Poetry

I’ve been writing since childhood, off and on. In high school, a certain teacher introduced me to the work of Charles Simic, and for a while, I practiced imitation. Through that, I think I found my voice.

Monotonic toxic release
Shepard tones, chilling bones
Forever up a stair increase

Junior high

Not very much of my early work is worth sharing, but replay value is representative of the pre-Simic era.

High school

A series of villanelles, originally published in my school’s paper, “The Wolf Howls”:

• A Heart’s Proprietary Design
• black humor
• The Great Heist
• The False Villanelle – this was meant to end the series, but I hadn’t found closure yet.
• unfinished business

I’ve only ever written one haiku.

I occasionally tried sonnet-like constraints, like Kohlberg’s Devil.

And others:

• Hotel Solipcyst – eventually this became a game
• Night Photography
• On Friendship Ending (remixed)
• a ritualistic season(ing) – trying to capture that Louisiana background
• before the wavefunction collapses
• kinematic hedonism
• Tree

College

A few of these were written for a very specific audience:

• Abstractions, love, and other general nonsense
• Overheard by somebody sleeping in the GDC

And some others:

• discrete event simulation. – The more I understood, the more it bothered me
• thought-trains and loco locomotives
• red kites and devils’ advocates

Later

Writing almost feels like a lost muscle now, but sometimes it still has to happen.

Hermetically sealed soup is an attempt at finding second wind in an airlock.

I wrote First contact for Once is never, a parkour zine produced by my good friends. Between when I first drafted it and finally finished it, lots happened in the world, and I realized I had inadvertently written about at least 3 totally separate things.

First sonnet in at least a decade involves public transit.

One week after being summoned, I am forced to confront the homeopathological case.

After almost a decade, I’ve tried reading poetry to a crowd before. Autobiography of a Lambeth flaneur is a more traditional piece, and some choice words for my archway nemesis is a battle rap, though missing a partner.