I live stream most Wednesdays, when I’m not knackered from my paternal duties or dealing with the momentary return of covid symptoms. While I have failed to become the internet love child of Rupi Kaur and Ninja, the stream is a lot of fun. It’s also helped me to keep my creative channels open — there’s something about writing underwhelming poems in front of a live audience of four that keeps writer’s block from creeping in during the rest of the week.
For the past few streams I have been playing Lake, which I often describe as 80s-rural-postie-with-a-midlife-crisis simulator. In the game you play Meredith, a big city magazine editor in her 40s, as she returns to Providence Oaks, the lakeside village she grew up in, to cover for her Dad’s postal round while her parents are on vacation.
It’s a mellow game with some interesting characters and plot lines, all taking place within a picturesque setting. Perfect conditions for stopping to write the odd poem while playing.
Her are the poems that I wrote during the session:
Nobody’s in to take their parcels
so I dump them on porches
exclaiming, “Lighter than I thought!”
as if I’ve decided they’re not worth nicking.
I’m glad for the lack of company,
all the hokey lives and hokey problems —
roadkill, repression, republicanism.
I once would have killed to escape
a picket fence prison like this,
but now I pine for a two-bedroom box
full of leave me the f*** alone energy.
There’s normally a cutscene when you drop the parcels off and speak to the locals but sometimes you just drop it to the ground and nobody seems to care about it getting stolen.
Robert, the emotionally repressed lumberjack,
stands in front of a waterfall
in order to subtly imply that there is a deluge
of passion behind his stoical facade
and polygon beard.
He is not a dead piece of wood
full of rings that attest to the years
that life passed him by.
Take his axe and cut him open —
he is full of angry water
and dizzy fish
Robert seems to be the male romance option for Meredith. I ventured into the storyline with the female romance option, the owner of the video rental store. She was very annoying though and my viewers seemed to agree so I dumped her and then suggested that she move out of town. She took it surprisingly well.
Two women
look over a vast lake
regurgitating the past.
Mayfly memories —
skittishly alive
one moment
and extinguished
the next
Meredith has an old childhood friend called Kay, I wrote this poem after they had a heart to heart at the top of an old watchtower.
Another parcel
plonked on the doorstep.
Nobody’s in, or maybe
last night,
when the dew descended
onto neatly clipped lawns
and the ducks tucked
dizzy heads
under wings,
that was when
the communists struck
I decided that there was actually a secret communist invasion and that was why people weren’t answering their doors for parcel deliveries.
I was thinking that I might move on to a different game but I just looked up the average playthrough time and it appears to be 6-8 hours so I’ll probably stick with it till the end over the next couple of streams. I should be back streaming this Wednesday and will post the links here when the the time draws closer.
I’ve decided that I’m only going to post on substack from Monday-Friday (with the odd missed day) for the time being, so have a good weekend without me clogging up your inbox with navel gazing ephemera.
Poems I wrote during Wednesday’s live stream