the cake is a lie

They were eating cake that was not quite as moist as the Platonic ideal of cake when he paused with his fork-full-of-cake distractingly nowhere near his mouth and said, I don’t understand what you want. What do you want? and she put down her own fork and said, It’s very simple, really. I actually have a list in my purse for situations such as this and she pulled it out and handed it to him. Can’t you just read that to me, he said, I want to hear it in your own words. She said, No problem at all! and she took a sip of tea and cleared her throat. She glanced outside and noted that the sky was dark and growing darker and the wind was beginning to lift very light objects off the ground and toss them back to the ground a few inches away, as if in boredom or disgust. She knew it would get much darker and the atmospheric conditions much more worrisome soon, very soon, so she spoke quickly and with conviction. She would not eat any more cake today, she decided; cake was not what she wanted, not on this day, of all days. 

First of all I would like a bird, bright blue, yellow, or red, to perch on the windowsill outside my bedroom and advise me on matters of importance, preferably inscrutably, so that the bird’s meaning remains a mystery throughout my life, something to ponder when I’m old and perhaps come to understand only on my deathbed. 

Second I would like to be able to fly the way I already am able to fly in dreams, without any superfluous equipment, without any discernible anxiety, without giving any particular thought to the matter at all.

Third I would like an apology. 

Fourth I would like to get home before the snow flies, and the snow will be flying soon, so I’ll be going now and I advise you to do the same. 

While she spoke he took three bites of cake and the sugar in the frosting grated more sharply against his teeth with every bite. He thought he could feel the individual crystals of sugar as they dissolved on his tongue. The electric lights flickered as she finished speaking and everyone in the room looked up, but happily, he thought, as if hoping that a bounty would crash through the ceiling tiles and they could rush to collect it. I’m sorry, he said. But now it was completely dark and he couldn’t see her face, only her form as she put her list back in her purse and rose to the ceiling.

 

 

 

February 6: You Say It’s Your Birthday

.
for my birthday
I suppose
the moon
.

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.

For my birthday (yes, it’s today), I gave myself permission to write another haiku about the moon (despite their currency being even more debased than that of haiku about snow). Or rather, to post another haiku about the moon that I wrote a while ago and saved up for my birthday.

I’m giving myself another present, too. I decided to do this last weekend, when I had been sitting at my kitchen table staring at my computer for about nine hours, mostly performing various haiku-related chores delightful activities (no, seriously) like writing the Haikuverse and preparing journal submissions and replying to fascinating blog comments and visiting everybody else’s fascinating blogs and figuring out what tanka were all about anyway. Finally I realized it was going to be dark soon and I quickly stood up on my wobbly legs and put on my running shoes and headed outside.

The air was cold and the light was pure and as I walked the air started flowing more freely to my brain, and within about ten minutes I felt a sense of deep peace and I said to myself, “Self,” I said, “I give you permission not to blog every single day anymore. Because this is getting crazy.”

I know. I know I said I would post a haiku every day for a year, and it’s only been nine months and change. But think about it. Nine months is a long time. In nine months I could have created an entire new human being from scratch. (I’m familiar with the technique involved.) Though I did do this, in a way. I created, or rather re-created, myself.

Okay, melodrama. I know. I hate it too. But in this case I don’t feel that this is too strong a statement. Before I started this blog, I had been wandering around aimlessly through most of my adult life with an unfocused desire to write stuff, but not really sure what that stuff was, or what exactly I had to say. I never finished much of anything I started writing. I lost track of it halfway through; it stopped seeming important or interesting. I was starting to think maybe I wasn’t really a writer after all, except that I had an uncomfortable awareness that the only time I ever felt completely aware and fulfilled and alive was when I was writing something.

And then haiku came up behind me and tapped me on the shoulder and quietly told me to give it a try, and since I wasn’t doing much of anything else at the time I said, “Okay.” On a whim I wrote a few haiku, on a whim I started a blog. As it turned out, this was kind of like going to a party on a whim and meeting the love of your life. Yeah … we’ve been chatting each other up for the last nine months, haiku and I, finding out all the things we have in common, marveling at the similarity of our personal philosophies, sharing our hopes and dreams for the future … at this point, I have to say, it’s pretty much impossible to imagine living without each other.

Which is to say, the reasons for my promising, back in May, to post a haiku every day for a year have essentially been rendered moot. I wanted to make a commitment to a body of writing and not give up on it for a change. I wanted to heal myself of my perfectionism and my reluctance to put any writing out in the world in case someone saw it and laughed at it. Well, none of these things are problems anymore. In fact, the problem I have now is that I would rather write haiku, and read haiku, and write about reading and writing haiku, and communicate with my fellow haiku enthusiasts, than do pretty much anything else. And I have a lot of other things to do. You know, school, and work, and laundry, and interacting with my family more than five minutes a day.

Also, it was fine for a while for me to just write any old haiku and slap it up on the blog without much thought, because I didn’t really know any better. But if I want to grow as a poet I have to not just write a lot of haiku, I have to take the time to live with them, and think about them, and revise them, and make them not just good-enough, but the best they can be. I’m not talking about perfectionism, I’m talking about craftsmanship; I’m talking about artistic integrity … oh God, is this starting to sound pretentious?

You do know what I mean, don’t you? At some point it’s not respectful to your art, or to your audience, to produce too much. To churn out publications just for the sake of publication. I mean, I still write haiku like there’s no tomorrow, but it’s starting to make me slightly sick to post things here that either I think are not really worth anyone’s time to read, or else that I could make even better if I took the time. It’s not that I’m afraid that you’ll laugh at me and point as I walk by and say, “Look, there goes the mediocre haiku poet!” It’s more just that I’m resentful of the time I spend putting up poems on this site that I don’t respect a whole lot instead of writing better poems.

I’m not going away. And the site certainly isn’t going away, it will be here indefinitely as far as I’m concerned. I’ll probably still be posting two or three times a week — you know, when I have something worth saying. I hope you’ll think it’s worth saying, anyway. I hope you’ll keep dropping by. This blog has transformed my life so profoundly — and just writing haiku wouldn’t have done that on its own. The presence of all you fantastic readers, and correspondents, and supporters, and friends is what has made the biggest difference. Not writing in isolation, wondering if I’m crazy. (I mean of course I am crazy, but most of the time you’re nice enough not to point it out.)

Thanks for once again listening to me as I go on and on interminably. (Admit it — you’re a little relieved that you won’t have to deal with that every single day anymore, aren’t you?) Someday, I promise, I am going to learn to pare my prose down the way I pare down haiku.

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another slice
of birthday cake
and life

 

October 26: three lines, three poems

1.

when that box is opened the packing material may surprise you

 

2.

this endless journey the cake I’m bringing you keeps getting heavier

 

3.

your sense of direction do you know where you are now