The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Tag: game theory

  • The Game Is A Foot

    “The game is a foot, I’m certain of it,”
    said the poet who talked the walk datum.
    To bloviate down his shorts and long waits
    about town he strolled and spoke and sprayed
    the populace with one-off quips and quotes.
    A foot player he was who climbed high limbs
    lofty the poet tree of mystery.
    Came he then to a steep stairway and down
    he went a long way down a circus clown.
    Loose freely from his three-rings born
    he returned to la-la-land a surfboard
    under his arm covered in salt and sand.
    “If life be a game,” he said, “play I will
    in waves never still twirl the pencil’s twill.”

    “We take it as a given that games are useful, productive, redeeming forms of human experience and expression.”

    The Poety Game

  • Chess Puzzle

    The chess pieces, old, dry, and frizzled, can only sleep, but as alive as cold-blooded bees in winter they dream of moves, puzzles, contretemps, and suck honey from the hive of time. They cluster quietly, clot in knots, in symbiotic formations, each exchange of pieces in turn reconstituting a meal in which each guest eats at the table of the other. Condemned to the board, the bored King snores while the Queen stirs the hive to action, cleans house, chasing the pawns this way and that, has knights jumping over the furniture, splits and clefts the sliding Bishops, insanely, apparently, willing to surrender their position to move closer to their dreary King asleep like a fossilized cat on the love seat in the living room.