Hummingbird whispers
Spring aria imagines;
Dream-river rapids

Haiku By CheeseFlap

Davy Jones’ Locker:
Another Monkey Drowning
Sounds like Porpoise Song
Haiku By JHM For Davy Jones

When i was a boy, the Beatles and the Monkees were the two forces that mated and created the zygote of my nascent musical imagination. The Beatles were the revolutionaries and the Monkees were the band manufactured by the establishment as an antidote for that fever, but it mutated…

Listen to this song and ignore the madcap mayhem in the video, which is a misdirection as in the performance of a magician: This song is as subversive as anything the Beatles ever did. It infected me.

With his fools gold stacked up all around him
From a killing in the market on the war
The children left king midas there, as they found him
In his counting house where nothing counts but more

Fee Fo Fo Fum Unplugged In 1990 At Melrose Bakery East Hollywood 1990

Distant dragonfly
Seven breathless syllables
Empty waterfalls

Haiku For Silence By CheeseFlap

Song written by Steven Pacia and Javier Hernandez-Miyares

Alex Garcia: Drums
Ariel de la Portilla: Bass
Steven Pacia: Lead Voice
Javier Hernandez-Miyares: Guitars, Piano, Harmony Voices

Recording produced by Javier Hernandez-Miyares

Haiku By CheeseFlap For One Day:

Web of emotions
Fluttering heart butterflies
Bones and meat in love

Drawing By JHM

Compound curvature
Flowers crush concrete sorrow
Anatomic bombs

Haiku By CheeseFlap

CheeseFlap is here

WTPF: Share with us some of your Haikus and explain what inspired them.

CF:This question makes my brain hurt, but I’ll try. And these are in no particular order. As I go through the archive, I realize it is very difficult to talk about even liking your own work so let’s just say these are some of my favorites today; that could change next week. Let’s start with one that goes back a few years. In fact, this is the oldest haiku on cheeseflap.com. Someone asked Sarah Palin whether she considered herself an intellectual, and she apparently hesitated and gave a long, drawn-out “yeesss,” which I think is pretty funny. I can almost hear the question mark at the end. So here’s what CheeseFlap said:

Brain cells school like fish
Inside the mind of a true
Intellectual

I discovered that this haiku had inspired a discussion thread on what I believe was a website for Canadian librarians. It spawned about 100 other political haikus, so this one holds a special place for me. I don’t expect CheeseFlap to be the J.K. Rowling of haikus, but you have to admit, once you have the Canadian Librarians paying attention, you’re on to something! I was very pleased and humbled that someone got it and was inspired to think in haiku about politics. Here again, you’ve got comparisons to nature, patterns, and an attempt to equate the way ideas can form with the way fish form schools. From a distance, they appear to move as one, and in a very fluid way. A school of fish can adapt, move around an object or predator, and come back together again. To me, this is a cogent idea, as constructed and expressed by thousands of different memories and bits of information in our brains. Sarah Palin doesn’t have that ability. If her head was an aquarium, there would be a fish in each corner, panicked by the presence of the other fish. At night, one of them prowls around and bites the sleeping ones, like puffer fish do.

WTPF: Our fish bowl is rapt in attention; give us another.

CF:
Big guns and cigars
Waved in America’s face
Don’t make you a man

I wrote this about the time the phrase “second amendment remedies” was popular in some parts of the country. For the record, unless you hunt and eat what you kill every day, having guns in an advanced society is stupid. Gun ownership is always argued as if it were a legal issue, but i believe it is instead a moral one. So I don’t need to get into Freud to tie the penises and the cigars and the guns together do I?

WTPF: Penises are good when they are placed in the right place; Cigars in that place were not so good for a former POTUS. Forgive us for not being able to resist that joke More poetry please.

CF:
Warming deniers:
Time to adjust antenna
On your cave-paintings

I liked this one because it functions on a lot of levels, and the image it creates is funny. Again, there are so many people who seem threatened by the possibility that we might have some influence on the natural order of things. On one hand, we have this great human tradition of conquering the forces of nature, and exploiting the planet’s natural resources for our immediate purposes. On the other hand, these people claim that we couldn’t possibly have an influence because we’re so insignificant. So which is it? Are we amazing (especially Americans, who are exceptional) or are we impotent? This is another issue that is framed as a legal one, not a moral one. Perhaps this is just my modernized version of Plato’s allegory.

WTPF: Cave Men dragged women by the hair; We saw it on T.V.
Your poetry helps us evolve…more please.

