Promised Poems: Creative Writing

Recruiting

2012-01-03T17:28:00.001-08:00

"At one major investment bank for which I worked, we used psychometric testing to recruit social psychopaths because their characteristics exactly suited them to senior corporate finance roles."

Fighting chance

2011-11-09T14:21:00.001-08:00

Not good.

Diet in a bottle

2011-10-21T02:35:00.000-07:00

Ship optional.

vi

2011-10-12T23:15:00.000-07:00

a bib is a place i save my food
something tasty, something good
a piece of toast for later, some vegetables too
and let's not forget my pud-

ding goes the microwave, wonder what i'll have
pop goes the kettle, sizzle goes the stove
something's cooking for me
where's my bib, i'm hungry

(repeat)

v

2011-10-11T22:43:00.001-07:00

soft toy, spoil me
see if i can squeak
hard toy, chew me
i'll help you with your teeth

iv

2011-10-11T22:27:00.001-07:00

egg custard, you're busted
with blisters on your face
with peanuts, i'll go nuts
and swell up every place

iii

2011-10-11T22:23:00.000-07:00

one egg for you, baby blue
two eggs from mum, currant bun
three eggs for me, surrounded by love
four eggs for an omelette, breakfast enough

ii

2011-10-11T22:20:00.000-07:00

caramel tastes sweetest
chocolate's sweeter still
vanilla's nice
but so is rice
with sugar, cream and milk

i

2011-10-11T22:19:00.001-07:00

it's okay to idolize
have a dream and fantasize
but what's important: use your eyes
to save the earth and seize the skies

Father and son

2011-07-28T16:14:00.001-07:00

30 years apart

Notes from a dream, part one

2011-07-28T13:50:00.001-07:00

The beginning of a story:

A phone conversation.
"Any fool with a disregard for his life and liberty can kill someone. If you care about keeping both, and I do, you must exercise control: control of the time, control of the place, control of the people. The Israeli assassination in Dubai used 18 agents to kill one man: to control the approach to the hotel, to keep the corridor outside the room he was killed in clear, to drug and overpower him, and to get away, and they were still caught on camera, identified entering the country, and warrants issued for their arrest which will dog them the rest of their lives.

"That's why the itinerary of the worlds most powerful people are so important secrets: President of the United States, the most wealthy men and women in the world. The men who defend these people will not let you have control of the situation or the surroundings because they know this is how you kill them. The man you have described... his head of security is with him 24 hours a day, sleeps in the same room if he sleeps at all, is both his chief food taster, as well as his brother. This man will be hard to kill."

The end of the story:

A beautiful tropical beach at night. A Hawaiian band plays, while three men sitting barefoot in the sand eat and drink. One stands up and starts pacing, gesticulating. He briefly places his hand on the head of the second, and the third leaps up and clutches him by the throat. The middle man jumps to the defense of the first, grabbing his brother by the arms and the two men end up rolling in the sand, fighting like they fought as children many years ago.
The older brother ends up on top, snarling: "Forgive him. He is a genius."
Two, silenced gunshots.
The first man: "I am a genius. A genius at killing."
The waiter cleans down and throws the gun into the surf, the band drops their instruments, and pre-recorded music echos out across the bay to the waiting yacht.

Exotic Spheres

2011-06-10T20:40:00.000-07:00

HP Lovecraft was right.

The Heat Death of New York

2011-06-08T20:33:00.000-07:00

The first day, it rained talking frogs.

He was out, walking his ape in Central Park when it happened - the sky grayed over, there was a thunderclap, and the hairs on his arms and his ape stood on ends for a brief moment, and then, frogs fell - in singletons, pairs, sets and then great groups pouring from the sky, each babbling as it fell: mathematical proofs, formal logic, partial differential equations, and as they tumbled and inevitably squelched into the soft loamy earth, medical texts, anatomical charts, sexual innuendoes, and the few fortunate survivors hopping around discussing philosophical issues with particular attention to Latour's Actor-Network-Theory and meditations on death and mortality as their broken backed colleagues lay dying in their thousands.

The second day, as he sipped a cappuccino in a downtown cafe, it was fish-and-chips, falling packets of soggy battered cod and shark and tuna tempura, and heaped handfuls of crinkled cut potatoes and kumara wedges and frittered yams, wrapped in broadsheets, tabloids, periodicals and scandal rags from the last five hundred years, and occasionally the future. Enterprising residents flung out nets, blankets, awnings, dresses, anything they could find to capture this unexpected bounty, since it had been many decades since the anything except jellyfish had been seen in the acidic seas around them.

That evening, as he watched the world markets crashing on the vortexes of time paradox, his ape looked up from cross-stitching and remarked 'It's kinetic pollution. All the solar power we generate gets stored in fly wheels at night, this great band of velocity chasing the sunset, spinning tensors out of control. We should have stayed the course with global warming. The universe has an inordinate fondness for heat death.'

He folded his napkin neatly. 'So it seems. Gelato?'

Radio contrast allergy

2011-05-15T19:50:00.001-07:00

Sadly less interesting than it sounds.

Blink 2

2010-10-16T17:05:00.001-07:00

Self-Activation of the World Nuclear Weapons System

Blink

2010-09-19T23:42:00.001-07:00

In my more excitable moments, I consider the iPhone as the greatest thing to have ever happened to the blind, and it may prove so.

Biosecurity

2010-08-25T19:41:00.000-07:00

"1) The Von Neumann architecture triumphed over Harvard Architecture in the design of computer systems in the late 1940s/early 1950s."

[...] DNA resembles the Harvard architecture. And we've got viruses. Lots and lots of viruses. Retroviruses, even, that write themselves into DNA. But most viruses depend on data and processor to be two different physical entities, and they do just fine.

So, no, the architecture wouldn't have made a difference. We'd just have different problems (side note to SF writers: Von Neumann-architecture genetics might get *interesting*).[...]

Honor code

2010-07-23T15:23:00.000-07:00

Identifying spare equipment

Roleplaying

2010-07-12T15:43:00.000-07:00

Paracosms

Love will conquer all

2010-06-14T20:58:00.000-07:00

Marriage is the solution.

Perfection

2010-05-08T04:50:00.000-07:00

Live forever without bias against others

The Chemical History of the Candle

2010-03-12T19:23:00.000-08:00

Bright.

Zombified insects

2010-03-12T19:16:00.000-08:00

And the Museum of Jurassic technology.

Emily Howell

2010-02-28T18:35:00.000-08:00

“The question,” Cope says, “isn’t whether computers have a soul, but whether humans have a soul.”

Singing for Supper

2010-02-05T16:52:00.000-08:00

"It was entirely predictable once Carl Woese realised horizontal gene transfer was a more significant mechanism for change than Darwinian evolution." he said to the shiny black stranger.
"Take the number of your phalanges. Entirely inappropriate for your genus but with the dominant species on the planet having a profound relationship with the number ten, whole ecosystems have undergone what I term decimalisation."
He struggled against his strong bonds as he spoke, trying to find a weak spot he might tear through.
The stranger moved closer.
"The elevation of intelligence is another consequence, helped by easy movement of prion precursors across neural structures. I've written a number of papers that I'd refer you to, given the opportunity and a less delicately poised situation. Perhaps..."
The stranger whispered, rubbing his chelicerae together.
"I hunger. You stop talking. Stop struggling."
It was his last resort.
"Help me. Help me." the human-headed fly cried out, as the ten-legged spider advanced.