All posts in Creations

Photos v.2

by Drey on June 23, 2005 in Writing with 1 Comment

Here’s a poem I recently reworked and tightened up a bit.

Photos
v.2

I spent five years filling up a photo album with a house, a car, a dog, a set of tools, a nice dining room set, and you.
And you in your wedding dress
And you smiling by the SOLD sign
And you raking the leaves
And you looking at me like I was forever.
I was an amateur photographer, to be sure
Shooting from the hip
Sending up a prayer that when the camera winked
Something would develop:
Be they happy accidents
The smeared blur of a smile
You on a camel, framed by a pyramid
The montage of a child’s face, my eyes, your nose
Or the sepia toned hope of you and me wrinkling in a sunset forty years away
But now I wonder
Did someone else borrow my camera for the last five years?
In the economy of betrayal
One word is worth a thousand pictures
“I do” bought two thousand moments
“Divorce” took half of them back
It’s an expensive word
It cost a house, a car, a dog, a set of tools, a nice dining room set, and you.
And you packing up your wedding dress
And you putting up a FOR SALE sign
And you leaving the rake
And you looking at me like I never meant anything
And it cost you me.
All those photos, just gone
As though I had spent the last five years taking pictures of the sun.

Hexile

by Drey on June 20, 2005 in Board Games, Creations with No comments

Inexplicably, while facing a mental block with my game House of Whack, I had an idea for a new board game. Two days later I finished the prototype. It is called Hexile. It is a hexagon-based strategy game involving aspects of chess and, well, other stuff. It is still too early to describe the game easily or to make comparisons.

Basically, two players face off across a tiled board made of hexagons. Each has a tower from which they fire caroms. These caroms have to move across the board, avoiding black holes, ricocheting off repulsor fields, avoiding blockers, using teleporters, in order to hit the opponent’s tower. Players uncover various types of terrain hexes and the obstacles mentioned and try to place them strategically on the board. Certain hexes will allow players to upgrade their towers with catapults and tractor beams, and their caroms with force fields and blasters. All of this requires power, so the players need to discover power generators and claim them in order to have power to accomplish their goals each turn.

I don’t imagine a long development time for Hexile. Maybe adding some more hexes and balancing the number of hexes in the deck. Tweak the rules and then it is done.

Frayed Day 1

by Drey on June 12, 2005 in Writing with No comments

Frayed Day 1 – Wednesday Never Put Up Much of a Fight

“In school, there were a lot of smarter kids. And when I first joined the force, they had some very clever people there. And I could tell right away that it wouldn’t be easy to make detective as long as they were around. But I figured, if I worked harder than they did, put in more time, read the books, kept my eyes open, maybe I could make it happen.”
– Columbo, The Bye-Bye Sky-High I.Q. Murder Case

As usual, it’s your bladder that wakes you up, pressing down on you like a water balloon. You swing your legs out of the fold out, scratching yourself. 1:12PM on the clock. Just some numbers that don’t mean anything anymore. You stagger past a stack of pizza boxes near the door [There aren’t enough to make a trip to the trash chute worthwhile. Better wait.] and into your tiny white bathroom. You unleash a torrent of piss into the bowl, standing there, watching some kind of beetle crawl around the cracked tile in front of you. [Oh wait, it’s a cockroach.]

You start to remember a dream you must have had before your bladder reached critical mass. It took place in a diner, a fifties style joint, the real deal by the look of it. Everything was in staticky black and white, not quite in tune, but the neon sizzled lurid pink bands of light through the scene. You were there to investigate a robbery. Someone had stolen something [No, not a *thing* per se, it was… no it’s gone.] and you were there to question the patrons. They gathered around a chrome-wrapped table: Marilyn Monroe, Benny from the academy, and some guy in a top hat and suit, looking like he stepped out of Great Expectations (the one with Michael York, not the remake with Ethan Hawke). You asked them questions, but you don’t remember what they were. Sometimes you were sitting and then suddenly you’d be leaning against the bar. Marilyn Monroe (only she denied she was Marilyn, insisting her name was actually Trudy) said “Who’s to stop anyone from taking it in the first place? Not like anyone’s paying much attention.” Benny just sat there playing with a pile of fries. The guy in the top hat just watched you go through your detective routine, a placid smile on his face. You remember realizing you were getting a hard-on and didn’t want Marilyn/Trudy to see and that’s when you woke up.

