GATES

August 25th, 2008 by Jamey | Posted in Poetry | 1 Comment »

Sometimes there can be truth
As true as the sound of an anchor
Hitting mud

From the shore only silence
Only the strain of a vessel
And the lapping water

It is true that all hearts grow cold
Whether during life or after
All hearts grow cold

Some speak of time
How as the benefactor it heals
Or that time is the destroyer

But there is no choice nor dissonance
An open window is still closed
To the enormity of the midnight air

How alike to a low-standing fence
Bolted or rusted shut yet exposed
To the absurdity of it all

Untitled

August 10th, 2008 by Jamey | Posted in Poetry | No Comments »

Suffer now the bitter evening
The undead twitter of lively folk
They are small clipped birds
Swallow now the half-chewed meal
Of wakeful dreams
Summoned by the stink of urinals
Or shambled men in piss-stained slacks

How ugly people can be
Slouched in the rain and thinking of death
Salvation for the heartless
Most of us are black in the eyes
The worst, they are gone in the face

Who cares what is wrong with this world
Who cares what the world knows
Augustus Caesar, son of a bloody man
And Rome, Rome is where the hyacinth bloomed

Imagine now Apollinaire gazing out the window
Of a small café in Montparnasse
How does a poet destroy a Sunday afternoon
C’est la vie, c’est la vie
Let me count the ways
That is life, sun up, sun down
Not to bring peace, but a sword

So let us be wise as serpents, as the snake
Or let us not understand our speech but remain confounded

And if there is a sweet-smelling savor in this world, O
Artisans of what is already built
Conglomerations of lilies
Masters of the interior
Absence of visage
Quiet birth

The days will grow longer
But the nights will not yield

Don’t Find The Kitty

July 19th, 2008 by Jamey | Posted in Development, Don't Find The Kitty, First release, Games | 2 Comments »

I was going through a tutorial on PlayBASIC, making fun little programs to practice what I was learning, when one caught my attention.  It was a simple program that printed out a bunch of random ASCII characters in random colors.  From there, it just kept getting bigger and bigger…

So I’m proud to announce and release my first-ever fully coded indie game!

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Production halt

July 15th, 2008 by Jamey | Posted in Development, Games, Nice Outside | 2 Comments »

I’ve been developing Nice Outside with Multimedia Fusion.  As much as I like some features of the interface, I just don’t think it’s going to cut it in the long run, especially when I want to move on with different games.  So I decided to attempt a migration of Nice Outside to an actual programming language for a smaller, cleaner, faster, and, in some cases, much more manageable game.  I can already see Nice Outside becoming unwieldy in size, and I’m not even into the first “boss” yet.

The languages I’m looking at are PlayBasic and C#.  Since my programming experience is fairly minimal, I will probably devote more time to trying PB, but C# remains an intriguing option.  I don’t know much about it or its benefits, but I do know that I would be able to take advantage of a much bigger community.  After preliminary searches for resources, it seems most C# tutorials blow through 2D development in favor of reaching 3D stuff, which I’m not interested in right now, so I don’t know.  Any opinions would be greatly appreciated.

If I have time and feel the necessity, I might wrap up Nice Outside’s first world in MMF just to have it available for whatever reason.  Actually, I’d really like to do that, but my time is always limited due to work, and most of my weeknights will be spent exploring PB (and C#).

Nice Outside

July 7th, 2008 by Jamey | Posted in Development, Games, Nice Outside | No Comments »

All right.  Since I haven’t written any poetry since early spring and I have nothing else to blog about, I’m going to use this space mostly to follow the development of the video game I’m currently working on.  To make a long story short, I was born the same year the Nintendo Entertainment System hit American shores.  My father bought the NES for himself, my brother, and me on release (as well as the SNES when its time came–we were the first on the block to have both systems).  You hear stories of children being raised by wolves.  I was raised by the blue bomber and Samus Aran, among others of course.  Video games, and Nintendo games in particular, shaped me as much as anything else.  But I didn’t want to simply play; I wanted to create.

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Total blog post

July 7th, 2008 by Jamey | Posted in General | No Comments »

Right???

29 films in 29 days

February 1st, 2008 by Jamey | Posted in General | No Comments »

Every four years, Punxsutawney Phil grants us an extra day of February to honor the scientific method pioneered by Vasco da Gama and DaimlerChrysler. To celebrate this gift, the Whiteman brothers create 29 short films, one per day, during our elongated month. It’s a long-standing tradition established about six weeks ago or something by the boys. The shorts can be followed at their website along with their other films (feature length and shorter), and the brothers’ writings, both fiction and poetry, can be perused there as well. I recommend giving that link a little click.

PEARL DISTRICT

February 1st, 2008 by Jamey | Posted in Poetry | 1 Comment »

The nighttime cityscape
That soaks the sun up
Is flushed in cascading light

The stars are gone        the moon is gone

The old industrial warehouses
Are now the ashen pearls
Of women with such small dogs

EVERGREEN

February 1st, 2008 by Jamey | Posted in Poetry | 2 Comments »

Ah, the weeks pass
In the morning I am all doves
This morning

A juniper rattles
Its thrushlike thicket

Speak unto me
That my heart will be unbent

I once was young

Yet thrice daily I am of lesser youth
The sun appears, doth rise, then sets

And homes along the boulevard
Draw on brittle morning air
I spy them as I ride into the city

Their windows are thick
With the heat of dreamers’ dew

SCANSION

January 29th, 2008 by Jamey | Posted in Poetry | No Comments »

Poems of some great stature,
built by those largely before my time
(they are long dead and forgotten)
have created me.

Was it Abraham or the Son?

Expatriate of that ground,
grounded somewhere else,
I search through remnants of words that
have been translated from texts lost or
battered beyond readability.

My fathers: innumerable, unnamable;
My mothers: they were barely known.

Or was it Abel’s injured brother?

The buildings lit for night
seem to me playthings from a distance,
but amid the city—perpetual wet evenings
pelting runny colors into one another—
it becomes difficult to travel the misty streets,
to make out the names of even the most familiar places.