since late 2019 my mind has found ever more simultaneous comfort, absurdity, and expression in the five seven five syllable format. what started simply as prompt to keep my thoughts concise has exponentiated into an obsession that has found haiku embedded in talks and essays, sculpted into kinetic meta meditations, and littered throughout all of my notebook journals of these last three years
we start with the poems i wrote in 2019 whilst performing at dreamworld, move through two lockdowns, a devastating break up, a few breakdowns, more breakthroughs, a rock bottom, and about year and a half of sobriety so far
possibly to the greatest extent of all of my works, these poems were written exclusively for my self - they are the doodles that make up my journals - a way of processing my feelings and experiences. for this reason these poems are presented in chronological order with the chapter titles being the titles of the notebooks they were written in.
while i am more than aware that there are traditional ‘haiku writing rules’, i have never felt bound by anything more than the mental gymnastics of trying to fit as much profundity as possible into the five, seven, and five form. i especially enjoy those instances where the form lines up perfectly with a sentiment’s optimal expression, or precisely those where it grates and strains, or even breaks