CF: Now we get to religion:

Belief in a god
Allows irrational acts;
Sky-dwelling scapegoat

If I believe in the Christian god (which American politicians must believe in if they ever hope to be elected) I can pretty much do whatever I want to do. I can lie, cheat, steal, kill, covet, curse, and be forgiven for it. And I don’t have to be accountable to any other person, because I’m only accountable to my god, and that’s between us. Of course, if you don’t believe in my god I can hate you, and that’s not a sin because I’m hating in the name of the one true god, who has blessed me and my country above all others and that’s why we’re exceptional. When I hear politicians talking about their faith in order to persuade people to vote for them, I substitute “space aliens” for “god,” which would be the death-blow to any campaign. I guess you can’t talk about space aliens in general without sounding crazy, but you can talk about one specific space alien, the Christian god, and millions will be convinced that it’s safe to have you run the country.

WTPF: You are on a roll; Keep going.

CF: Here’s one that I like that’s somewhat related:

The real stone tablets
Show history, fossilized;
The real word of god

Hardcore Christians deny the evidence of evolution but put their faith in fiction written during a period of immense illiteracy and scientific ignorance. If there is a god, he’s probably texted “forehead hits desk” more than once. This next one blends the two previous ideas:

The year: forty-ten
The find: SUV remnant
Attached: Christian fish

WTPF: That is tragic but funny. Give us another so that we can laugh ourselves to death.

CF: this one in honor of Newt Gingrich:

No, no bad puppy!
Newt paddles across the floor
Long streak on carpet

And if you get your carpet professionally cleaned, no one will ever know it happened! This could apply to almost any of the major politicians today, although the conservatives have really left their mark on the fabric of society in a lasting way. FOX News almost has a monopoly on carpet cleaning these days, but my sense though is they don’t really clean, they just darken the rest of the carpet to match the streak.

WTPF: We thank you for your poetry. Now it is time to ask you questions about who you are and why.

The mysterious CheeseFlap will reveal somethings on the next chapter of this blog.

Too Many Bugs (33 Haikus by JHM)

My voice is choking
from too many grasshoppers.
I wish i could sing.

Cicada cadence:
Everything must be written
and it will be law.

My mother was stung,
and by serendipity
i came to being.

How to cover ass:
Burrow like a Cicada;
Hide from predators.

Voices of crickets
describe our moment of death.
Tiny violins.

All crickets must die.
Their tiny violins crushed
by the conductor.

I don’t like roaches,
because they make me jealous;
They scare girls away.

Metamorphosis:
Gregor Samsa is my friend
and so is his dad.

Music and laughter.
According to Kant we can’t
understand insects.

Heavenly beehive:
Where angels are the insects
stinging men to death.

Katydid or not
is the telescoping gag
that fossilizes us.

For mother mantis:
I did not want to exist.
Why did you mate me?

Is there shame in this?
Lorca was devoured by
fascists and maggots.

Insect universe:
Where sound devours silence
and we are silent.

Bunuel loved insects.
He knew what was coming to him.
They took him away.

Dante observed bugs;
In Empyrean, angels
swarm heaven like bees.

The universe drones
and a wurlitzer of bones
whistles a graveyard.

Creeley lost an eye
and that socket was a hive
for a swarm of bees.

The katydid speaks
in a language that fools know:
Binary Hipster.

Who killed the poet?
Only Lorca knows the truth:
The sound of crickets.

My corpse is shameful.
Insects devour my sex
while i am naked.

What i expected:
God dreamed me and then woke up.
Thank you for the flies.

Bugs Devour God:
His great book is on a vine
that xtians consume.

If God were a bug,
I would stomp it and crush it.
I hate intruders.

You make me human.
Exoskeleton in you
dissolves in your sex.

The universe dies,
and like a praying mantis
is a cannibal.

There is no way out.
We are in the roach motel
that god left to us.

The flies will signal
the place where the poets died;
Via Appia.

Bugs that frighten me
scatter me in my silence.
Can’t turn on the light.

What we will become:
Insect robots created
with anguish and steel.

Flies of the future:
Nanorobot memories
of humanity.

Piping is over;
Supersedure now begins.
Long live the new queen.

What does space smell like?
It smells like honey sulfer
stung by our being.

For Mike C.
_______________________________

7-22
i have added this Haiku by CheeseFlap:

Are we not bugs too?
Gnawing at god’s creation?
Trapped by gravity?

and my Haiku response:

Our thoughts are fossils;
Creations sticky resin
is where they reside.

A Quiet Riot:
Enduring Every Moment,
I Shut The Fuck Up.

Haiku For John Cage By JHM

Piano sculpture
Volume inverse to output;
Heartbeats grow louder

Haiku By CheeseFlap

Drawing By JHM

The Diabolical Agenda

Medicare Vouchers:
Let’s Short Sell God For Profits;
Everybody Dies.

haiku by jhm

True patriots die,
(Saved from Communist death grip)
Without insurance

haiku by CheeseFlap

Drawing By JHM

Where The Pieces Fall (Orchestral) by Sinlab
Composed By JHM And Arranged By Ariel de la Portilla

It Was A Pleasure
Something Only God Can Sort
Where The Pieces Fall

Haiku By JHM