Day-old snow under a stone sky at midnight: and beyond flattened trees, in the shadow of a rust-eaten combine, one animal invisibly moving.
*
The man with the rifle in the blind sits still; his uniform chafes but he cannot move or the face in his scope might ghost and go on living.
*
Wind-driven dust eats at this rock face as it has for centuries, leaving its tracery of scars, its crows-feet, the aneurysm of erosion.
*
The blind girl in the library passes her hands over dusty spines like a pianist, like a pickpocket.
*
The translucence of agate. Shade of the blue fir. Track of a slug, luminous in starlight. Garbage truck. Brickbat. A dead mouse in the wall.
*
If you hadn't recalled the cabbage and turned suddenly back, the man in the suit would never have lost his pistol. Osmosis. Wages of gnosis.
*
A dark chamber in the spine of the boar holds the ozone-colored powder that crystallizes his hunger. He lives in his body only. Die for him.
*
Her eyes convulsed, then closed as the soldier entered her, grinding against her belly the rifle's muzzle, the bracket securing the bayonet.
*
Dawn should be immaculate, burning you clean, but smoke pours out of the wreckage, shrapnel, and a photograph of you on the train, waving.
Twitter/haikus? We will have info on Mon. Greg couldn't make it to school yesterday. Gym trip instead.
ReplyDeleteProse twitter haiku. I thought "haikeeters" sounded like a bloodsucking insect.
ReplyDeleteI keep thinking about the "wages of gnosis." To everything its price.
ReplyDeleteI love this form, whatever you call it. Bit by bit through Twitter is perfect for me. Like the mini Snickers bars people on diets eat to pretend they aren't eating sweets, one bite of poetry at a time is all the busy one is allowed.
This is what poetry should be doing, adapting to where people are and how they live their lives. People are on Twitter. Bring on the haikeeters.
Seems to me that new contexts represent opportunities. Most of what I see bouncing around on Twitter is extraordinarily mundane, if not actually commercial--which is OK; whatever use people find for a medium is, well, useful. But it interests me to embed little nuggest of otherness in there. And the mechanism itself enforces a certain formal demand.
ReplyDeleteThat's what I thought when I first encountered Twitter. It's micro-poetry, or at least it could be. It has created a form unto itself, and there is a kind of lyric, if random, flow to the feed some days that experimentalists of days gone by would have worked hard to affect.
ReplyDeleteI wish I were using it like you are. Mostly, I'm just making peripheral contacts between grading tasks. But that's important too, to me and my sanity.
Hmmmm. I haven't had the time to tweak yet. It seems to be getting more and more crowded when John McCain does it, . He twitters a lot in person. Still, I may get up the courage. I really like
ReplyDeleteThe blind girl in the library passes her hands over dusty spines
like a pianist, like a pickpocket.
Imagine Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder. The metaphor is not exact.