January 15, 2004

Happy Januween

I was cleaning about my Yahoo mail today (I've been scraping along at around 96% of the inbox's capacity for quite a while now), and I found three haiku I submitted to Archie McPhee's Halloween Haiku contest way back in 2002.

Sidebar: Odds are you don't know about my haiku history, so this is an opportune moment to ramble on about it. I used to be a big contributor to the Spam Haiku Archive, and many of the poems I wrote for it were reprinted in the book "Spam-Ku: Tranquil Meditations on Luncheon Loaf". By virtue of being someone who checks his e-mail obsessively, I was also the first to answer the call to be interviewed for this article.

But that's not all! I am also one of the contributors to the "error message haiku" which made the e-mail rounds -- usually without attribution -- a few years back. Mine was also one of several of those haiku read into the record of the Microsoft antitrust trial, another example of me controlling the world from behind the scenes. That's right; it's me and the Jews, baby. First Microsoft, then igry.

So I write a lot of cheesy hack haiku is what I'm saying. Anyway, here are the winners of the Archie McPhee contest, and the three haiku I submitted, for your delectation. Note the seasonal reference in the first one, for full haiku cred.

Store-bought plastic suit
Cannot keep out the fall chill --
Mask still makes me sweat

Apple in my bag
Glowing red like a stoplight:
Razors lurk within

My dead mother's ghost
Knocks bookshelves over if I
Go out with no coat

In the same vein, here are three zombie haiku I submitted to a Goats competition:

In monsoon season
When I rise up from the earth
My clothes get muddy

Like a bird's delight
In the first worm caught in spring --
Brains of an infant

I walk the wide earth
Barefoot through the deepest snow,
Lacking nerve endings

Posted by Francis at 12:11 AM