We will now turn to the magazine Peaches and Bats, issue 5.
And we'll read some of those pieces.
And we'll find here that some of these
are haibun the famed prose cousin of haiku
with a little tail at the end that little coda--
that haiku of unrestricted syllable length that's so
pleases us all.
I got going on these little numbers in 1984
when I saw that April issue of Clayton Eshleman's magazine
Sulfur, and Ashbury had done I think six of them.
So I thought, hey, maybe I will try one of those.
Well, I've been doing it ever since.
It's like a contagious disease.
So stand back, OK?
This is called "Impact" "I haven't loved you in a decade.
And some days I don't recall your name.
I do remember that you wear your hair as though it is
an inconvenience that cannot be tamed without calling out
a posse and embarrassing whoever neighbors are.
It is well within my psyche to confer
with people who claim expertise about my out-of-bounds response
to you.
I am habituated to deciding the less said
about either one of us, the better
for distinguishing old wealth from dust mites on holiday.
A fortnight slides past before I have
to think about the smell of single cigarettes smoked
in the movies of the '40s.
Once a man wearing a distinguished hat
attempted to hire me as his immediate superior.
I wore a blank look in hopes of being let go like an adverb.
He merely caught me between meetings,
proving once again that I exist until I don't, at which point
you can reminisce being positioned out back
where the staff retrieved scraps of material that
did not make it into art--
saffron rice, elliptical machines, and roommates
voted off the island."