South of the Border Haiku Edition no.1

This blog needs more culture. And no, not World Game Forum Crayshan style 'kulcha', but more ivory tower, completely up yerself, yes I am better than you because I write faggy poetry culture. And how much more ivory tower and pretentious can you get than haiku? Anyway, I had several South Melbourne related haiku published late last year in the venerable Seed Magazine, albeit not exactly with the title I asked for and presented as if it was just one regular poem rather than seven separate haiku.

For those not familiar with the form, haiku are Japanese poems with 17 'on' (meaning 'sounds' but often erroneously called syllables in English), essentially seperated into three lines, in a 5,7,5 form. Traditionally haiku is a rigid form, very serious, and with the poem requiring a so called 'season' word. Me, I like free-form haiku (not so much worrying about syllables) and haiku's non-serious relation 'senryū', which deals with human concerns rather than with nature. So here is an example of one I did last year and had published, and I'll try and make this a weekly segment wherein I publish one every Saturday. Once again, contributions are most welcome, with a short explanation or background piece highly encouraged, but not necessary.

As noted earlier, the first haiku in this series was written last year. Thematically, it is closely related to most of the other South haiku I had written around that time, pondering the obvious decay our great club had and has seemingly found itself in, on and off field, generally drawing on some aspect of the 'life force'. But this one seemed to stand out to me, particularly in its depiction of blood, the portrayal of the physicality of the life force itself, rather than the more symbolic allusions in some of the others.


mangled hearts bleed blue;
dreams of a happier time
are no elixir