A "Too Long" Haibun
Apparently, the people in the know don’t like haibun (these prose with haiku) to be more than one paragraph. Apparently over 100 words is against the ivory towers of academia, the societies of Haiku, and other places of experts.
But where were these informed societies and those who have form and processes solved when I struggled to learn to read, the noise of a classmate’s pencil grinding in my ear drums so deep the words in front of me just kept going by and I had no idea what I read? Just the noise of a hand rubbing paper and my comprehension was lost for a while, maybe for the day or week. I went back to fighting the communists in the Cold War from my school desk imaginations. I wasn’t them, but me, who figured out how to read 25-100 books a year.
And where were these experts with their absolutes when I had no idea how to write a sentence… in college? For real, I dropped out of Composition One twice because I was failing miserably. It wasn’t until a professor, filling in for another, with me going through my second time in college and my gut steeled towards learning grammar that I found out about Noam Chomsky and Generative Transformational Grammar, that the rules of grammar weren’t really rules at all, but B.S. carried from crazy Latin grammar rules and now we know how our speech now guides grammar. My mind exploded and that very moment I learned to listen to my inner voice. I learned to listen to that voice and then argued myself from a 94 to 105 on a test in my next Advanced Grammar class, bringing myself out of flailing and failing with a 60 to pass with an A. I publish weekly and forget these experts exist a lot of the time.
So like those from Basho to Shiki—the writers who broke haiku from the haikia, from the collaborative longer form to an individual expression in a few lines —I just want to see what is in front of me, not as the group needed it.
But even if there was no Basho or Issa to go before me and you, these words are mine, yours are yours. They are the observation and the unveiling of each of us. They are words and they are power. They are words and when done in truth, they can be one of the truest forms of love and freedom. Yet they become trash when they are reduced to serving forms and the power structures of politics, religion, academia, etc. These are the bare bones of it all!
Dang it, this is the sixth paragraph!
no outsides to spare, bones bare
spring brings little care
