Tuesday 16 November 2010

Cyberpunk

Despite being emotionally out of sorts, I have been writing all sorts of interesting stuff. I went to a 'writing marathon' and one of the exercises was with a poet who is one of our tutors. He got us using a style called 'cut up', a strange attempt to reconstruct reality invented by William S. Burroughs and it was interesting what came out of a short free write about a recurring dream; an article about the movement of stars; and the humane device for killing crustaceans. I took a piece of the short story 'Cyberpunk', a piece of Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat and a piece I wrote about reading on the bus to school, and came up with sixteen lines of poetry: now I have to think of a title! I don't know how it works as a poem, but it was great fun to write.

Out of my sleepsack, cyberpunking to purgatory
Seven miles on the transys to school
The seat was booby trapped, apple carts
Spinning wheels on the way out of the prefabs
Sprawling over the hill, Jerry built, no really,
Custom built from the motherboard up by POW’s
Enslaved to the corporation, greentoothed,
From the red-eyes hollowness of the war.

Easing myself into the planet machine
Deep in the book, following Jim DiGriz
Down the stainless steel sewers, a bug
Oozing into the programme, no-one flags on us
The right salute, the right uniform, corporate zombies
Charming the drones, tough program to crack,
On-line in nano’s, blew a chip, shut down fast
On the seven ten bus from the end of the line.

3 comments:

  1. Considering how it was created, it works beautifully!

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  2. Oh...ah... um... not understood at all. Honest comment.

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  3. Thank you Downith - I'm puzzled by how it worked out but it all made sense to me (perhaps you need to know science fiction from that era for it to make much sense though!) Thanks Tony, for the honest comment - I'm not sure it's a technique I could use but maybe as a starting point? I shall play around with it.

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