17th of April, 2026
Ten poems from Seaglass
About a year ago I decided to try something completely new and just started writing poetry. It's not that I'd never written poetry before—just never for its own sake. All I'd done were a few writing exercises at school, or fairly functional poems to go with analog games I made. Not that making art to go inside a larger piece of art lessens it, but it does add considerations, I guess restrictions. I wanted to fuck about with poetry for its own sake.
Pretty soon I was writing poems every day, sometimes even double-digits, putting whatever came to mind on the page (well, my phone's notes app) any time I was out. Almost all of it was short, formal stuff. It turns out, having some of the path cut out for you by all the people who worked in that form before you really helps imagery, phrasing, ideas turn into text. Soon I built the code for Seaglass, my HTML poetry notebook, so I could keep my poems in plaintext files but convert them into a more convenient format for display.
This went on for nine months, the pace rising and falling and rising again through nearly 1000 poems, until eventually my phone battery went to shit midwinter. I didn't realise just how important my phone, this supposedly very replaceable tool, would be till I started looking for a new one and found that smartphones have gotten so big and so heavy recently (my last one was from 2014; my new one's from 2023 and is about 50% bigger and heavier). The new phone arrived mid-January and between the clunky size and weight and what feel like worse touchscreen interactions it's frankly kinda unpleasant to write on and the number of poems I've written since then just plummeted.
Granted, a fair bit of what I wrote before was basically a whole lotta nothing—half-inspired haiku and the like I wrote just to have written something that day—and I know I was circling round the same basic themes. However, my gut feeling is that I wrote proportionately more poems I liked when I wrote more poems period, maybe because I was deeper into it, practicing in the medium every day. More bad poems meant even more good ones. Obviously ideally I'd want to improve over time and write fewer, better poems, but practice is practice. And I can't do this practice as often without some kinda small, comfortable digital writing tool. I tried a notebook, but my process involves a lotta whittling down variations in word and phrase, which is easy digitally but hard in analog.
From here, I guess the next step is to get some kinda tool as a replacement. Not a phone, but about phone-sized (from a decade ago), if that's even possible. In the meantime, I wanted to reflect on what I've done. I see a lotta flaws in my poetry overall, but I think it's good to be (reasonably) proud of the better art you're making instead of falling into a loop of shame and self-loathing that maims all creative desires that don't manifest as virtuoso brilliance.
So, here are ten poems picked from the notebook as a sample of the better stuff in there. As an extra constraint, I've picked only one poem from any given group in the notebook (see the Seaglass group index for a full list).
Zeroth poem #
Feeling Vast and seaglass, Never knowing whether This is it, the chip, the shatter— Green stars.
Okay, there's actually a zeroth pick. This untitled poem is where I got the name for the poetry notebook from and also the start of a loose series of (so far) six journalling-ish Crapsey cinquains (named for the creator of the form, Adelaide Crapsey) that all start with “Feeling”. The word seaglass is so evocative to me and undoubtedly so many other people and I wanted something that'd get at the concept of a strange refinement over time, a sea change.
First poem #
the cat hunts the sun— relaxing can be such hard work
This Kelly lune courtesy of watching my cat. The Kelly lune is one of a bunch of forms created in the 19th or 20th centuries as a Western equivalent to haiku. I tend to write them with a pivot on the middle line, or more like haiku with the poem being split across one of the line-breaks into two halves (one bigger, one smaller) that complement or contrast each other. Here it's the former; “relaxing” is a surprise that changes the meaning of the poem.
Second poem #
Left to rot in archives deep Old silent letters start to speak Dredged from inkwell seas sublime Dead gaieties crawl out of time Science sells its arcane tricks At rendezvous with human ticks Palaces are burning now Our laughter echoes, then the howl
Most of the poems in Seaglass are short, formal stuff, but I do have a section called “longer rhymes” for stuff that like this 4-couplet poem. It's a bit cosmic horror and a little bit queer…
Third poem #
“Come and learn my arcane tricks,” Is what I'd say if you weren't thick!
Okay, this dumb one belongs to a tongue-in-cheek form I defined called the Grunty based on the insulting rhymes of Gruntilda, the witch villain from the Banjo-Kazooie series.
All the Grunties so far are from the point of view of Dark Souls characters/enemies (or the same kinda thing from a fictional medieval Soulslike); I think this one, for Big Hat Logan, might be the best partly because it's pretty much what happens in-game if your intelligence stat's too low and he decides you're not smart enough to learn his spells.
Basically the Grunty form is a series of shitposts I wrote one night.
Fourth poem: Cities & Age • 1 #
The people of the city of Samurna build great sloped houses on the side of their dormant volcano, each floor successively occupied by elder members of the family, the nursery in the attic, the children's room below that, then adolescents, then parents and uncles and aunts and so on, ending with the elders plotting in the vast, interconnected basement, among lost wine-barrels full of secrets and the corpses of burglars.
For the preservation of dignity and industry, all those who dwell in the city are foresworn from moving between these floors and conduct all familial business by an intricate ritual of calling-pipes and dumbwaiters, with two exceptions: firstly, visitors may move freely, provided they have the permission of their hosts; and secondly, the deathbeds are all by the nurseries. Each child's first duty is to carry the dying on pilgrimage to their rooftop necropoli when they feel their end approaching.
