Uncontrollable Haiku

 

The Belvidere Oasis

is built above the interstate.

We grip burgers at a window seat

as the traffic pours toward us.

Collision seems inevitable:

semis pass under, sometimes 

two at once with rhyming thunder. 

Say two maple leaves

from the same tree are

blown to separate locations.

One floats on the lake. The other 

lies on grey pebbles.

This is my divorce.

This is the truck stop after divorce.

Brother one day when we were boys

we pissed outside standing 

90 degrees from each another, crossing 

streams to produce an intersection 

of pale uric gold.

We did this in ceremonial promise

that we'd be brothers forever

no matter what. The stand of pines

surrounding us served as collective

climbable witness. 

All done. All done. Brothers forever.

(shake it, zip it.)

Now you guide me to Minnesota

after a manic episode of mine

coinciding with my marital leaf-parting.

You say I can start a new life,

but what will be new about it?

Nothing but pain will come of it.

Trees in their autumn beauty

speak with their leaves not at all

from my island distance.

Still, I take some heart knowing

that that liquid oath of ours proceeding

from the bladder of childhood

cashes itself in today, splashing 

my walking shoes of ignominy

with persistent fraternal grace.

HB, Sissyfuss-Zephyrus 2025

Something to Pass the Time when you're Sick Maybe. 

Here's a word game. The idea is to write down a word and then add syllables that complete that word in a word that in sum is larger and more interesting.

A    my      ex    cel    lo    be    den     Herrn

So  a is completed by my, making Amy, my by ex making my ex, ex by cel making excel. And I completed this one with a little German, breaking the rules a bit, but the point isn't necessarily to make a sentence. It's to create a set of words that seems beautiful and meaningful together. Or just plain funny. Proper names are fine. Other ways of joining the words, say by rhyme might also be fun, though I haven't included that here. 

Pine     sap    sucker    punch     bowl

Cal    if    or     nigh    a     lot    teri

Half     penny     wise     ass

Wist    Erie    a    light     nighty

Have Fun!

HB

 

Chuck, Morgan 

Chuck me in the pen 

of bedazzled time, where

the rooster struts that struck 

the dawn of dawns apert awake

infinitely influentially so.

My name is Chuck what's yours?

Morgan.

(Time flows by)

The rooster flies off inevitably,

but the roster of two remains. 

Hush this is the story we love. Love.

Zephyrus 2025

Item by Item Meditation on a Networked World

1. The world has always been networked.
2. The world is already networked.
3. Sex is networking,
4. as is music and all the arts,
5. including the art of cooking
6. which has long since needed a patron muse.
7. I would suggest maybe a guy named Gormaldo.
8. Just a suggestion.
9. I mean really, who hasn't connected over food?
10. Now.
11. Reading and writing is networking too.
12. And speaking of reading,
13. a good receptive reader is fertile with a kind of blindness,
14. like a potato's eye just on the verge of sprouting.
15. The idea here is that you read expecting your eyes to sprout toward the indicative light of the text.
16. Sometimes this sprouting happens, sometimes it does not. 
17. Incidentally some writers are cool, others are not. 
18. Try to read the cool ones, who sound like catbirds
19. because they love the variety of the song of life
20. and put their words together with a sense of sympathy and poise and an easy sense of wonder.
21. By the way, it's probably obvious but
22. garrulousness is a plus as well as an A+ when it comes to networking.
23. Now to change the subject one more time,
24. Catbirds are sonic bricoleurs.
25. They make their songs out of other birds' songs. 
26. So there you have it. That's what they do,
27. and to get to the point,
28.  all language is a phenomenon which is sort of reducible to
29. millions and millions of catbirds in the human brain
30. that say stuff out of an enthusiasm for networking, and what they say is: 
31. Reader, thou has sprouted.
32. I mean, if you have.

A Song

My man's Typee, the second son of Aldrin

(who was the second man to step upon the moon)

but I do swear the number 2’s my favorite

we’re talking sweater, red apples and God's hair. 

Chorus

Come on thru, come on thruuuu

I just loved the baby train of you,

Come on thru, come on thruuuuu

Make the thru delicious kind to me.

This is the last burst of our lost communion,

therefore I call thee beauty man adieu,

but if you’ll be my baby train believer

I’ll never say a whisk of ta-ta-doo.

 

Chorus

This is the last broom of our last communion

There is nothing much fewer than a few,

Come on thru, come on thruuuuu,

shovel steam don't disregard the cue.

HB