5, 7, 5

sleepy summer night
cows under the yellow moon
don't tip them over

I have a haiku problem. I just can't write them. For some strange reason they always come out wrong. Not even "oh, that's not so good" wrong. It's a full-on "is this even poetry or am I in the middle of a brain aneurysm" wrongness.

bag boy in apron
peering at your groceries
judging your baked goods

What's strange is that I used to be able to write them. I had the same teacher for 2nd and 4th grade ( Mrs. Bulmer...best teacher EVER) who introduced me to the style. I remember sitting at my desk and clapping for each syllable as I penned masterpieces about snow and blueberries and horses. While definitely the work of a 2nd and 4th grader, those poems are recognizable as haikus and they make sense. So somewhere between 4th grade and now...I lost the ability to haiku.

soft rain on the roof
dripping on my forehead
call a plumber now

Is Adult-Onset Haiku Deficiency (AOHD) a real thing? Do you think there are treatment programs for this? Do those programs involve lots of Japanese art and thinking about nature? Or am I just doomed to keep producing these same disasters?

cookies in the trash
under a banana peel
wasted happiness

Things I’ve almost written

Last night was one of those nights. You know the kind. Your fingers itch, your mind races and you long to put words to paper. But for some reason nothing worked out. My writing stuttered all night, each new idea dying out just after conception. It was terribly frustrating and not just because I felt impotent. Some of these ideas were really interesting!

1. “The Littlest Thief” – An epic ballad of a young girl from New Jersey and her quest that turned her into a camel thief.
2. A series of limericks that mocked cable news pundits.
3. “Foster!” – An opera about people who give temporary homes to wild animals.
4. “The Telltale Pea” – Dramatic retelling of the DVD remote that got lost under my mattress.
5. Short fiction piece with the prompt “Don’t you wear those on your feet?”
6. An essay on the importance of bread choices in sandwich making.
7. “Hammering Bones” – A love poem about pianos (or possibly a skeleton)

Okay, I said they were interesting…I didn’t say they were good.