TREASURE

arcade41 video game poems for

National Poetry Day 2011

by jon stone

Introduction

In September 1971, Galaxy Game, the earliest known coin-operated video game, was installed at Stanford University in California. 40 years on, the UK celebrates its National Poetry Day with the theme of ‘games’. Jon Stone wakes up to this coincidence three days before the day in question. He’s been slowly clawing together a sequence of 41 poems, one for every year since Galaxy Game, each responding to a computer game released that year. He has 23 more to write and suddenly only three nights to do it in. He decides to give it his best shot. Here are the results.

A note on the form

These poems use an invented, as-yet-nameless poetic form consisting of one short line and three long ones. The second line ends in a ‘fuzzy’ rhyme with the first (ie. using the same group of consonants), the third line ends in a word associated by sense or phrase with the last word of the second line and the fourth line (the ‘boss’ line) contains pure or near-pure rhymes with all of the previous lines.

Frankly, I don’t think I’ll be using the form again, since it was tougher than Super Meat Boy.

1971Galaxy Game

We two then, love:

waterboatmen on a broad, bleak pond between galaxies – alive

but hardly alive. Just blinked out dust, light spots. Say, look –

the whole cold stub of me fades against a hive of stars, dumbstruck.

1972Hunt the Wumpus

I have drawn my arrow

and oh, what a suite of seductions for the lost and Wumpus-wary:

the Westerly-creeping stench, a scavenger breeze, the bats wired

to the smallest tremor, the narrowest capillary suddenly fired.

1973 Lemonade Stand

Barring weather anomalies,

I’m made. Observe my sugar bags, sacks of ice, paper cups, lemons.

In drizzled sun, my customers knife through the tarmac’s rich cake:

whole families, their heads raw moons. Parched, but also on the make.

1974 pedit5

Lonely but for my spells,

my satchel of raw experience – so not lonely at all. The dark sleeps

but I do not sleep. I gather scars in tallies and heal between dreams,

wear the pelts and skulls of whatever sweeps these oil-thick seams.

1975Gun Fight

One in the cactus,

leaving a pulpy green exit wound. One lodging in an axle. One staccato

off granite. One grazing a condor’s retrices. Our simple stichomythic

back-and-forth – what actors! With hearts obliging their swift kick!

1976Colossal Cave Adventure

You are in a twisted lip.

You are on a lip of ledge, a little twist of ledge, before a deep pool.

You are in a pool of passages, an inverted brain, a cave-cool lap.

You are lip-deep in a loop of cool lip, on the brain’s ledge of sleep.

1977 Videocart-4: Spitfire

Like a low dose of ketamine:

seeing myself death-roll a third time – my, let’s say, Mark X

Spitfire bright blue with innocence and Portsmouth’s sky a fold

in a map or fogged scene – when Biggles trembles with cold.

1978Space Invaders

Sky is very darkest whiskey.

There are snowflakes – or is it ash? – drifting down and long weeks

of half-winter ahead. Try to dash them all to vapour, the wind working

to hurriedly whisk each wave beyond your reach, the moon circling.

1979Lunar Lander

Gravity is a temptation.

As you sink toward that silvered page, you splay, push and shunt

your body every which way to avoid plunging like a loaded truck,

to fashion a kiss from the dunt you might otherwise have struck.

1980Defender

The long night lost count

of saucers dashed to sawdust and of glowworm hostages taken,

lives burned. Afterward he walked a while, found the perfect refuge:

a water-bored haunt, godforsaken, dumbly expectant of deluge.

1981Donkey Kong

I’ve lived with the smell

well enough until now. His fleas. The way he lopes and looms.

I’ve scarred my book with marks and grown fat sharing his hoarded fruit.

Now comes pell-mell my ‘rescuer’ – rage blooms in his booming throat.

1982Dig Dug

Hori Taizo! How dare

you dig up my land again! You plan it as if it were a night-time raid,

arrive with your makeshift harpoon and a tank of oxygen-rich air.

But there are no dragons buried here. Go spade your own hectare.

1983Pinball Construction Set

Soon it became

as much a tentative wizardry as playing: calibrating the camber

of every bumper, shortening the shooter rod for reduced thrust,

each off-key chime a mamba in the brain, every rattle a new thirst.

1984 Paperboy

To be up with the frost

and bare-handed, biking – street upon street to cordially strafe

with paper batons, the overhead sun barely a faint chalk circle.

I too would have tossed them liberally, waif to the chilled knuckle.

1985

Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?In bed, Carmen smokes

a red cigarette, claws for her red knickers, leaves reedy red marks

across your back. The dawn is meat-red, and there is even beauty

in how she stokes the cabin fire to red sparks, her hair slightly sooty.

1986Out-Run

He dreams of the drive;

her bleached perm whipped to ruin, the state coast road-rivered.

Spring in North Holland is a slow live circuit, his car the current.

They arrive here, the young and favoured, in a veritable torrent.

1987Phantasy Star

The musk cat’s medicine

brings round the ruffian. Slowly, and lightly as the subtlest sandman,

I draw my crew together. Somewhere, brother, you are a shimmer of dust.

For you, I will be Amazon, shatter the grand plan. It’s freedom or bust.

1988Gain Ground

Our future Captain Scott

crosses virtual tundra toward a rhumb-line marked ‘Exit’.

His lost boys are norsemen, stoneagemen, injuns. The sky’s silicon fire

primes his spear’s flint knot as he stakes it on the enemy choir.

