Haiku?

 

 



Rite of Spring, 2012 (kind of a haiku)

biking, wearing shorts
in March; it stung me on the
thigh—first bee of spring

.,

You'll Have To Decide For Yourself Whether Any Of This Has Anything To Do With Yoga

A dictionary resembles the world more than a novel does, because the world is not a coherent series of actions but a constellation of things perceived.
Edouard Levé

...one thing I’ve learned from being called for jury duty is that, as long as I answer questions honestly, there’s no chance whatsoever I’ll ever be picked...the truth, you might say, sets me free...

...have never been one of those desperately unhappy people who wear all black and write poems about suicide...nor one of those desperately unhappy people with big toothy smiles constantly trying to buttress themselves with feel-good notions they can't actually force themselves to believe...though I’ve danced insecurely on the margins of both...

We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand.
Eric Hoffer

...a friend was leading a therapy group for mentally ill ex-con drug addicts....one day, a caseworker was talking with a client and had to leave the room...finding, upon returning, that both the client and her lap-top were gone....though the guy came back the next day, to what I imagine was as therapeutic a grilling about what happened to the lap-top as possible...it’s at a crack house, he said, but I can get it back for $20...not surprisingly, the staff was dubious...but given the value of the computer, not to mention all the classified files on its hard drive, twenty bucks really wasn’t much to gamble on the faint possibility of getting it back...so, they gave it to him, and, some time later, he came back, lap-top in hand...leaving my friend and me really impressed by what was apparently a very professionally and ethically-run crack house....making me wonder: can fair trade organic crack co-ops be next?...

...any time a student started asking a question beginning with do we have to...?, I’d interrupt, say no, of course not...they’d say really?...and I’d say you’re in college; you don’t have to do anything...I can’t send you to the principal’s office, can’t give you a detention, can’t call your parents, really can’t do anything to you; what you do or don't do is up to you....except the grade, they'd say...and I'd reply but that’s just a description of what you decided you felt like doing...in shorthand...like a haiku...but even shorter...

...the difference between self-pity and self-compassion is, I think, that the first is only marginally different from cruelty...a distinction merely in terms of the tone of voice with which we call ourselves pathetic...while the latter is more likely to give a soothing back rub before saying, in a loving tone, that it’s time to get up off your ass...

Post Holiday Doldrums and Accidental Haiku

I don't want to be alone, I want to be left alone.

Audrey Hepburn

sluggish, sinuses
on fire, don’t wanna know how
much weight I’ve put on*

* was compiling bodily complaints and realized they came out to exactly seventeen syllables, easily divisible into a traditional five-seven-five structure...making my whining about minor seasonal ailments a completely accidental and spontaneous complaint-haiku...which might be really spiritual...or poetic.......or neither....perhaps funny?...if so, that’s at least as good as either spiritual or poetic...at least to my current state of mind...which let’s face it, is pretty typical for the time of year...minus the all-too-common post-holiday colds or emotional wounds...no fights with family members, this year...not even close...seriously...and, to the best of my knowledge at this point, on the early evening of the 28th, nothing caught from little relatives sneezing on me....the days are getting longer by a couple seconds with every sunrise, and 2011, less than a week ahead, is shaping up already to be a year of momentous events...in my little universe, at least...(but more on those, later)...best wishes, namaste, & all that to all you Floating Glowing Beings of Pure Love out there who give Yoga for Cynics meaning by reading (even when its author's in a crappy mood)...

From the Coffee Shop at Kripalu...

soft foggy morning,

mist, quite the view from here, is

that a metaphor?*

* ...biggest problem with this place is the food's so good, and there's so much of it...and afterwards, you do yoga....then, I suspect there are worse things a person can experience in this world than a touch of indigestion during camel pose....all morning, stuff kept reminding me of a dream last night I can't remember...just strange amorphous resonances....was telling Brooks...(even better in person than on-line)...about it...she asked what the dream felt like....I thought for a minute, said nice...warm...she said that's good...and I think she's probably right...

In Dog We Trust

...had a yoga teacher once who talked a lot about the tailbone...as yoga teachers are wont to do...pointing out that it’s an evolutionary vestige...meant to control the tails we no longer have...unfortunately...

...with tails, he said, dishonesty would be impossible...imagine playing hard-to-get with tail wagging vigorously...or, conversely, trying desperately but failing to make it move while emitting false, empty I-love-you’s...

...looking after my friend Bella...pictured, above...for the week...a chance to renew my abiding faith and trust in...dog...

turning out the lights,
I hear a thump thump thumping
on the wooden floor

Autumn Rivulets 2 & 3

...keep finding myself in conversations like this:
Complete stranger: Whadja think o’ [somebody who apparently plays baseball] in the seventh last night?
Me: Uh...he was great...
Complete stranger: Whaddaya mean great?! That douchebag mighta cost us the series!!
Me: Oh...right...yeah...he sucks...

