From the Obscure Way by James Rich

He'll wander blind into the night - -
his path is wrought with peril - -
the flowers and the woodland sprites
have all turned wild and feral





~ Easton's quatrain, from The Obscure Way (working title) by James Rich

Automated constrained poetry, made from Markov Chains and Project Gutenberg - Boing Boing

From Boing Boing, this on snowball poetry:

Automated constrained poetry, made from Markov Chains and Project Gutenberg - Boing Boing: A "Snowball" is a poem "in which each line is a single word, and each successive word is one letter longer." Nossidge built an automated Snowball generator that uses Markov Chains, pulling text from Project Gutenberg. It's written in C , with code on GitHub. The results are rather beautiful poems (these ones are "mostly Dickens"):

For example and more, follow link.

Catatonia

her hand in slow motion,
a glazed eye,
she watches a fly slowly
wave its legs
in the butter dish.


~ regan lee
1980s

family picture

like a tooth from an ancient play
the eldest takes guilt wrapped in newspaper
irons the yellowed pages 
before filing it absently in a rusted trunk 
and the key --
long lost by a gleeful prop boy.

wandering alone in a darkened theater
she fondles the green curtains heavy with dust
slipping on dirty masking tape stuck to the floor.

the eldest dimly remembers a line or two
and whispers it, hoarsely,
in the wings.

~ regan lee, 1988

Max

Max in turquoise
is Johnny B. Goode,
slapping green leather
on the dusty deck.


~regan lee
Oregon, 1980s