I set a personal record for how many times the water had automatically shut off while I was trying to wash my hands in the bathroom one day and seethed in frustration at my desk for about fifteen minutes before writing this poem. I understand wanting to save water. I understand the sort of low-volume but highly-aerated water flows that these faucets create. I understand that this is probably the best answer for the environment in some regard. I also know that using a normal faucet lets me quickly clean my hands and rinse them in less than a quarter of time it usually takes me to rinse them under one of these low-volume faucets, even if I cut out the time I spent trying to get the water to turn back on while my hands are covered in soap. Honestly, this one is pretty straight-forward with almost no hidden or subtextual meaning and represents a lot of the frustrations I feel working in corporate environments were policy is chosen based on intention without any attention paid to actual outcomes.
Continue readingPoetry
My Year In Haiku: 2024
Time for my now-traditional post with a sampling of the journaling Haiku I wrote over the course of last year! This is my third year in a row doing one of these posts, so I feel confident calling it a tradition now. As usual, each of these haiku is titled with the date it represents in my journal, which means you’ll see a few with the same name. These similarly-titled haiku are not necessarily thematically linked, but they sometimes are. The point of journaling in haiku format is to force myself to really focus on what I’m feeling, how I’m feeling it, and what all comes with those feelings, so I try to avoid writing multiple Haiku as that kind of defeats the purpose of thinking it all through until I can express it in three short lines of text. But the human condition is rarely that concise and while I love giving myself unnecessary restrictions and rules to follow, I’ll be the first to admit that sometimes rules are meant to be broken and sometimes coloring outside the lines can serve to highlight the moment of deviation as an intentional and important choice.
So here’s a bunch of notes from last year. I’ll warn you now, it was not a great year for me. 2023 was the “most” year I’ve had in my life, maybe, but 2024 is the one where I’ve been the most miserable, which feels like it really says something if you know my personal history… I spent most of it dealing with some amount of constant pain, had a period of sleeplessness that mirrored my teenaged insomnia burst (which I often refer to as the grey/cloudy period of my life), and had such a significant reduction in my personal spoons that I could barely make myself reach out to talk with my friends online. Everything was a struggle at the best of times, thanks to the pain and other side effects of the medication I was on, and yet it was also the most physically demanding year I’ve had at work so far. I tried to avoid picking only the miserable, unhappy haiku, but avoiding all of them would have meant not doing a year-in-review post. So, with that important bit of context in mind (and absolutely no additional context since that’s kind of the subtextual point of these haiku: personal emotional expression devoid of full context), here is what last year looked like in my journal.
Continue readingdiss sew sea aye shun
One Star Morning
This poem is from a month after last week’s. I had noticed a pattern evolving in my life–though it would take until September to notice it in my writing and poetry–that seems so obvious in retrospect. The general pain and stiffness caused by the medications I was taking had turned even the ordinary and simple activities of my life into tasks that now cost me more than they ever had. A cost that would continue going up. I wrote this poem shortly after the first time I realized that my old way of doing things wouldn’t work any more. I had to find a new way to manage myself, my emotions, and where I chose to spend my slowly dwindling energy.
Continue readingFrom A Dry Well
I like to think that most of my serious metaphors are pretty apt, but I don’t think I’ve tripped and fallen into one so completely apt as this one. It is rare when life’s metaphors line up so perfectly with life, but I’ve never been the sort to let a moment like that go by unremarked. I wrote this after almost six months without writing any poetry, which is a long time for me to go without writing at least SOMETHING, regardless of whether or not it might see the light of day, so I think you can see why it might have struck a chord with me as one of the first things I wanted share when I finally moved my blog to a home where the host isn’t going to sell my data to some “AI” company…
Continue readingMy Year In Haiku: 2023
In what will probably become a yearly tradition (two years in a row does not a tradition make, but three definitely does so I look forward to calling this a tradition next year), it is time for my yearly Haiku post! Before I share all these little glimpses into my day-to-day life in 2023, though, I’ve got a couple notes. First and foremost, they’re all titled as the date I wrote them, which can be a bit troubling sometimes since there’s a few from the same date, but they’re not necessarily connected beyond sharing the title. I leave it up to your interpretation to decide if they’re a part of the same message or disconnected expressions. Additionally, and probably most importantly, these aren’t traditional Haiku. Or really Haiku at all, since the structure of them is a part of the poetic form and the whole 5-7-5 thing is an English adaption of a Japanese form of poetry. Unfortunately, we changed a poetical form and reused the name, so I’m pretty much stuck calling them Haiku for the time-being. If you’re one of the handful of people who was about to bust my chops before I wrote this disclaimer, just think of them as structured free-verse poetry. If you weren’t about to bust my chops, then it’s fine and we can keep calling them Haiku because language shifts and changes and I think its fine to reuse names in new ways for things that people used to be confused about.
Continue readingCell Phone Thoughts
I used to wonder why I never saw my cell phone in my dreams, or why I never even thought about it while dreaming. Then I was grateful, since it meant I could escape it’s constant presence in my life. Now, I wonder if it’s been a part of my dreams all this time, just in a way I didn’t recognize because the parts of it that matter in the way that dreams matter seemed so similar to my own thoughts.
Continue readingSelf-Destructive Repetition
In Time
A thousand idle dreams
Race through my mind
In the time it takes
To change lanes
And I fly down the highway,
Windows open,
As the stereo blasts
A melancholic upbeat tune.