little dark lost

Little distant glimmers
Drop off alone but in sequence
They were only tiny rays
But without them I dance in the dark

Kitten Haikus

This is a series of haikus I wrote when Kiyoshi the Kitten first came to live with me.  Posted for posterity and my own amusement.


Short version of Yoshi’s background: I found him mewling in the bushes beneath my window when I overheard some children; “The cat is still here.  Do you still have that stick?”  No, I did not kill any minors that day. 

Serial Short: Part Three

The funny thing about dreams is the way they mix and match reality. It’s like playing cut and paste with the people, places, and pathologies that make each of us who we are. Perhaps that is why they lend themselves to pop-psychology style interpretations. We think we know ourselves fairly well, but a different combination of faces, locales, and situations might lead us to actions we thought impossible. All the signposts in a dream are familiar but they lead us to destinations we didn’t know existed.

We’ve skipped over again and are passing the last of a shitty joint back and forth in a studio apartment I haven’t lived in for years, in a town that no longer resembles my memories. It’s a one room cottage twenty feet from a major railroad. Its moldy walls are thinly webbed with ancient cracks and seem to breathe due to the sharp angle of the floor. Pipes with shoddy wiring in them encircle the room and run to a 30 year old furnace that hasn’t worked in ten.

Serial Short: Part Two

There's this thing that happens only in movies and dreams; the main characters meet and connect in some way and then are seen together again some amount of time – specified or otherwise -- later. The unseen proceedings are implied and accepted. They aren't terribly important to the main sequence of events so they just get… skipped over. This gap in recorded time has always struck me as similar to a blackout. It's so easy, and ultimately futile, to obsess on the details missed between the moments; a pointless and addictive exercise that is the cause of many flights of fancy and pangs of regret, each more striking -- for better or worse -- than the last. Better to just move forward with what is certain.