Breathe.
I watch the shirts
On the line
Breathe in and out
Letterboxes.
They line up along
The footpath mouths open
Hungry for mail.
Exercise.
That black bug
Stretching wings, legs
Doing tai chi on the page.
Trigger.
That rustling in the hedge
A short story
Stirring into life
Egg.
Bald and black
As an emu’s egg, the helmet’s hatched
A biker’s head.
the breeze is slurping my face
like Bella’s pink dog tongue
when sick, I slumped on the sofa
K’s fond of haiku,
Michael senryu, its jokey cousin;
Mia, ‘a struggling author’ writes tiny tales,
Richard American sentences,
put them together,
and what have you got?
a slim, selection
of shorts,
a breviary of brevities
a pocket book of poems
for the wee small hours
When people ask me, did you have any inkling in all that time you knew him, I say, not really, then I think of the incident in the restaurant,the one that slipped beneath my notice in what was meant to be a piece of devilish fluff in ‘No Sympathy ….’
It began in the third line: Hey! Is that a glass of water you threw over me? That’s when autobiography took over and followed us out onto the sidewalk where I was shoved to the ground when my back was turned and my mate who had turned rogue did a runner.
So did I know? Did I suspect? I sure did: in those moments he unleashed diminutive, haiku-sized bursts of anger, I could feel the embers of a conflagration 18 years before that the forensic squad, armed with new evidence and methods of detection, were sifting through and building a case.
His mate, Dale , who let him stay on his property at Second Valley in a caravan while he got his life together, fell victim to Adrian’s wrath.
All that time Adrian proclaimed his innocence, He was the only suspect. He lived at my place for a while, He rode a bike, did the gardening, spoke to the kids, Everyone loved him. A top bloke, they said. Then the night ….
Once my friend was charged with the cold case and sentenced, he finally admitted to us: Just think, he said, 15 years for five seconds of madness.
That little haiku of a revelation warned me that of all the affairs we have to manage in life, our temper comes first.
the prompt was to choose a color and make a three-line poem out of it:
There’s a traffic jam inside my head
thoughts blaring to be said
but the traffic light’s stuck on red
* can you choose a color and write a three-line poem, perhaps a haiku, on that color? have a go; post your poem in the comments section
That mangled text
Shot off in seconds: such
Furious fingers
I’ve got a poem for you, a very short one, he promised with a garrulous grin, and then, in a long-winded introduction in which all the masters of brevity were cited, he proceeded to demolish the very notion of shortness. The poem took ten seconds, the intro five minutes.
Could you squeeze her
into a haiku? No, that would not do.
Her life was too sprawly.
It simply wouldn’t fit.
Something larger, more inclusive.
Perhaps a biopic.
She crams characters
Into her novels like clowns
Jammed in jalopies
The challenge was to write a book review in haiku form. Here is my first attempt. Do you want to try one? It will be interesting to see what people come up with.
‘The True Color of the Sea’
didn’t flow for me
its prose flat and monochrome
as a pancake sea
John Malone 