Chilly November
Philly’s in the world series
And I just don’t care

...was reading this newspaper article about somebody who, it said, had an unfinished life...which is the kind of thing you say about people who die before their time....as if life were a novel...and a conventional one, at that...a coherent narrative with proper beginning, middle, and end...exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, denouement...and something seems very wrong when it doesn’t turn out that way...when the final chapters we were expecting turn out to be missing....maybe it ends halfway through a chapter, a paragraph, a sentence...leaving no neat, cozy message to tease out in English class...except maybe that life and death have no interest in the stories we create...the leaves are gonna turn and fall whether our summer plans have been completed satisfactorily or not...

Autumn Rivulet #1

I’m in the here and now and I’m meditating, and
still I’m sufferin’, but that’s my problem...
Van Morrison

...as long as you’re breathing, there’s more right with you than wrong with you...
Jon Kabat-Zinn

felt a cool autumn
breeze upon waking, though no
window was open

After the Equinox

still life drifting past
the autumnal equinox,
and I just can’t deal

...got done what absolutely had to get done, put everything else off ‘til next week...whether that was wise or not...got in the car after dark and drove east...crossing the Walt Whitman Bridge a little after ten, getting to the ocean some time after midnight...all to wet toes in salt water before sleeping...

alone by the sea
except for that young couple
fucking in the sand

Early Morning Haiku

hammering next door

momentarily blocked out

by the garbage truck

Zen-Like and Irritating

A friend always tells me when I’m being Zen-like and irritating...particularly when, just after yoga class, I seem unable to form a solid opinion about where we should go for beer...wanting simply to flow along with others’ plans like a babbling brook...or something...and I appreciate that.

Meditating, I
become a pain in the ass
to all of my friends

And so I offer up this haiku in small tribute to the long-suffering multitudes who tirelessly put up with pretentious yogis, hippie Buddhists, and other annoyingly cosmic and mellow types.

(...though suspecting that doing so only makes me more Zen-like and irritating...there’s a koan in there somewhere...)

Kind of a Haiku by Allen Ginsberg

And now...an exclusive, never-before-published haiku by a famous dead American poet. Really. Seriously:

Just wandered in from
the void for a poetry
reading, the next morning
I was hung over.
Allen Ginsberg

You’re probably thinking that doesn’t look much like a haiku—in fact it looks even less like one on the original page, since the line brakes above are really just where the writing hit the edge of the paper, and he certainly wasn’t even trying for 5-7-5 (though it has been argued that, given the essential differences between Japanese and English, that schema isn’t important for English-language haiku, anyway) (then, those presenting that argument might simply be lazy) (but...far be it from me to get into debates about poetic form).

It was back in the summer of 1990, I believe, though it could possibly have been '91, while I was embarrassing my parents living the life of a slacker out in Boulder, a year out of college, no prospects for or particular interest in a promising career of any kind, and, when not wandering in the mountains or otherwise sacrificing brain cells to unknown gods, attending a free Zen meditation class at the Naropa Institute, which was also attended, at least once or twice, by Ginsberg, who one Saturday (I think), as part of a benefit for something or other, along with some other poets, did this thing—basically, you stood in line, paid a few or maybe five bucks, and a famous poet would ask you a few questions, then write an instant haiku on the spot....I told Ginsberg I was just wandering, kind of a bum—apparently thinking maybe he’d be impressed and tell me I reminded him of Kerouac or something (he wasn’t, and didn’t)—I also told him I’d gone to a poetry reading the night before, and now, in the morning, was hung over...and so ended up with a piece of rag paper, with this poem, a little drawing of a flower and what looks like a snake, and Ginsberg’s signature on it. I’ve still got it, though in the midst of a long summer living in my van, something apparently got spilled on it, staining and smudging it badly, particularly the signature, though you can still read it...kinda.....

That summer or maybe the next one, I also attended a seminar Ginsberg did—once a week for I think three weeks we read Blake and Whitman, and Allen related the poems to his sex life, drug experiences, and conversations with Bob Dylan...which could be interesting, sometimes, like when he talked about this Blake poem:

He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunrise

and applied it to how, at one time in his life, he’d kept taking acid, each time hoping this one will last until, finally, he learned to kiss it as it flies...and he drew attention to this part of a line from an obscure version of the well known I asked a thief:

‘twixt earnest & joke

arguing that it was central to his own poetry as well as that of Shakespeare and lots of other people...now that I think of it, it’s probably central to Yoga for Cynics, too...and, some years later, in grad school I used it as the basis for what became my first published scholarly article, called The Trickster Metaphysics of Thylias Moss. Thylias Moss writes stuff like this:

Somebody told me I didn’t exist even though he was looking dead at me. He said that since I defied logic, I wasn’t real for reality is one of logic’s definitions. He said I was a contradiction in terms, that one side of me cancelled out the other leaving nothing. His shaking knees were like polite maracas in the small clicking they made. His mustache seemed a misplaced smile. My compliments did not deter him from thinking he conversed with an empty space since there was no such thing as an angel who doesn’t believe in God....

but, that was another time....