I explained to you exactly

why I love you.

A mushroom was growing out of your nose.

Because of the mushroom, you couldn't speak.

But you explained to me nonetheless that I hadn’t understood a thing.

Which I realized!

Where your eyes must have been, behind the ever-growing mushroom, sprigs of parsley were sprouting.

Your mouth dropped like a potato, still mouthing something as it was falling down.

Startled, I stepped back before your mushroom head could touch me or the parsley could tickle me.

– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2026)

Posted in response to Friday Writings #250: Memories and Dreams, this is actually the translation of a surreal dream I’d originally written down in German. The painting above by Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1526-1593) would seem a good match for this vegetable-centric dream.

The surreal surprise haiku

Black, black cherries. And
suddenly an eruption
of earwigs, earwigs.

– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2017)

Note
Did not happen quite that way. But I started eating a nectarine when a big earwig fell out of the pit, which had partially split the way it sometimes happens with nectarines. That was surreal enough, actually. But then I thought of a pile of black cherries and discovering, when taking a closer look, that there were masses of earwigs underneath a thin layer of cherries...

The surreally sentenced haiku

Thirty days of hot 
landswart for the misdeamer, 
said the judge. Gavel!

– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2016)

Note
Another one that came to me while I was half asleep and getting ready to wake up.