23 Minutes
by George Larkwright
Oof. I am so the wrong audience for this one. Growing up being always involved with babies and kids (oldest of 5 children, all boys; near the beginning of… 24 grandchildren, two-thirds boys), it has always been difficult for me to see “dad games” as more than a depressing commentary on the narrowness of who gets to make games. And then one of Keza MacDonald’s podcasts reinforced that. What was that called? Spawnpoint? Extra Life?
And this is definitely no exception. But let’s try to look at it for itself…
It’s a poem set to a turn-based silent movie. A blurred walk to work in the early morning. No choices: click or press space to reveal the next line. As a reader, I might have preferred revealing stanzas instead of lines, but that wouldn’t have evoked footfalls as well.
The poem is set in three… not columns, since they overlap, but… alignments? Left/center/right. I thought that was used to good effect, both for interleaving competing lines of thought, and just for movement.
I thought it got saggy toward the middle and end. More of a story, less poetry. More overplaying its hand; piling on making excuses for explaining the protagonist rather than being exhausted early-morning thoughts. I think the ending was supposed to be looking up but it just felt like another excuse to me.
Broccoli was an amusing recurring motif:
Wipe the debris from my eyes
crunchy
like the tips
of oven-baked broccoli
Yeah. Dunno. I thought it did a pretty good job of what it was trying to do, but it also made most of its point in the first quarter or third and then kept going.