Back in my days on LiveJournal, the little group I was connected to would occasionally play a game where one member would throw out a list of five or more words and the rest of us would write a poem containing the words on the list. It was a game we didn't play often, but I enjoyed when we did.

I've mentioned British speculative fiction author Jeff Noon's Twitter game #speedlit before:

RULES

20 words or less
no punctuation
lower case
one line break

As a larger meme, it hasn't caught on, and even Mr. Noon doesn't play anymore. Mostly it's just me and the brilliant poet and artist ReVerse Butcher.

Words are my LEGO blocks, my lumber and nails. Programming is such a joy because it's a place where I literally build things out of words and phrases.

So despite playing it in solitaire mode, Mr. Noon's game is one I come back to at regular intervals.

Due to the limits, the initial work is quick and simple, not requiring dedicated time or energy, and lends itself to the way I get tiny flashes of story scenes or strange phrases stuck in my head throughout the day. The mental bits get jotted into a window on my screen where they sit with too many words and commas, and not enough edge or story, as I poke, poke, poke for the next several hours until I'm either satisfied or exasperated.

The rules themselves make no such requirement, but from Noon's early examples and my own internalization, I try to avoid treating the projects as poetry. It would be easy to argue the constraints and most of the forms produced are absolutely a kind of poesy, similar to a haiku, and I have no counter. My own goal, though, is to construct a tight prose narrative, a single degree of story arc containing hints of what came before and where they're going after while containing a sharp stabby sense of what's happening right now.

My own enjoyment comes from processing the original ideas through the mental still set up by dark, boozy pirates the in the Broca's area of my brain, condensing the mash originally put onto the screen into something which meets the constraints, but still contains enough flavor to be valuable. Reducing phrases to their skeletal frames, finding words with a higher degree of specificity or generality or impact, changing order to increase clarity or reduce word count, making myself do without extraneous adjectives and adverbs.

A perfect bit will create a specific image or feeling in the reader and make them intensely curious to know the whole of the story. Maybe:

dream flensing knife only three seraph pelts the blind ifrit calls from a back stall

time to go hunting

Or:

he never spoke of the spider hearts beating keeping the watch hands sweeping or the cost of every midnight chime

An imperfect, but good bit, does function like a haiku: capturing the image or feeling of a moment, but existing mostly outside a larger specific narrative, and making the reader content with what they have, rather than curious about what they don't.

Say:

shapes of morning cut roughly from the sheet of night collaged carefully together

a map etched from real to dream

A failing piece will simply be boring as either poem or narrative, and will be dull and fuzzy rather than sharp and clear. I actually do like this:

already haunted by future ghosts she spat at lachesis

keep up or cut me loose

but even I don't remember what it's about or get a clear image of what's happening in its moment.

Some of them contain seeds of fuller stories I'd like to write which Is why I keep them after first throwing them to the scouring winds of Twitter.

---

riding catastrophe
bareback and razor wire reins
into gray apocalypse
with joyful cry

i can still see tomorrow

---

spot injecting neural resins
encasing the last memory of light

gonna need it come nightfall

---

shaping wind with suggestion and intimidation
coalescing vapor
ion
suspicion
into crackling edges and thrusting points

gathering winter for war

---

led by appetite into disregard
deeper into self
twisting into darkness

there was never a light inside
only a maw

---

converting base images into electricity
firing the sky with numinous voltage

disciples of tesla
freeing souls with coil and ladder

---

the compass rose of her future
marked out in pencil
and mercury
smudged and roiling

all switchbacks and dead ends

---

words on the tree
dropping
to carefully tended pages

a secret tribe of scribes
quietly stealing knowledge
from eden

---

a phoenix egg
makes a poor heart

but it gets the job done

---

orchid venom
collected from the canopy
coating obsidian knives

gods remembered
only by jaguars
pythons
hunting shadows of memory

---

at some point
monsters under the bed
learn their own fear
they sharp teeth
she shrapnel mind
and razor heart

---

in the fifth center
shadows never cast by light
writhe against granite
and unity

whispered tendrils
spidered stone
freedom satiation

---

formatted for belief
conflating write errors with conviction
they scrapped the jack booted
automatic thinking lot

started over with lemurs

---

external gills unfurled
traversing thick humours of ruination
with feathered breath

recovering dreams dropped overboard
when aspiration pirates raided

---

hiding terror in our bones
replacing marrow with condensates of fear

we became the monsters you wanted us to be

---

cacophony of hunger
a ravening chaos
tangled
and asynchronously beating

rising pulse of redress
kept too long on frayed leash

---

gorgons of alcatraz
running peepshows of stone and violence
dime a minute

ten cents and a turn under their gaze

---

reclaimed from the wreckage
a voice
etched into a ceramic shard of bulkhead

the sun is lying

---

shape of sound
in cloying abyss of silence
huntress comes
wielding daggered waves
violently calling

i need you

---

chronodopplers
joined in strange quantum web
working tangled skeins of time
from both ends
realigning eras

fixing what i broke

---

haunted by shadows
choices
unmade
roads
not taken

rueful emulsions
coagulate in darkness
hunting the betrayer
of should have been