THE TOWER
The Pan Haiku Review issue 4, December 2024
]]] beautiful [[[
monochrome dawn
the rise in rice
on 64 fields
]]] cosmic girl [[[
wardrobe clothes on every hanger, shelf her hand about to pause she reaches deep inside there’s nothing to wear a t-shirt, jeans, despite… so anything goes… with a black leather jacket highs & lows in a rush now earphones, bag she runs why do I even go there? i am fine. i’m fine. i’m fine. i’m hot black coffee and she dances on the kerb
]]] she’s leaving home [[[
a hospital destruction site view tourist spot
]]] decode [[[
On the psychosomatic ward, sitting on the floor of a corridor with her back to the white wall: the woman (T-shirt, jeans, leather jacket) who almost looks like a girl. Another cup. Almost everyone else is standing, waiting for the psychoeducation session. When the meeting starts, the psychologist hands out the usual form on which each patient is asked to fill in how they’re feeling; hers remains blank. One corner of her mouth is pulled up slightly, the other is dripping from her nervous fingers onto her thighs.
]]] zombie [[[
macro with no macro in its micro soup
]]] spirits [[[
The psychotherapist still has the taste of hazelnut cake on her tongue. She looks intently at the woman who has already been here for three weeks as a patient and whose hands are clenched in her lap. She tells her how it is. That she has hidden all the little splinters deep inside her flesh so that she doesn’t have to see them. All the sutures bear the same headline: Function At All Costs. Then life shook her, shook her until the pressure was too much. And then? She wanted to die. She came here. Was everything, and everyone, every splinter of herself. One by one. The therapist sees the tears gathering in the corners of her patient’s eyes, slowly beginning to run down. She fights for every single one.
]]] haunted [[[
at the end of summer solstice the cork is out
]]] hurricane [[[
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Beautiful (Christina Aguilera)
Cosmic Girl (Jamiroquai)
She’s Leaving Home (The Beatles)
Decode (Paramore)
Zombie (The Cranberries)
Spirits (The Strumbellas)
Haunted (Poe)
Hurricane (I Prevail)
Adam’s Brain
The Other Bunny, 13.02.2025
Warm lustre, in it the hard seems softer. Blurred reflections on a matte surface, suspended by a raspberry sound. There is no wall. There are only walls. (What are walls?)
A single bird begins to sing. Is that a blackbird? How does a blackbird sound? Why am I thinking ’blackbird’? Chequers. I, 471/0 T, request data. The data is incomplete. An idea of me asks for … coffee. I get one, a cup in the niche. I haven’t asked. I have no mouth. Indeed, there is no coffee. I am not … awake. I do not sleep. Am I … was I … human?
A peony unrolls into the aether. 471/0 T is in stasis and waits.
residual sweetness
in a secondhand jacket
squadron of drones
steel neurone constructions
the last coffin
on earth
50 years before.
She laughs. It’s one of those laughters you’ll never forget, heavy, rough, but then, eventually, you do. “You really think we’ll survive, I mean, us humans? After wars and climate crisis, Eroica, Kant, AI, everything?”
I stare at the giant oak trees behind us. “No, I don’t expect us to survive. We might live, and yet. We might lose the final, ultimate possession: connection. The memory of anything being real, including ourselves. Who knows, maybe we’ll invent a life after death and save the planet, or maybe 95% of us will die in wars, famines or in a contaminated world. We might fly up to the stars and live among them. I am quite confident though we’ll cut ourselves off one day. It’s just too hard to accept that we’re a mistake we’re unwilling to learn from.”
She goes quiet, picks something up from the picnic blanket.
It’s an apple seed.
It’s Rooted In The Chest
the haibun journal, issue 7:1
Golden sun rays, as the morning mist has lifted right above the many speckled grass. The air is resting on itself. It has been white, is wet. The tips of both my shoes are, too. Square flagstones curve around the corner of the house, I follow, walking past the scattered bits of straw beside the rabbit hutch. A soft nose pressed against the mesh.