1989Shadow Dancer

Tenderly my white dog

grips the man’s throat, as if he were carrying a drinking gourd.

How still he is, considering sweat spiked with aftershave is bitter,

the larynx is a wriggling frog, his reward a far-off speck of glitter.

1990 The Secret of Monkey Island

We who went a-roving,

lean for the sweet trade, all of us foundered on the garnet-haired governor,

her brazen calico, who left each heart a capsized coracle, each body

run through with loving, every rum cove and ravener drunk for her custody.

1991Another World

It’s that bruised cloud

of a beast in your dream again. Lester, it’s almost ludic

the way he mauls you. Come to, speechless and swaying, game

for a jailbreak. Unbowed. In rude nick. Another blink of flame.

1992Alone in the Dark

Our house the ghoul-den;

wolves at the windows, chains shivering ice onto the landing.

I mostly balled myself up but sometimes, making myself as light

as my shadow, emboldened, I went wending – like some Bedlamite.

1993Gunstar Heroes

Me and my brother

mixing rare gunpowders – letting the various chemistries breathe.

The shafts they’ve bored are veined with rails and heck-deep,

but we were born to scupper. We seethe with colour and lack of sleep.

1994UFO: Enemy Unknown

The copse draws

its children in. The fields huddle. As for us, we stuff our mouths with words

but have only a jerked gun barrel for strangers, whose strange games

torment us. Thus, a wind saws through herds of buildings. A huntsman aims.

1995Alien Soldier

I’ve been that lad

half-grown into a bird, punkshackle from the last feather-strewing duel,

headlong into the next. How night worries itself to dawn

in his bluster ballad, the sun’s ampule of flame ever airborne.

1996Syndicate Wars

Once the sun has blown,

the city centre is conquerable. Our matching raincoats are noble,

in a way, my talk an uzi-ish stutter. But your low voice is sleeping gas.

Your eyes a bank loan. Your double-take a wire trap’s 5v flash.

1997Broken Sword: The Smoking Mirror

What we don’t know, Nico,

will tie us to the chair, set the curtains alight. You and your uncanny

nose for trouble will lead us down into the Vision Serpent’s valley,

where every echo is tyranny and the earth god glowers dismally.

1998Half-Life

There was a tear, a roughish

rent, the world splitting its trousers, an eye-slit or sea fissure.

From it came this lamp-post of a man, dressed to frisk a king,

and you were a bright, broken starfish, a skirmisher ripe for gathering.

1999Strider 2

This bloodslick scarf

is what’s made me risk my arch-Russian gymnast physique

on the incurable problem of you, your diesel dragon, athletic

over half-hoaxed cityscape. But don’t you feel weak? A little pyretic?

2000Deus Ex

When the hours are as thick

and sunless as here, and now, and forever, you learn to trust your kith

all the more deeply for their uniform, their medley of voices akin

to a gothic choir. It’s shelter, something to merge with, a broader skin.

2001Halo

A kind of tilling,

this carving up alien land with bullets and tyres. You untangle

the local militia nests with gentle razors. You sweep a loosed hair

from your visor. Such thrilling angle of dawnspill, just over there.

2002Neverwinter Nights

How we loved Aribeth,

who was not sweet or clumsy, and never watched the stars throb

with heaving breasts but turned on us with all her smudged heart.

Now we know we don’t know death. We do our job. We make a start.

2003Beyond Good and Evil

Of course a pig

makes a great mechanic. His snout discerns exactly which oily gap

needs plugging. His bristles are tuned to the engine’s sob. He’s years

older than you. He swigs from a can, whistles, raps the spur gears.

2004Cave Story

If you wake, totally blank,

no weight of self, do root about. Win a trick in two-handed pinochle.

Come upon a buried civilisation. When it’s time to make your play,

remember everything. Thank your fickle maker. Now dance. Now sway.

2005Psychonauts

I could poke around

in your midbrain – dust off the chairs, puzzle out that drone,

dislodge the wasp, tune the telly. I’m the nimblest of workers,

sweet. Think of the sound of the lone flea conducting a circus.

2006Dreamfall

Sometimes in the snow,

you think you see a girl who warns you not to dream. But you’ve seen

the static that teaches sleep so complete, whole stories go unheard.

Tell her you want to know. You’re lean and your ear itches to be stirred.

2007Bioshock

We were beautiful;

darling, we were the toast – won, mugged, smuggled, butted, bluffed

our way up. My unforgettable face, your always-there-on-the-double.

Now, your ‘inscrutable’ half-grin is that of a stuffed cat, a cracked bauble.

2008Bangai-O Spirits

Rich with thieves,

the whole sky bears down on me – one night-sharpened scythe of

nebula. All these bright engines primed and appetites whetted,

and I, mere thorn who heaves his tithe of blood, unfettered.

2009Muramasa

I’m thinking of our shared

furious flush in a mountain spring that steamed like boiled radish

the second time we met, me with my memory a shorn stem,

you with your girlish bottom bared and reddish, each wound a diadem.

2010Angry Birds Seasons

Night and day and night,

they blitzed the weakest joins of the house, leaving it scare-torn

and clotted with powder down, us scrummed, half shaken apart.

Rage made them bright. Greed had drawn us like an applecart.

2011Portal 2

Not spiritual

but spirited – her Stygian stumble through the necklace of portals,

spurred to keep tumbling on by – I don’t know. A wide open

lens, an AI’s vitriol-spiked prattle? Knotholes she might hope on?