Reading Murakami has lulled me into a haiku-writing frame of mind.

Autumnal twilight
Midges circle beneath boughs
Fallen apples rot

Another random gogyokhu

I just knocked this out on Twitter. I have rearranged the order of the lines. I felt that the last line needed to be separated, like a turn in an Italian sonnet.


Piano fingers waltz in a daze,
Water lilies float, drowned butterflies.
My Armature is a humorous exoskeleton
To get me through the day.

Wear a beret or become a Sufi?

New experimental semi-automatic gogyokhu

This is a gogyokhu I just spontaneously composed on Twitter. I have no idea what it is about or what prompted these images. What I don't like about this poem is that the line breaks are arbitrary; I wanted to write a gogyokhu, and the decision to use the form before thinking about the content seems to have resulted in my crowbarring the language into a shape that doesn't quite fit the sense of the words. It would probably work better semantically as one long line. Anyway, here it is.

Holes in the sky,
The spaces between clouds,
Make me laugh but the faces up there,
Jezebel wanderers,
Are killing me.

Throwdown

I just threw this down for a Twitter #haikuthrowdown. The challenge was to use any or all of these words: morning, mercury, sedentary, hat. I cheated of course - 'morn', though a poetic word, is a synonym, not the actual word. On the other hand I managed to make a seasonal reference and the haiku expresses something personal: I am sedentary and wearing a hat!

Low mercury morn
Means sedentary fellow
Must wear a warm hat

Twitter nonsense

Two more off-the-cuff haiku I posted on Twitter a couple of days ago. The first one was just a hello to my followers and the second, strictly speaking not a true haiku if the content is taken into consideration, was tweeted to @beerhaiku. Cheated on the syllables in the second haiku by doing a James Joyce and inventing a classical Greek-style compound adjective. Basho might not have approved, but Homer would.

Good morning, my Twits
Snowbound, snuggled up in bed
Sunday has arrived

Nightdark and bitter
Cold clean bite warming the soul:
Pint of the black stuff

Haiku Throwdown

I just put together this little ditty for the #haikuthrowdown on Twitter. I have changed one word to avoid a repetition and the second line is adapted from a poem I wrote a long time ago.

frozen toes grow numb
I feel the cold bone-deep here:
can't escape winter

Nonsense in compact form

Just some random silliness I threw out on Twitter tonight. I suppose you could call it a senryu, but that would probably be lending it a seriousness it doesn't deserve.

cowabungaface
heliotropic bunfight
post-human crabsticks