Back in the living room/bedroom/office/storage area, you flip on the TV and it starts beaming out the good word from its pulpit of plastic crates. You adjust the shades to block out the autumn-tinted daylight washing out the screen. There’s a commercial for some new kind of mop. You hear someone banging on a door in the hallway outside your apartment. [You hope they stop soon.] A commercial for McDonald’s. [The McRib is back. Might be worth a trip down there.] Finally, a show. It’s Legacy, the soap about a whole community of pseudo-Renaissance courtiers who send their personalities forward in time where they are re-enfleshed in the tight young bodies of Los Angeles’ social elite. The writers borrow heavily from Shakespearean themes, judging by the similarities to the movies you’ve seen. [Thank God for NetFlix.]

The banging in the hallway continues and now someone is yelling. [For fuck’s sake!] Ophelia just discovered that Mercutio had already asked Portia to attend the gallery opening with him, not realizing that Antonio was going to use the event to publicly embarrass Mercutio with new information about the Denmark incident. [You wonder if you have any email.] You like Mercutio because he hired a private detective in this one episode, and, well, it was cool. [You wonder if the actress who plays Ophelia is from Europe or if she is just faking an unplaceable foreign accent.]

On the screen Antonio is delivering a soliloquy as he paces alongside the billiard table in his immaculately decorated home. He holds the cue ball aloft, addressing it as though it were the head of Mercutio.

Out in the hall another voice has joined the fray. You recognize it as that of one of your next door neighbors. Brandon or something. He’s in a rock band. Sometimes they must practice in there and they are loud as fuck. You see Brandon and his roommate [John? Jim?] in the hall sometimes when you get your mail. It sounds like Brandon is trying to reassure whoever is yelling, but it doesn’t take and they keep going at it. You can even catch bits of what they are yelling: “He’s got to be in there! open the door? [If they are waiting on the landlord to get off his ass and actually do something useful in this dump they’d better pitch a tent.]

After the commercial Legacy resumes with a scene involving the two young lovers, Don Pedro and Miranda. [These two make you sick, all that fawning and going to the mall.] Don Pedro has decided to reinvent himself as a reckless bad boy by purchasing a motorcycle and cruising around town at high speed. Miranda doesn’t seem very pleased with this development.

Interview

by Drey on June 12, 2005 in Writing with No comments

This morning I was interviewed by Simon Toon of the Slam Idol podcast. I think the last time I was interviewed was for my high school yearbook. I found it quite enjoyable talking to someone in England via Skype. He’ll edit out all the boring bits and publish the interview as a podcast (so I hope!). Hope it turns out well.

Slam Idol

by Drey on June 7, 2005 in Writing with No comments

I can be heard performing my poem “My Girlfriend is so Fat” on the Slam Idol podcast.

It’s like a poetry slam that happens online. You listen to each performer and then vote for the one you like the best.

Truth / Core

by Drey on April 24, 2005 in Artwork with No comments

Sometimes, despite my best intentions, I’ll start work on an image for a client and, rather than creating a useful graphic, art appears on the screen instead.

First Time Flowing

by Drey on April 24, 2005 in Avatar, Writing with No comments

The airplane is the epitome of safety, order and restraint.
Everything designed to induce calm and minimize contact.
Other passengers apologize for touching me, ashamed of the slightest nudge that briefly bridges a gap.
But I want to be jostled; I want their fingerprints on me.
I look out the window and all the clouds are fucking.
Couples glomming together,
Threesomes tumbling through the atmosphere,
Some of them on dragons.
And I want out of the capsule.
I want to go where it is wet and uncertain.
Inside the window, we are rows of silent worlds, arranged like eggs.
We acknowledge each other like the blurred faces in the periphery of dreams.
We are in transition.
We are being taken.
No one mentions our mutual fate, as though words would cause the worlds to crack and burst, blending together like the clouds outside.
We have nothing to hold but our breath.

