Count on It

I.

Lucid portal, you map
a bit of world reversed,

yourself a globe, your twin
who tracks your moves a globe.

Your shutters flick to glaze
you glistening again.


II.

The captain's pleased to hear
you sound. Authority's

made firm, confirmed, by your
repeated utterance.

A sir will follow you.
You have it, as they say.


III.

You follow on surprise,
when speech's sense is lost

but breath and mouth and pure
articulation shape

some yelps -- as when planting
a fat thumb on the stove.


IV.

It's natural that some
are well-connected here.

But shady you, you've got
your tendrils all throughout

this institution. What
a senseless climber. Creep.












Nick Montfort's recent projects include Ream, a 500-page poem written in one day in April. His latest interactive fiction is Book and Volume, released on the [auto mata] label in 2005. His books are Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction (MIT Press, 2003), The New Media Reader (co-editor, MIT Press, 2003), and 2002: A Palindrome Story (co-author, Spineless Books, 2002). Montfort, an alumnus of the University of Texas at Austin, MIT, and Boston University, is now at the University of Pennsylvania, at work on an interactive fiction development system that uses natural language generation to allow narrative variation.






                       BACK