I’ve never been a poetry guy, not because I don’t like it, I’ve just never gone out of my way to read them over books or whatnot. The poems I’ve engaged with the most are those read out during wedding ceremonies, those that pop-up before the start of a horror game, or The Tiger by 6-year old Nael that occasionally pops up as I’m doomscrolling. But thanks to the multiplayer web game “fridge poetry”, where you drag words to create poems, I might become a day-to-day poem guy. Going off my first effort, I don’t think many will appreciate my career switch.
Head on over to this site and it’ll transport you to the web’s fridge wall, complete with loads of magnets folks have already popped on there and arranged to create poetry. At the bottom right, you can generate your own words, too. All you have to do is drag a word around and plop it next to any others, rearranging existing poems or creating your own. And what’s really nice is that you can see other people’s cursors as they go about their business, before they disappear into the ether.
My first poem? I saw my opening, the moment I laid eyes on the fridge door: the night consumes blank. I saw the word “fortnite” hovering nearby. Smugly, I put the two together: the night consumes fortnite. I think of it as a sort of contemplation, let’s say, on how Fortnite both consumes people’s evenings and is also being consumed itself. Consumed by Disney and Lego and Ariana Grande – perhaps gleefully. The word “night” also sounds like “nite”, which I thought was clever.
Someone immediately dashed my work, hopping in to unpick my poem before leaving (fair enough). So I left another poem later, simply entitled: rock, paper, shotgun. And just as I did so, someone else generated the word “frotnite” and positioned it above “fortnite” in what was a rather beautiful thing that happened in real time.
Other poems on the door at the time of writing:
- every raccoon is gay
- meow! meowmeowmeow
- Dismay@aol.com
Yeah, I really like that last one.