I am gripped by a spiritual shuddering, caught inside my own wake.
If I would resist less, make my soul an aetheric arrow, flow upstream,
I would find Me.
A Me surfing the crest of Time.
A Me moving so fast it strips the paint off stars.
A Me that is already There because it itself is the destination.
A Me with liquid, hungry boundaries.
I would embrace that Me, pull its lips to my ear and finally hear what I’ve been trying to say all this time.
But right now I am a pail of water in a steel box:
Passenger 10C on a carefully prescribed arc,
Moving faster than I ever have while sitting completely still.
Three buttons give me the power to summon
A tiny sun, a tiny wind, or a tiny repose.
To see, to feel and to dream with the seatbelt securely fastened, small and safe.

Hidden somewhere ahead of me is a
Flickering matrix of dials, maintaining my fate.
They taught me that complex machines were required to yoke destiny.
Without buttons and dials the plane could land in Xanadu, missiles could land on the Civil War, and I could become anyone.
The gauges were necessary to measure progress.
So I bought into the buttons and the dials.
And I bought them with my blood.
An umbilical snapped, memory faded and I unlearned that ultimate potential, life in all directions, chaos, is easy.
Anywhere and Anywhen slide loose behind a thin amniotic membrane where my body used to breathe water and my soul used to breathe…used to breathe…
Where my soul just used to Breathe.

Outside the window, the clouds form the angular logos of their new corporate sponsors.
The people flying the plane weren’t just taking us,
They were taking everything.
Frantically, I reach out and press a fourth button I hadn’t noticed before and I summon a tiny point of contact.
A woman arrives and asks “Can I help you?”
I say “You can do more than that: You can get your hands dirty with me. Get me under your fingernails. You can stop lying and expecting me to lie back. You can drink my tongue and every other part of me and I will do the same for you. We can walk naked and give everything we see a new name. And don’t apologize if you end up killing me; I was made to explode and make a mess and stick to everything.
“Barring that, you can show me where they’ve hidden my sun, my wind and my dreams. I’ve checked way too much baggage onto this flight, so I know they can’t be here. While you’re at it, you can take back all the dials because I’m not measuring up, I’m going Up.
“Barring that I’ll proceed to one of the four exits (the nearest of which may be behind me) and get off the fucking plane.”
MAYDAY EJECT EJECT MAYDAY EJECT EJECT
…

She sits down next to me.
Her hair is not red.
Somehow that’s okay.
She pulls out a dog-eared copy of The Little Prince.
I know what pages she has marked.
“First time flowing?” she asks.
“Yes, yes it is.”
She holds my hand and my heart although they both stain her.
We’re going to slide up and through the plane now,” she says.
I nod.
There is a splash.
I stop holding on to my breath.

Burning

by Drey on April 16, 2005 in Artwork with No comments


The three women lived in a slanted camper with one wheel, out by the old baseball field. On certain nights bonfires rose up in right field and small animals would go missing from the neighborhood. On the night the camper burned, Bobby Monroe said he could see faces in the flames, laughing.

Gate

by Drey on April 16, 2005 in Artwork with No comments


We had been warned never to open the gate that separated our back yard from the shores of Elysium.

“Do not play near it, children,” said my mom, wagging her finger. “You should spend your free time at the mall with all the cool kids and study their cool ways.”

Of course, I did not listen.

Architecture

by Drey on April 10, 2005 in House of Whack with No comments

I turn once more towards the House, unfinished blueprint rolled in my hand. It has spoken its desires to me, some clear, some like smoke. The names of the occupants are known, their various gambits. New paradigms have moved in, decorating the walls with glyphic lights. Old ones have been packed away into the attic. But still…still…I am not sure I have seen the House’s true face.

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