A Word If You Can Spare

Her eyes dart. There's me, left, below, and sometimes nothing. She's juggling, but doesn't think to catch her parts. They simply wait to hit the ground. Her face is focus, and wonder underneath. If you peel you find quiet fears with loud reasons. Her answers aren't clear but they are transparent. When enough words swell and battle to describe her, she fades, and in her absence, her emptiness speaks to me:

Newborn memory
You stand before me
And taunt me with
The arms at your side

Your blood makes me move
Your bones keep me still
I need your skin to keep me
Clothed

But when I see through you
I do not see you
When I speak to you
My words do not travel

Where do they go, the things we hold in our hands?
How do we find them, the things we never lost?
When will we remember the things we never learned?
Why I do not love you

So I answer with my fleeing words and sounds, and all the things that emerge from my fingers, eyes, and sores. I answer with my unseen stares, my unwashed heart, and unwanted needs. In whispers to the world, and notes sacrificed before so many altars I say:

You cannot tickle your own foot
Though you might feel its scratch

You cannot frighten your own hand
Though it bows in its submission

You cannot yearn for things for you have
But might miss what you've misplaced

You cannot see yourself
Except before a mirror

I know no metaphor or trickery
I can only tell you what you are
A filled cup desperate to pour
A defiant falling
Juice

I have no solution, but am thoroughly immersed
I mistake double meanings for twice the words
Curiosities for desires
Wisdoms for truths

Love is not a thing you wait for
Come to
Or bring

Passion is not a paper trick
Of many-fold wonders
Hung by a string

And alone is not a number

They are the bubbling parts of your mind
The transformable parts of a world
And the means of my meaning

They are words

I'm writing them now, but may come back to hack off parts. What she has is still a mystery to me, but I know I have both longing and love. Freshly plucked with no jar to keep them. Her eyes no longer dart, but remain, and in her stillness her absence wanes. The earth is quiet again beneath me, but remembrances below me still flood with meaning.

I may be here for a while.

Some Haiku

I don't know why in particular I've become interested in haiku, but I have. I post them from time to time on Twitter, but it occurs to me that they're likely being lost in the flood of 140-character posts, so I'm assembling them in one place, and may do so every few months if I produce them at a sufficient rate. These were all written this summer, and are in chronological order:

Summer sky beckons/An empty desk behind me/It's time for dinner

Shit-stained sidewalk/Ambulating down the hill/Cars pass on my left

Banana carcass/Its purpose perfectly served/Lies and stares at me

A "frappelatte"/An airport's quiet hours/And a slow-paced walk

Constant dull humming/With a book and a window/Sound of returning

In addition to the 5-7-5 structure, there are a few rules I tend to apply to haiku. First, they should describe a particular moment. Second, you should not only have 17 syllables, but really respect what it means for them to be different lines. That is, I don't think it passes to take a 17-syllable sentence and present it as haiku. In that case the haiku structure is nothing more than an inside joke, whereas if you respect the structure and what the limitations mean, they can force things out of you that you didn't expect.