The you must watch haiku

You must watch this ad
before you can see what
you wanted to see.

– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2016)

Note
A little kick at today’s coercive online advertising blackmail practices. (Is that a tautology? Doesn’t matter. Drives home the point.) This forced ad exposure reminds me of Stanley Kubricks’s film A Clockwork Orange (1971), where Malcolm McDowell’s eyes were kept open by force so he could not avoid seeing the things that were forced on him. With the aim of turning him into a nice guy from a criminal. So what’s the advertising forced upon us supposed to turn us into? Idiots who will eventually succumb and consume?

The candlelight installation haiku

Bucket-size candle
jars, jasmine water-filled, in
about any church.

– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2016)

Note
This one was sparked by a photo of an eminent contemporary conceptual artist's installation in a church in Santiago de Compostela, Spain. The jasmine water is my invention. Add a wick and paraffin, and it would probably burn nicely. I'm convinced it would smell good in any church. Priests, preachers, bishops, etc., please contact me for possible execution.

The extended burger and fries haiku

Let’s think of the pain
of the cows and potatoes – 
or rather not go there
and eat the damn thing.

– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2016)

Notes
This one's pretty much self-explanatory... I admit to having second thoughts every time I eat a hamburger somewhere. And the haiku is definitely extended.

The Heather Nova haiku

Dedicated to Alexa

Said my daughter: you’re
the only person I know 
who listens to her.

– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2016)

Notes
The truth and nothing but the truth (about the quote*). Out of the blue** I felt the urge to listen to Heather Nova’s London Rain and its healing effects*** today.

* Some evening in the early 2000s I ended up watching part of a Heather Nova concert on German TV, probably as a result of zapping through channels in search of something watchable. I don’t recall anyone else who comes off as ethereal on stage, as dreamy and enamored with singing with eyes closed. It’s something that can get too much. However, I ended up getting some Heather Nova CDs and playing them frequently when my daughter still lived at home. Hence the quote. I don’t think she liked H. N. very much. She preferred bands like The Back Street Boys back then.
** Does anything ever really occur out of the blue?
*** Nothing falls like London rain / Nothing heals me like you do

The friend from my youth haiku

She used words that I
would have never used to make
new categories.

– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2016)

Note
This one is about a friend from my youth (as she called me even 20 years ago). When she used that term, I felt hurt because she seemed to be saying that we were friends back then but could no longer be. She had created a limited category instead of the friends is friends and friends last for ever that I would have preferred.

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.

Emancipated

“A little backbone once in a while wouldn’t cheapen your dangle,” she said with a twinkle in her eye.

I’d just apologized to the waiter for the fact that she had ordered a Dos Equis and that he had brought her a Tres Equis.

When, in fact, I was pretty sure she’d said Tres Equis.

Now what the hell was her meaning?

Which is exactly what I asked her.

“It means that you should learn to stand up to some people, my dear man. And it would not hurt that swagger of yours I love so much,” she laughed and slapped me in the area of my bum – which she couldn’t quite get to because we were seated.

Reading between the lines is sometimes difficult.

What she really was trying to say might be, “Stand up to others as much as you like, but be wax in my dainty little hands.”

However, there definitely had been some innuendo in the dangle.

So that I was not entirely surprised when she suggested going back to our room after a while.

– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2016)

Written around the words backbone, cheapen and dangle from 3WW.

The Martin Shkreli haiku

There he goes crowing
and smirking: the cockiest
cock on the dunghill.

– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2016)

Note
This one was prompted by this morning’s news on France 24, where it was said that Martin Shkreli might easily be America’s most hated man nowadays.

The early morning dog haiku

Barking. The shrill kind,
a smallish yelp. Ecstatic
to have done a job.

– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2016)

Note
I hope this renders the facts as experienced from my early morning office: the yelp of a dog being walked somewhere in the vicinity. Saw neither the dog nor its walker. The job is my interpretation. Alas, many of these jobs can be encountered in the vicinity.

The Ansel Adams haiku

Oak tree, grassy hill,
fence posts in bottom foreground,
color, faded some.

– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2016)

Note
It’s a little known fact that the American photographer Ansel Adams (1902-1984), who is famous for his monochrome photographs of American landscapes, also experimented with color photography. This poem is a direct reference to one of his color photos, which can be seen online here. The first two lines actually consist of the photo’s matter-of-fact description at the Center for Creative Photography site.