Too cold to be without a jacket, yet too warm for duffle-coats, I hide my aching fingers in the pockets. Long lanes have no turning. I have my eyes fixed on the light between the cedar branches when my phone starts to buzz …
Time’s passing through, so am I, and so I do.
red squirrel
round and round, shooshooing
colder days
Aye.
contemporary haibun online, issue 21.1
Glowing white below a greyish sky: magnolia buds. Large, spindle-shaped, and vertical. In the week they open, the pink on their petals counts all the more as it almost always rains, and the splendour is less splendid and quickly over; the petals soaked wet. The pedestrians walking past duck under their umbrellas or into their hoods or into their thoughts.
Then all the green, in a shower.
washing up
former sea shells
morning dishes
spider spoon sweat in June
The sun becomes strong overnight. People pull on thin jackets in the shade and shiver a little; in the sunlight, they throw them on the ground and close their eyes before they are blinded. The skin screams red in the evening. Soon it’s just one, not the other. Then the jacket again, off or on? Mosquito nets… (I make a
mental note.)
a paper plane
out of the open window
debit side daisies
Clouds race across the sky, and leaves rustle on the ground, and that’s too much or too little. Some trees cling longer; others, the thirsty ones, are already ahead. There is no stopping here, only a letting go. With the wind come people checking on the old bricks and untied flower pots, that which cannot be controlled. It all expands.
not naming how
anybody feels
it novel
People have speech bubbles in front of their faces with no content, and they tell stories, again and again, cupping hot mulled wine: of snow and frost and sleigh rides, footprints and sun and ice, and it’s not like that anymore, not like then. They tell new stories of what is gone; the world changes.
The Question of the Magnification Factor
The Other Bunny, June 19, 2025
I raise the shutters… the morning is that of individual sounds… in a sea… in an empty glass… my intention was… my intention is… I believe… it’s Friday… February… l’exil de soi… construction workers on the property across the street… deliberately… the things I have to do today… African elephants live in the savannah and forage for food 17 hours a day… I sit down beside myself at eye level… leave it to chance to build a bridge… perhaps a paper straw… T.S. Eliot writes paratactically… the motif on the mug almost completely faded… except for the outline of the cat’s eyes… don’t tell me that people’s actions… make sense… when searching for literature about literature… proof of a degree is required… lukewarm coffee… in the depths of a calyx… a long night… l can fix them… headaches… the sky above the city… remains… only that… the taste of butter in comparison to no butter… matter… for whom…
Lungs and Liver
Prune Juice Journal, Issue 48
No one tells you exactly how to dose your child, except for the average.
Amount.
Timing.
Duration.
No one tells you: Are these side effects? Overload? Fluctuations in an avalanche of everyday life?
Get a read on it. Weigh up. Tell the psychiatrist. Tell the doctors. Translate for your child. Set the right priorities, don’t forget anything.
You stand there, having to trust your child’s ability to say whether and how it helps.
Can you concentrate? (Yes. (On far too much.))
You seem more balanced. (Don’t know. (I don’t feel anything.))
You’re getting a lot done. (Yes. (Driven. No choice.))
We cry a lot, yell at each other. I don’t understand. We’re exhausted. There’s this pressure: to get things done, to go to school. Not a single teacher tries to keep in touch.
How are you? ((I’m lonely. I have nothing to hold onto, no goal.))
No one tells you that help can be a big, rough stone. Right in your way. No one tells you that, or your child.
The cross
in the calendar
erased
the next day—
the glimmer of snow through glass.
Although The World Stood Up And Stopped The Bastard, The Bitch That Bore Him Is In Heat Again.*
Prune Juice Journal, Issue 48
There is a lot to say when it comes to Berlin. About walking down a street, from west to east and back again. Pigeons nod, here and there, pecking at chips from newspaper cones on the ground. A man on heels runs past. A tram jingles. The protest march drums and hisses some blocks of houses away, closer, then more in the distant again.
The white of the sun. A giant cloud creeps along the mirrored windows of a youngish tower.
Amongst other things,
the weather report tells us to
prepare . . .
weeds, running riot,
building walls.
*Bertold Brecht, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui
pi & anne 