Postmortemism - Chapter 1

Postmortemism: The Narcoleptic’s Guide to Necrophilia in the 21st Century: A Rebuttal of the Buttressed Post

Dedicated to Rip Van Winkle, the one who overslept

I am by day a no-frills choir boy who can smell the scent of a lilac 30 years in the making and 50 more in the grave.  I am by night a triceratops riddled with catheters, scraped and shaven and left face down in the bay.  I am a hypercondensed tab of psyllium seed husks, a Neolithic gentlewoman who has renounced her fortune and his fate.  I am a draconic gameshow host with an appetite for jaywalking swamis, a beacon for the Western Prince.  I am the immaculate exception.

Have you ever read a book with 41 chapters?

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Update

I don’t know why I’ve been neglecting the blog.  Maybe because it’s uninteresting and no one reads it?  Anyhow, I’ve updated my website and taken the redirect away, so antehero won’t automatically point to this blog anymore.

SPARE THE SERPENTS

I know nothing not in the Socratic sense
Only the swell of a windowpane in mid November
The sleepy swallow hibernates

Rusted pipes hum in the twilight of nighttime
Approaching the river’s glassy reflections
Passed down from the ancestors of ancients

Wind chimes sing like church bells in the melancholy morning
Light snow drifts afoot along wisps of willows’ breath

Alive in the sky is a bird missing mate
Awaiting the favors of springtime
Fleeting into bliss     and from bliss into passing flight
Young buds forge testaments against the will of suns’ light

Birth and death from lily to lotus
Becomes the realer divestment
Even the Christ child must die

Youthful servant who slays the serpent
You who would salivate over thimbles full of sour milk
You who have supped with the brazen and the burnt
You who will suffocate each night to lift the dying moon
You who laid claim to Messiahs in rapturous blight

You with your dour wail and whip of thunderous wind
Now miffed to be lost in this obscurity

The wilderness cannot be tamed
Nature will poach the illusion
If one thing must suffer
If one thing must perish
O monarch of knowledge
O slave to venom and wisdom
Let it be you

[I'm currently revising this, as it has a number of problems]

THE FLAT CONSTELLATIONS

The humble are born as loaves of bread
To fatten bellies full of air
To sulk along with bedraggled face
Avenues rife with crust and rind
Their limbs swing to every beat
Oblivion’s metronome clacks away the dirge

They are recycled anew
By the most gregarious tenants of the overworld
The reprobates and mavens and crooked all
Forever ringing in the New Year

A conflagration of daffodils is raking its fingers
Across the hearts of earthly nations
And searing through the countryside
Where the pious cry for secret harvest moons
Who would snake throughout the sky
And croon their purple melodies
For the azure Zen of a world
That is all but drowned in its reflections

Now the sting of one inflated ember is enough
To disquiet even the supplest balm of breeze
Sent skulking through forgotten alleys
Homes for the living dead

The eyes of once-honest people
Retire in their sockets
To some elliptical moon
To some constellation
That beams toward us
Clips of a fabled past

As we lie naked across our bed sheets
A murmur of swollen voices can be heard
An undertone of wholesome pain
Yet the pleasure this provokes
Is enough to temper wicked flame
And for one elusive moment
It feels so good to burn

From birth we have learned to march as pawns
To further ranks and make no sacrifice

Deciduous children brandish spears
And crown each other loudly

Our crudely shaped reveries
At the speed of sound clash
The mind of ministry is botched

And we lift our faces to the sky
Prostrate with our languid prophecies
Our hands now clasped like holy wedges
Cutting right angles to Cassiopeia

GATES

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

From the shore only silence
Only a straining 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 neither 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

LAMENT

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

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…

DFTK title screen

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

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Production halt

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

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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Right???