A few years back, I fell in with a cohort of poets who challenged each other to write Haikus on our topic of the day. While others found this highly restrictive form of poetry helped open and expand their creativity, for me the required discipline was suffocating and restraining. So, instead of writing three-line poems of five, seven, and five syllables, I created the American Haiku genre, that like America itself, is undisciplined, unregulated, and filled with expressive freedom. Enjoy my American Haikus. . .
Love is layered in loneliness, like sediment
along the banks of a washed-out prairie river winding
through every mistake I've made, every regret
I wish could be washed away by an upstream surge.
I plant trees
to the wistful sound
of drip irrigation,
life defined in incremental intervals.
It's impossible to walk on water
but my kayak gliding across
a still calm lake
gets me pretty damn close.
God-damn I'm tired.
Tired and alone,
tired of being alone,
and that's a God-damn shame.
Hummingbirds swarm in a magical
morning melody, drawing
energy from nectar jars, feverishly
fighting for what can't be owned.
Today is epic. Earth intends
to partner with del sol
basking you in amazement
so that when you smile, others are too.
Your message doesn't surprise me
as much as its cold indifference
and callous way you talk in terms of
nothing I need to hear, devastates me.
Today I travel nine hundred miles
to catch the very same fish
in the lake next door.
I have no need to explain myself.
Even as I knock on your door,
part of me believes you aren't really real.
The rest of me is blown away by
the tender tone of your shy hello.
How do I love you?
How do I not?
My glass tips over,
you're still gone.
It's a helluva boat we've marooned.
Your hesitant, I'm uncertain, and love's lost,
misguided souls desperately clinging to lifelines
as if it's possible to keep from drowning.
Seduction smoothly spans the disparate chasm
separating where you are from how my heart is trending.
It's not that I can't love you, I don't want to
for reasons far eclipsing explanations I can't explain.
I must be alone to settle
accounts and seek
solace in my last redemption.
Mea culpa . . . mea culpa.
Wind winds down my predawn mountain
blanketing me in memories. Somewhere
after long ago but before unscripted futures,
lay lost keys deciphering your cold elusiveness.
Paris calls so I must come.
Curious cobblestones comfort
cautious bones. Sidewalk cafes
callously cast doubt.
I must see you again
even if it breaks my heart.
To hear your voice even though
I can't know your touch.
Just as fire needs oxygen
or wine needs to breathe,
those born to wander
are bound by recursive infinity.
It's easy to say I love you
when I know you don't.
Like expecting a cheater to stop lying
when you know they won't.
Love-locks glisten against the backdrop of Eiffel's tower
reassuring hearts in need of cliche gestures
and nonsensical affinities for love. My sin
is being cast as a relic from a canceled world.
If you play me, it’s okay,
but shame on you.
I’m willing to be a fool
to again know your touch.
You’re damn good kisser,
but it’s the way your fingers
tenderly trace mine
making this moment magical.
I’m far less afraid of consequence
than I am of you. Your smile conveys sympatico,
but behind carefully crafted words
lay many tragic ways this doesn’t end well.
My job is to provide and protect
but no one tells us how
to get beyond
passion and promises.
Shame on me.
Shame on You.
In some odd way
we’re meant for each other.
You vanquish me in whispers
like a gentle night afraid to breathe.
The softness of everything consumed
by cold indifference.
She speaks in accents long ago misplaced
by moments meant to be.
The tenderness of her touch,
aloof sadness encased in smiles.
If you hadn’t lived
at the Goerge’s Cinq in Paris,
we would’ve had a shot.
I can’t roam in worlds like that.
It’s so much more figurative
than the way your fingers glide
along mine, it's how they say
it’s okay to love unafraid.
I hope my life
never comes down
to picking fabric
for car seats.
The wayward way you wander
through our last kiss
before escorting you to your door
tells me I’ll not see you again.
Blinded by the white light of forever
I no longer see you
on my far away horizon.
Acceptance seems so elusive.
She says sadness,
I say blame.
She pretends at happy,
I cry in silence.
I’m a widow to
what’s left,
as if any of that
even matters.
I drink wine when I write,
coffee to proofread,
and whiskey when
trying to make sense of it all.
Rain batters my tin roof
in a way that says, so what.
But what the hell has rain
ever said that made sense.
Kiss me quick before I forget your name.
It's not that I don't like you
so much as I see in your flat line smile
the exit strategy in our first hello.
The dangerous lie
is not the one we tell ourselves,
it's the one we allow
ourselves to believe.
After falling onto the path of
least resistance, I understood,
at least in part, the easy walk
to the wrong side pity.
I'm not enough for some,
and too much for others.
That's why you'll find me leaning
against the wall in the corner.
What a weird way to live.
At a juncture where all my hopes,
all my dreams, depend on someone
I hope loves me as much as I love them.
When fate comes looking, she will find you
and all that remains for
final adjudication is ascertaining if
she's friend or foe.
Recklessness of water,
like sun racing toward
distant horizons, makes no
claim on being kind.
Not seeing things
for what they are
has always been
my Waterloo.
It's a damn sad ending
to what was once so alive,
you're leaving
and I'm way past giving a shit.
Your last words run echos through
the darkness of our distance,
chasing me to worlds where
we're still together.
The distance between the end of you
and new beginnings is measured in
diminishing intervals of regret silhouetted by
melodic movements of orchestrated hope.
Do not mistake my silence
for surrender
when it is
my one defense.
Half a world is not enough
to ride you off my mind
any more than late night Negroni’s
can alter the outcome of my journey.
