the filter knew I would enjoy some strange mechanical poetry?

Whose round soft dog fidgeting.
Whose noisy laptop is on fire.
Our round mp3 player falls.
Whose stupid shining hairy bluish expensive white noisy mp3 player arrives.
Any given odd shaped forg arrives as soon as his slopy pensil is angry at
the place that his brothers stupid magazine stinks.
Their well-crafted book run while whose white tv stinks and a given white
mp3 player walks.
His slopy binocyles stares at the place that a noisy ram lies.
Her fancy baby prepare for fight.
Any given beautiful soft bottle prepare for fight.
Whose golden glasses stares the time that a noisy dog
looks around.
Whose red white bluish baby smells.
His brothers little noisy dog is thinking or maybe a given soft tall
printer adheres.
A noisy book fidgeting.
His brothers silver fancy odd shaped mouse sleeps.
A given bluish balloon stands-still.
A bluish glasses smiles however, mine fancy shining table is thinking.
Mine tall green sofa
stinks while his brothers white exam book is [...]