Unpublishable Haiku #11

To reach customer
service call one eight hundred
two five eight three sev
                 -Andrew Schwalm

Unpublishable Haiku # 10

I am given change
for renting a bicycle
with three cigarettes

                                                                by Fred Shultz

Unpublishable Haiku # 9

Bowl of cereal,
half-ton of Cabernet grapes,
Last iceberg melting

                                                                   by Benjamin North Spencer 
                                                                  (an actual real-live winemaker)

(Definitely) Unpublishable Renga # 1

wrote haiku
tried hard
never heard from you

                                                                   by Adam Crohn

Hey Adam, I thought
A haiku was supposed to
have five, seven, five? 

                                                                   by Costa Tsiatsos

Nate, you are so close
But you must be quite busy
Yeah, that must be why

                                                                  by Costa Tsiatsos

Unpublishable Haiku # 8

Dipping her fingers
slowly in the sugar bowl,
Djura, the Dutch girl

                                                                by Fred Shultz



Fred explains:  "Here's one from a long time ago that got rejected because it did not have a proper juxtaposition of two images and because its syllables were too perfect"

Unpublishable Haiku # 6 and 7

cherry blossoms bloom
from old rugged bark


  
                   spring

tomorrow no long underwear
cool breezes blow

                                                              by Gordon Drinen

Cat Eyes

I was hitchhiking through Mexico with a guitar and a duffel bag. I scored a ride with a mango truck: cases and cases of mangos in the trailer of the eighteen-wheeler creaking groaning across the land.  The smells of dust.  Smells of mountains.  The smells of a dead horse lying by the road (narrow endless roads).  Young girls selling fresh juice at the crossroads in the daytime.  The smells of scrambled eggs and black beans and tortillas in the heat of early afternoon.

The kind and vulgar, smelly truck driver sat next to me, most of the time saying nothing, just staring through the smudgy windshield as I read a dilapidated Faulkner book even though my eyes couldn't focus on the words too well--the truck was lurching violently.  After several days, he turned to me and asked my name.

"What is your name?" he asked.  It was dark.  There was a comet in the sky surrounded by the stars that shone above the dark dark road (and headlight beams) in the nighttime as I fell asleep, my head against my arm against the window sill.  The breeze, the warm tropic breeze rushed by as we drove along the dusty road.

"Nate," I said, as I shook myself awake, shaking off the images that had begun to pass before my eyes of their own accord, fragmented images blending with other fragmented images--images of people I'd known, and places I'd been, and books I'd read, and thoughts I'd had, and prayers I'd prayed, images moving to the hypnotic sound of shifting gears and the squealing creaking groaning engine.

He was sleepy, too, and wanted conversation to help him stay awake.  So I tried to accommodate him as best I could.  "Your Spanish is very poor," he said.

   

One time we stopped in a little town:  three or four shacks on the left hand side of the road and everything else flat and empty as far as you could see with the shimmering of heat on the sand and on the road.

The driver took a nap in the truck and I went outside with my book, The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner.  A head popped out from one of the shacks far away...an old man furtively gesturing to me.  So I walked the length of the world until I approached him.  He invited me inside with great grandeur and I bought a coca cola. (Dusty floor and darker shadows.)  His wife talked to me a while.  Then he asked me if I would like to buy some medicine.  "Cat Eyes," he said.

 

"Are they the eyes of a cat?" I asked.

He shook his head and hobbled, disappearing into a room.  He came back out with a bag of seeds.

"They are for what?" I asked.

"They are for every illness," he said to me.  Both elderly people, they gazed at me, his wife quietly nodding her head.  They looked at me tenderly.  And waited for what I had to say. 

I said I wasn’t sick.

I walked outside into the blistering sun.  The flat empty land.  An empty land.  I went back to the truck.  The truck was rumbling into life.

Eventually I got to the border town of Nuevo Laredo, a town that I've been through several times.  I was walking towards the border when a drunken man who had eight children and no job came up to me to see if I had anything to give to him.  When he found that I did not, he offered to be my friend.

"You are crossing the border?" he asked.

"Yes," I said as we walked along, together.

"Which way are you going?"

I pointed vaguely towards the bridge.

