[POETRY] [SORT OF] an odd colored bear

I've been learning to code. Almost from scratch. The last time I tried writing software was age 13 or 14. The language was BASIC, the device was a Commodore VIC-20. I wrote simple text-only programs, including a card game and a D&D map. A cassette tape stored audible fax machine sounds and--when you played them back--the program ran. Then your parents crossed themselves and grounded you from electronics while they read up on voodoo.

Why do this? Depends on who you ask. My wife would say it's a mid-life crisis, and she's probably on to something. My son would insist that we'll write a dinosaur version of Minecraft together (that sounds a lot like Ark, but neither of those games have the Nolan family imprint, so you can understand his thinking). My daughter, the most patient of them all, would guess it's something to do with the day job, or President Trump. She's at least half-right.

But there's a lot of time between First Day With the Manual and Making Sure Our Server Isn't Hacked, so, along the way, I'd like to use code to generate poetry. This time around the language is Python and the software model is the Markov chain, but programming logic is fundamentally unchanged from 36 years ago. I've been using if-then-else commands in Excel for two decades, and Python's while loop seems fresh out of 1981. I know barely enough to find a poetry bot online, make minor adjustments and add my own fiction as source material. Yet, to my shock, these first drafts aren't totally unusable:

an odd colored bear wanders into the sound

telephoned us his love

standing near, mostly talking over the child

he is cured

the details; i am married, getting too weak

sincere about work

the child had cleared room for rooms. their life is playing on mazes

angry with a temple roof

As you can imagine, the line-breaks are mine, and there's quite a bit of pruning to get these things under 280 characters (why write it if you can't tweet it out?). Some sentences have to go, for example: "i telephone brittany called about come to watch out of this." But I don't add or change anything, only cut.

Not that adding and changing wouldn't make these almost tolerable. Because who's to say, with a little TLC, these aren't poems?

an odd-colored bear wanders into the noise

telephones us his love

he is near, mostly talking over the child

we are cured

the details; i am married, getting too weak

too sincere about work

the children cleared room for other rooms. their life is playing in mazes

and staying angry with the temple roof.

FredAugust 1, 2018