Do you still like jazz?
I think you do.
I don’t know why.
Buncha cats with all their notes.  Nonsense.

Play certain notes.
Be selective.
Don’t just play any stupid note.

Lazy jazz cats with their heroin tracks and same-sounding songs.
Harumph. 

This is a little something I call “Superbowl Sunday Haiku.”  Um, okay, I mean it’s a little something that E. calls “Superbowl Sunday Haiku” (contributed by E.) 

Here goes.

Oh wait, that last title was the Subject line.  The real haiku title is:

Super Duper Kamikaze

Pigskin in the sky
Chicks launched high into the blue
Superbowl haiku

(90 seconds.  Submit four-minute or sooner poems here.)

 … A. sent a beautiful poem yesterday.  And for the entire day, it had a horrific typo.  “I pick scallions for my wife”, was posted as “I pick scallions for my life“, which besides completely altering his original meaning, makes it appear as though A. rather amateurishly repeated life. 

Ack, A. … I’m deeply ashamed.  There will be a full apology and retraction from this publication soon, and Teresa DiFalco will be immediately fired.

Not that this is any small consolation for upending your once-promising career as a poet. 

I’ll give you a dollar and 30 cents, then.  And don’t stop poeming, ever. 

They come furious and fast; this one not quite either, but here goes:

I pick apples from the apple tree  (When did you ever pick apples from the apple tree?)
As the kids run free

I pick scallions from the garden for my wife  (They’re leeks)
It’s a wonderful life

There is a wine grape-covered trellis by the pool (We’ll never sit there)
We are too cool

There is rhubarb and blueberries galore
What more can one hope for? (I was hoping for a new car.)

But what grows most noticeable
Is not what is edible

It is more family time
For which I rhyme.

-A.

[In the future, poems may require a huge reading fee.  Still, send them in.]

… He gets it exactly right, somehow, every single time.  A. nod, perhaps, to the more senior A. — the one presiding in Rockland County.

Maureen Cannon was doing the two-minute poem way before we were, turns out.  And E’s been spitting them out by the fistful all this time.  The kids are all doing 30-second poems now, E. – chop-chop!

Knowing what you know now, and also that the piece below from E. took an unfathomable four minutes to be born, well viewers … read at your own discretion. 

Not for Psychosis but Rather Mood Stabilization
(In Iambic Pentameter)

I want to be more active and alert,
Without the mud and suck that’s in my head
And heart and blood.  Of all the pills on Earth
to help along your hot daydreams of death,
Geodon, unfairly named, does work the best …

Top that one, kids!

[Send your 30-second or longer poems here.]

From E:

(Conceived and then composed within two minutes)

There’s a thing
What makes writing
Poems real
Hard. It’s the brains,
I think,
the having
to use them.

(Support Guest Poet Monday by sending your very own two-minute poem here.)

Still on drugs; no better …
Snow and cold and showing house
Cleaning, A. did most.

* Click here for your very individually personalized haiku from me the master – $5. Send as gifts!