Unpublishable Haiku # 16

silent street:
snow gathers
on my beard

                                                                              by Jeffrey Stottlemyer

Unpublishable Haiku # 15

frozen trash can -
a rat jumps out
into the snow

                                                        by Jeffrey Stottlemyer

A Good Book

You know what might be good? is a nonfiction, Gonzo account about violent conflict. Since the end of the Cold War, states have collapsed like Humpty Dumpty across the Global South. The world is rife with national and transnational insurrections, criminality, terrorism, natural disasters, epidemics, and complex humanitarian emergencies. Maybe I'll write this book, you know? About the wackiness of being human among other humans in this time and place, funny encounters with regular people living in apocalypse.  This book of anecdotes, reflections, photographs, and haiku would explore the risk factors of internal and transnational conflict at this point in history and will be divided into three parts.  All these horrible, hilarious stories would persistently be oriented in the broader context of geo-political stresses and strains, oil addictions, and urban decay. It would be a unique attempt to tell the story of America, the last superpower, through snippets of profane dialogue, socio-political analysis, and haiku poetry.

I don't know.  What do you think?  It would be a good book right?

Justice

I think I was about 15, with my friend, Scott. Scott and I weren't best friends or anything, but once we found a huge whale vertebrae on the beach, so we had that in common. We'd been walking down the beach from the fresh water inlet in the monkey-infested mangrove swamp where we shimmied up a tree and jumped twenty feet into the water from a skinny branch, splashing into the shallow water being sure not to lock our knees. We were walking back to camp when we saw something on the beach. What's that, I said. It's shoes, he said. It's not shoes, I said. It wasn't. It was a huge-ass, stinky whale vertebrae. We dragged it all the way back to camp. I got to keep it. I forget how we negotiated that, but that's how it ended up. Maybe he didn't want it. Anyway, we had that in common.

So the way I remember it, we were sitting in a restaurant in Douala, Cameroon, on our way to the airport, eating french fries and chicken. My dad's friend was keeping an eye on his car outside, through the open door. So when his alarm went off, he was pretty quick. All of a sudden he was bolting out the door.

Me and Scott ran out after him. My dad sat there at the table, shaking his head at all our foolishness. He sprinkled more salt on his fries. My dad's friend scuffled in the middle of the road with the guy as cars honked and swerved around them. Then we were all sprinting through the city with a spontaneous mob of vigilantes armed with pipes and strips of rubber.

Eventually we caught the poor bugger. The three of us went back to our meal and left him in the mob's clutches. I don't know what happened to him after that.

Everything is Broken

Unpublishable Haiku # 14

this is called _Cahuita Haiku_

Marijuaneros
befriend me with oranges
and coconut milk

                                                          by Fred Shultz

Manu Chao - Rainin In Paradize (Emir Kusturica) (HD)

Unpublishable Haiku # 13

Here's another little poem.  Fred writes these little poems.  Not sure what they are but I like 'em.  A whole lot.


Parrot fish, thank you
and all you other fish too
for sharing with me


                                                                  by Fred Shultz

Unpublishable Haiku # 13

Your wind in these trees
sounds like cars on a freeway
Boquete evening

                                                                            by Fred Shultz

Another Weird Thing

So I've written about a couple a weird things since Christmas.  I wrote about the time I accidentally broke a curse on an old slave trading island in Cameroon.  I wrote about getting robbed by a deaf-mute with a spear gun and a snorkel in Guatemala.  I wrote about getting a tattoo in Tijuana, Mexico from a guy with a bull ring in his nose and a fetish on his desk.  I wrote about chasing a black bear down a hill.  There's a bunch of others, too.  Ben wrote about a lot of weird things, too.

Another weird thing happened when I was about nine years old or so.  It was hot and muggy in Yaounde, Cameroon, so I used to sleep with a fan next to my bed.  One night I went to unplug the fan in the living room so I could take it to my room.  My pinky stuck on the prong before the fan was fully unplugged.

Wham!  I was soaring through space.  I saw planets and stars.  I figured I was dead for sure.  But just in case I wasn't dead yet, I yelled for help.  The babysitter heard my halfhearted tone (Help, help, help, help), and figured I was messing around.  Eventually she told my younger sister to go check on me.  Tammy came in the room and saw me on the floor, shaking.  She went back and told the babysitter that she'd better come and see.

When the baby sitter touched my arm, she got a shock herself.  I guess she grounded the circuit because then I came back to my house from outer space.  I seem to remember that I was pretty proud of myself.