Presenting The Fragments

Kurt Vonnegut - you can buy his artworks here

(And you really should)

It's raining. I wanted to mention it in case you hadn't noticed. As I write, my next door neighbour is hammering on his wall/floor/ceiling/own head in desperation (it's hard to tell with the wall in between) - a sound that leaves me endangered by insanity for some time until I realise that yelling "Come in!" every time he stops banging neutralises my irritation with childish laughter. Is the universe really this simple?

The rain awakens a need to daydream in me at a time when I should be catching up with a thousand emails and a backlog of work the length of my face. That may not seem very long but now imagine that the length of my face is made up of single sheets of paper, piled on top of one another, and that each sheet of paper contains at least three hours work.

Yep, you're with me now. That's quite a lot of face-length paper work.

Or quite a clumsy metaphor. Don't blame me, we can't all be Samuel Clemens, and besides, as Kurt Vonnegut once said: Life is no way to treat an animal.

The thing is that I would rather be out in the rain, drowning my soul by millimetres and gently contracting pneumonia than sat here working. Of course, this is a moot point anyway, because I'm not working, I'm talking to the virtual ether with invisible finger ink and looking for music I've never heard before on the wonderweb.

This is a glorious age for procrastination.

I wonder if it's the same rain-inspired waterbird urge that has been the catalyst for my return to poetry-writing. I'm flirting round the edges of haiku lately, inspired by my friend Sir Michael of the Museum, whose delicious haiku on "the blind dog in the new house" I have posted on the blog before (note to self, must sort out the tag/label for post technologic at some point, another task for the paperface list).

Searching for Michael's haiku via Google I come across something even better than the post on my own blog - a whole page of Sir Michael's haiku. As I've had his permission before, I know I can reproduce his blind dog haiku here:

wagging its tail
in the new house
the blind dog

But I also want you to go and look at the link, because there are some absolute gems in there - especially for all you haiku fans.

You can have a taste of my trip across the sort-of haiku lands (I am not yet at the stage of counting syllables and Michael has told me the form can be very contentious amongst haikuians anyhow):

On the courthouse wall
leaves are flowing
like a river

I, too, unfurl at midnight
a darkling blossom
a flower of the moon


Somewhere
lost in snow
flows a remembered river

I find most of these in my diary, and usually barely remember how they got there. Often they are scribbled on scraps of paper, sometimes as I walk along the street, and stuck into my diary later. Until I discovered haiku, I thought of them as only 'The Fragments.'

I ordered a laptop today, after annoying all the techno-genies I know on what to buy (Ben, Glenn and James - many thanks for all your advice and endless patience with my obvious ineptitude). It should arrive early next week.

Aaah, the anticipation....