Ex-Tabula Rasa

Haikus of Wisdom

Watched pots never boil

More so if you’re watching them

Run off with your wife

-

A watched banana

Never ripens; Trust me

I’ve been staring for, like, six hours or something and it’s still green

-

Wait, it’s a plantain

I abused the haiku syl

lable scheme for naught

6:59 AM by Shane Koyczan

I’ve been told
that people in the army
do more by 7:00 am
than I do
in an entire day

but if I wake
at 6:59 am
and turn to you
to trace the outline of your lips
with mine
I will have done enough
and killed no one
in the process.

(You may remember this guy as being the best thing at the Vancouver Winter Olympic opening ceremony. I am going to buy all his books and CDs. You should too.)

Is Poetry Friday still a thing?

Aidan Moffat - Cunts

We like to fuck and shag, we’re not into making love

But I hope that she’d admit that we’ve done all of the above

I’ve got a cock or sometimes a willy, I’m referred to as her bird,

And she’s usually got a fanny, rarely any other word,

Though you might’ve heard a pie once, or a bum-not-back-but-front,

Or maybe the odd snatch, but never once a cunt.

She only uses that word when it’s Scottish for amigo,

Or to punctuate a sentence when deflating my wee ego.

Some Other Just Ones (A Footnote to Borges) by Steven Heighton

The printer who sets this page with skill, though he may not admire it.

Anyone whose skeleton is susceptible to music.

She who, having loved a book or record, instantly passes it on.

Whose heart lilts at a span of vacant highway, the fervent surge of acceleration, psalm of the tires.

Adults content to let children bury them in sand or leaves.

Those for whom sustaining hatred is a difficulty.

Surprised by tenderness on meeting, at a reunion, the persecutors of their youth.

Likely to forget debts owed them but never a debt they owe.

Apt to read Plutarch or Thich Nhat Hanh with the urgency of one reading the morning news.

Frightened ones who fight to keep fear from keeping them from life.

The barber who, no matter how long the line, will not rush the masterful shave or cut.

The small-scale makers of precious obscurios—pomegranate spoons, conductors’ batons, harpsichord tuning hammers, War of 1812 re-enactors’ ramrods, hand-cranks for hurdy-gurdies.

The gradeschool that renewed the brownfields back of the A&P and made them ample miraculous May and June.

The streetgang that casts no comment as they thin out to let Bob the barking man squawk past them on the sidewalk.

The two African medical students in Belgrade, 1983, who seeing a traveller lost and broke took him in and fed him rice and beans cooked over a camp stove in their cubicle of a room and let him sleep there while one of them studied all night at the desk between the beds with the lamp swung low.

Those who sit on front porches, not in fenced privacy, in the erotic inaugural summer night steam.

Who redeem from neglect a gorgeous, long-orphaned word.

Who treat dogs with a sincere and comical diplomacy.

Attempt to craft a decent wine in a desperate climate.

Clip the chain of consequence by letting others have the last word.

Master the banjo.

Are operatically loud in love.

These people, without knowing it, are saving the world.