"No, do not go that way," he said, grabbing my hand to lead me down another road.  "Do not go that way.  The current there is much too strong."

San Pedro

In Guatemala, the tourist trail for backpackers and dropouts begins in Antigua, usually on Holy Week.  I was there for a couple Holy Weeks.  One day on one of those Holy Weeks, a bunch of us was sprawled out in the grass, playing music underneath a tree.  An Austrian was singing.  A hippie girl from Canada was beating out rhythms on a drum.  A Frenchman was smoking my cigarettes. “No you don’t have to speak to understand the people,” he kept saying.  Everybody was real excited about the fact that there was a lunar eclipse scheduled for later that night.  Hale-Bopp was in the sky that night, too.  So everybody was talking about the crazy vibes.

The Holy Week processions moved through town, along the narrow streets, first appearing as a glow and then the noise of feet and singing.  Then they emerged around the corner, hundreds of people passing by, men dressed in hooded purple robes carrying long wooden floats upon which the figure of Christ stood holding up his hands.  Hundreds of men and women walked by, flanked by priests with incense, swinging censers back and forth from chains, singing.  It was a somber and festive affair. 

Eventually, the park became less crowded. Throughout the town, people were working on the carpets for the next day, sifting sawdust of different colors, sifting it through strainers and then through the stencils, laying out the flowers.  They were working on them all night long.  The volcanic mountain cones, dark against the dark night sky loomed around us.  The French guy suggested that we go somewhere to drink beer.  We went to several bars that night, sat in many courtyards, fountains trickling underneath gargoyle grimace and flowering vines.  His German girlfriend, Julia, joined us along the way and the three of us trudged around in the dark, stopping frequently to urinate, sometimes in an alley, sometimes within the crumbling walls of a five hundred year-old boarded up church or monastery.  There were many picturesque places to piss at night in Antigua, Guatemala.  We pissed in as many as we could find.  We drank many shots and insulted many people.  Trying to communicate, I spoke in bad Spanish to Julia.  I spoke in bad French to François.  Julia spoke German to the Germans.  I spoke in English to the Germans.  Sometimes we actually met Guatemalans.  They spoke Quiche to each other. 

We were looking for a certain special bar that François liked, "très sympa" he kept saying over and over again.  Julia became discouraged by the whole ordeal, and just wanted to go back home and go to bed.  But François insisted that the bar was indeed very "très sympa" and so we walked some more, stopping to piss in the moonlit ruins of antiquity.  Julia became yet more discouraged.  We walked past many carpets of colored sawdust and purple bougainvillea flowers arranged in intricate designs.  Finally, Julia sat down in the middle of the street and I walked on ahead as François pranced around her saying loving things, and urging her not to be dismayed.  He kissed her and he prodded her until she rose up to her feet and trudged on once again.  "We're almost there.  We're almost there," he whispered in her ear.

Sure enough--around the corner we heard the music and saw the lighted doorway.  We walked towards it in the dark.  The smell of beer.  The sound of music.  François loved this bar because in the bathroom there were glow-in-the-dark stars pasted to the walls and ceiling.  "Do not forget.  You must visit the bathroom," he reminded me again, as we sat upon the tall bar stools. 

We stole an ashtray and some other stuff.  We thought that was really funny.  We stole a flower in a vase and gave it to a homeless woman later that night sleeping in a box by the cathedral.  We thought that was poignant.

Anyway, Antigua is where everybody starts.  Then they end up in San Pedro on Lake Atitlan, a weird little tourist trap that you need a boat to get to.  Backpackers and dropouts like it because they feel like they discovered it themselves, or heard a rumor about it or something.  You can buy crepes there and take weaving lessons.  Anyway this was years ago.  Maybe it doesn't have the same mystique now.  I was laying on a rock one time, in a pretty secluded spot, about to go swimming, when a deaf-mute with a mask and snorkel and duck-fins waddled out of the bushes with a spear gun and gestured wide-eyed and earnest that I should go swimming.  Then when I was out there in the water, he stole my money out of my pants.  

I also found a tiny scorpion in my swimsuit at that same spot, on another day.  Thank goodness it didn't sting me.