In this manner, Samurna ensures its continuity, reliant on the charity of strangers and the love and care of those barely born and soon to be dead. In this manner, it has existed for at least a thousand years or a decade, and in this manner, it will continue to exist for at least a day or an aeon.
I re-read Invisible Cities and decided to try my hand at writing a city on the theme of “Cities and Age”. Obviously it's hard to write like a much better writer and likewise to write in someone else's vein, so I mixed in my own style and ideas. It's flattery-type imitation.
Fifth poem #
fresh in disguise— skinned loggers' hides— dryads count coup
This novem is kind of a cheat, since I can't tell whether or not it follows one of the restrictions of the form (that there's one consonant sound that happens four times in the poem). I count the “c” sound in “skinned”, “count”, “coup”, and… “disguise”, where I feel like the “sg” kinda lightens the “g” into a “c”-like sound (compare with the “gg” in “loggers”).
Anyway, I'm not super keen on the novem as a goal when writing poetry. It's way too strict, with a line count, word counts, a shifting syllable-per-word pattern, and the consonant count I just mentioned all for just 12 syllables… how am I meant to write something affecting or insightful when I've gotta simultaneously solve this linguistic sokoban? So, instead of writing novems for the sake of the novems themselves, I tend to use them as a block-breaker. Writing some contorted surreal imagery is a good way to get started I'm struggling to write anything that day, or just to fuck around. I don't need to write a good poem, just a good-enough novem poem. Harsh, but true!
Despite what I just said, I think this novem is pretty strong by itself. Maybe that's because I didn't quite follow all the rules.
Sixth poem: Nightmare Times #
Watch out! The Seasons' weary walls grow thin And nightmare times With cold cathedral eyes peek in.
This one's the first-ever crooked quad I wrote! The crooked quad is a short form I created (though who knows if I'm the first). Unlike the Grunty mentioned above, it's not a joke. I just kept writing iambic and trochaic poems with these syllable counts per line (2–8–4–8 or 4–8–2–8) and after the first dozen or so I figured I should make it official.
Anyway, I really like the phrasing “cold cathedral eyes” in this one. It's a weird, cool bit of imagery that offsets the natural subjects. Aesthetically I was going for a vibe like Algernon Blackwood's The Willows, of natural “Great Personages” and things piercing the veil, and also for certain surreal paintings I can't remember the name or artist of right now.
Seventh poem #
the storm has passed but rain still falls beneath the trees
It seems a lotta people say poetry is the art of doing a lot with a little and this haiku about rainfall (and other things) is probably among the top do-a-lot-with-a-little poems I've written. Definitely one of my favourite haiku in Seaglass, where it's competing against over 300 others (admittedly, there's a lotta basic haiku in there). Edit: competing against about 100 others as of the 8th of May, 2026, when I trimmed Seaglass down a lot, but you can find the original 300+ on the haiku page in Yardang.
Eighth poem: Blizzard Belly #
Blizzard Belly
eats and eats—
His favourite food
is hands and feets.
Just a fun little A–B–C–B ditty about frostbite and maybe a yeti or a living blizzard, who knows.
Ninth poem: Labour and Birth in the Land of the Sunset #
You satisfy our nationwide necropolytic septic tank till it bursts. Blood and night soil!
Okay as a general rule if a poem in Seaglass is sort of obtusely angry about something, like this septolet, it's probably about British politics in some way.
The septolet is kind of a weird form. It needs 14 words across 7 lines—a huge number of line-breaks for so few words. This heavy stress sometimes forces poems to look like a stereotype of bad free verse poetry, all full of thoughtless “significant” line-breaks that obliterate the flow. In my experience, if you're writing a septolet you've gotta mould it to the line-breaks, use them for pacing like punctuation, otherwise it'll end up looking awkward and pretentious. I haven't always succeeded at this. The alternative's to break away from the form—use the other features (brevity, two parts) as creative restrictions to start with and then get more freeform for the final poem.
Tenth poem #
Click–flash! The crowd agape, Who stomach any pain; The boxers' kiss will break this egg And fly.
To close it out, here's a Crapsey cinquain about a surprise. It's another poem where I think I do a lot with a little, but not as much as the haiku example from earlier. Like all the poems in this post, it's one I hold in my memory—I think it helps that the first line is both self-contained and unique, where a lot of Crapsey cinquain intros, being only 2 syllables long, feed into the next line and aren't that interesting by themselves.
What next? #
It was fun to showcase a bunch of my poems I like with broader commentary than I can really do in Seaglass! I might do it again later with another 10 poems, or do the same thing with other creative stuff like the low-poly models in The Third Dimension or the analog games or fonts I've put on itch. I've tried to avoid talking about meanings—instead it's just a good launchpad for lightly touching on other stuff, in this case the writing process and the properties of poetic forms.
The flipside is it'd also be nice to pick out works by other people (in any medium). I already do reviews of some things (movies/videos/TV, PICO-8 games, plus I've got a bunch of other WIP collections), but even then it's good to write about that stuff without turning it into some kinda analysis of the thing. We'll see!