Writing

Stuff that I have written.

The Sunday Poem: 48

 Posted by (Visited 4961 times)  The Sunday Poem
Sep 162007
 

A number shy of fifty, count short of a century’s half.
An age where half the time remaining is decline.
A span of time not quite tomorrow, a batch of hours
Piled past a rising sun and past a moonlit night.

The gap of time to find a killer before he’s off scot free;
The span of time for ecstasy to filter through a brain.
“A day or two,” the time we cite when something needs
Some getting over, the “she’ll be better in” refrain.

Anticipation’s simplest metric. The continental States.
The year of Paul of Tarsus’ mission, when singing
visions Damascened his eyes. Two even pair of dozens,
a pile of potential chickens, a deck without the kings.

All numbers have their secrets; odd or even, prime or strange.
All figures have their seasons, and all periods have a range.

The Sunday Song Lyric: Number 43

 Posted by (Visited 4297 times)  The Sunday Poem
Sep 022007
 

Today we had an early birthday party for me (the actual date is Friday, but I will be in Austin at the AGDC) and I didn’t get to actually do anything for the Sunday Poem. So I am digging up an old song lyric and posting it.

Number 43

I knew a guy once who wrote a pop song
It was catchy and stupid, about two minutes long
Billboard counted it up to number forty-three
It was as inadequate as mediocre can be

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The Sunday Poem: BASIC

 Posted by (Visited 5476 times)  Game talk, The Sunday Poem
Aug 262007
 

Anyone who has programmed for a long time knows the weird feeling when a new language comes along and up-ends your assumptions. It’s certainly true that you basically learn to program once, and then learn many syntaxes. But it’s also true that programming languages bring along ways of thinking. So here’s a silly poem about that feeling.

BASIC

Who would think the line numbers would go astray?

Instead each order is atomic, each action is its own,
Standing individual like citizens, instead of operations.

And what is this inheritance? This oh oh pee? A gosub’s
Gone from subroutine to type! Variables once global
Now can var, can pointer, enum, local, scope!

Hell, there’s more than just one sort of number! A number is a number,
Dammit.

Well, hex and dec, sure. And binary, I guess.

But quit making simple complicated! Where’s the jump table,
Accumulators, and my register’s gone? Damn kids these days.

Haha. I put a function declaration in a header.

This is kinda neat.

The Sunday Poem: Jungle Book part V

 Posted by (Visited 5025 times)  The Sunday Poem
Aug 122007
 

V. The Water Beside the River

The sun makes its green-filtered way down past leaves.
Clouds scud when the Waingunga is not high enough.

Rocks grind and grumble current in the depths.
The breeze hackles necks and scatters mosquitoes.

The water at the edges is hidden by lilypads and leaves.
Some are dark brown and others a sickly vibrant green.

Insects skate across the water as if it were glass.
Sketchy ripples slide away from their pockmark feet.

Damp velvet water slides cold and oily against skin.
Feet feel the whispery touches of waterlily roots.

A wild plantain stretches out its sharp triangular leaf.
Where it touches the water it sends out ripples like explorers.

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The Sunday Poem: The Pangrammatic Fox

 Posted by (Visited 8717 times)  The Sunday Poem
Aug 052007
 

I’ve got an even harder challenge than what I suggested previously. Construct a poem, or perhaps a haiku, using only pangrams. That’s not the challenge though. The challenge is do that and make sense. I bet you US$1.00 that you cannot do this. It’s impossible for even a Master Poet. ;P

For those who do not know, a pangram is a sentence that contains every letter in the alphabet. (A perfect pangram doesn’t even repeat any). I went with a pangram per line, and in the spirit of self-enumerating pangrams, made the poem about pangrams, and their most famous exponent:

The Pangrammatic Fox

The quick brown fox, they claim, jumped the lazy dogs, over and more, forever
cycling mad her quota’d alphabets, leveling Zipf, an indexed joker wild.

Unlucky vixen, pangram beast, spending q’s and hoarding j’s, the thrifty ditzy wench!
Why futz phonemes fro and to, when flow twixt verbs and jokes, the cogs of status quo,

Delights us so? Books bursting free the japes, glyphs, queries, catalexis, zeugmas woven
From words quotidian, to dazzle, vex, pry, illumine, beckon! Why judge letters equal?

Math must be seizing Reynard’s mind, values coffling waxing jabber, equations poking
Til nothing’s left except a pangrammatic sieve, quibbling z’s and k’s; hortatory, just, and swift.

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