Fair Play (Album Leaf)
A fly is dying on my windowsill.
I must prove again that I am not a liar and a cheat. The state demands forms and letters, presented in person, to be sure I am disabled. The trip will cost me days in bed. The able-bodied can apply easily online.
Why should I choose light, when the worst is assumed of me—that I lack social conscience? I am almost housebound. I could pull the wings off the fly. No one would even know.
A clean death is one thing: I would swat a fly without thinking. But to make it suffer? That is my weakness. I am kin, at least to a housefly.
The clerk at the counter wanted to care. You could see it in his eyes.
outside my window
between the dust devils
a mourning cloak
Notes for next time:
I’m reframing these as “Album Leaves” rather than haibun. I would love to write something with the openness of haibun—I would really like to experience that. Instead I keep writing pieces with a point. But I’m loving the way the haiku changes the flow of time from more-or-less linear, with forward pull, to something more three-dimensional.
The haiku is really more of a micro-poem or “triad”; to me it has too strongly individual a point of view for haiku—not a universal first person, or even an “Issa” figure, just me being me. Am I being too fussy about definitions? I wouldn’t write the way I do if I didn’t believe words had precise meanings that reflect (and create) thought processes.
What would make it more haiku-like?
Maybe:
drought in the desert (or “desert spring”)
between dust devils
a mourning cloak (or just a generic “butterfly”?)
or a more universal-person perspective:
other side of the glass—
dust devils
and a mourning cloak
Oh. Yes, that one works.
The triad probably doesn’t “shift” enough for haibun—it’s a deepening or expanding of register, not a linked thought that moves in a new direction. I’m okay with that—I’m currently mostly interested in how the experience of time changes with the triad/haiku.
I don’t think like a Buddhist. (Not a criticism, just an observation.)