jornales

How reading and writing haiku opens up a whole new world of beauty and more in Nature through the language of haiku…like how it did mine and other poets who responded to Charlotte Digregorio’s call for sharing theirs in her blog: www.charlottedigregorio.wordpress.com, (post of July 21

 www.charlottedigregorio.wordpress.com

July 22, 2022 Posted by alee9 | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Featured poet again at:

https://alkhemiapoetica.blogspot.com/2022/07/tuesday-july-12-2022-alegria-imperials.html

July 12, 2022 Posted by alee9 | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

My Testimony on Haiku at:

https://livinghaikuanthology.com/poets-on-haiku/poets-on-haiku/2669-alegria-imperial.html

July 11, 2022 Posted by alee9 | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Featured poet today at:

https://alkhemiapoetica.blogspot.com/2022/05/tuesday-may-24-2022-alegria-imperials.html

May 24, 2022 Posted by alee9 | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

lMy haiku and tanka at Never Ending Story and One Man’s Maple Moon blogspot of Chen-ou Liu with Chinese translation also by Chen-ou Liu (click on link to read)

https://neverendingstoryhaikutanka.blogspot.com/2021/08/one-mans-maple-moon-mountain-mists-and.html

August 30, 2021 Posted by alee9 | Uncategorized | 2 Comments

The dread of a writer’s block

(with tanka, a 5-line Japanese short poem also called song)

Amazing how crunched up the mind gets when on its own it churns up an ocean, an ocean of time, for me. I’ve never learned how to escape the undertow. Like now, I got only two weeks to clear up a week to be in Hawaii, yes, again! Why do you do it to yourself, a friend had asked yesterday, when on her ‘hi there’, I unleashed an anguished list of hurdles. 

Why? I never did figure out since my school days. Maybe I dawdle longer than hunker down to tackle what awaits me. Maybe time sense in my brain has been weakly encrypted. Maybe pushing off the present to grapple a future has long been a habit…like instead of writing two more advanced columns here to free me up until the first week of November, I poured in two hours of haiku-combing to catch up on my responses to daily haiku prompts at the National Haiku Writing Month Facebook site, which I had joined three years ago. And I have yet to read through friends’ posts I’ve missed, or worse, responses to likes and comments. 

weavers/

could we be? Or more/

of clam gatherers…/

who speak of tinted/

fabrics in moonlight/ 

My suitcase from trolling in the North East remains intact with scents, flavors, or maybe dried-up rain-and-dew drops, star-and-moon dust, or even thumb prints of luggage handlers and chocolate fingerprints of a child because I haven’t unpacked. Lists and more lists of what to fill it with for the next trip stare at me from a memo pad. And yet, here I am gripped in the undertow of receding waves to write this…and oh, wishing for more haiku or tanka as in:

if all the flow/

pour into my heart/

imagine me/

singing about what oceans/

know of starlight/

How do writers confront deadlines, really? I knew one in university days who chomped off leaves of books, not of lessons but of poetry he wanted to write. Another stared in class through blood-shot eyes the

  veins of which he said throbbed with lines. 

 But performing artists take on stress, too, like in the weird body contortions as if the looming first bell for a symphony concert could be squeezed out of the young conductor’s body I once knew. One premier danseur would go in a cabinet-building or dismantling rage before say, a Swan Lake gala while his is prima ballerina I heard would search for old receipts, redoing budgets.

 Why does a deadline sound like the approach of doomsday? Or like 

rain shadows/

in shimmers our song/

flows away/

among anxious steps/

melting in runnels/

You make frequent trips to the fridge to look for what to cook, or suddenly take the broom and scour corners, chides a friend who knows me from university days. In those days, I had to refile my notes, take hours to file my nails and wash for the evening, and long minutes to choose which pajama to wear to study and I would obsess over slapping a nuisance-mosquito before I finally open a notebook to memorize from beginning page to end page for exams. Nothing to do with creativity or writing then but such habits could have marbled my bed of procrastination that now I slip into each time I try to meet a deadline.

loss/

to a flower…/

same as/

my anguish over time/

vanishing perhaps?/

And the dread of getting stuck on a line while time like a martinet stomps on, marching while a blank space stretches on to the horizon. I once took on “an answer-if-you-can challenge” in a writing blog on writer’s block with this fancy response:

“Stuck, I am often but not glued upside down on a ceiling though I had wished I were for years or with the kind of pain that would summon my whole being, overwhelmed but freed with screams if I have to, and whines or groans.”

But stuck on a blank page I always am, which exacts more than a body feat—much more than pain. Or these days—on a blank screen, where a cursor shredding the ‘now’, a pulse hacking at space even taunts me with a beat that rises in decibels until these march after me: scratch, bite, cry, or die, scratch, bite, cry, or die . . . and it begins again. 

A wave of peace though slips in on rare moments, the kind that washes off the horror. This wave hums and murmurs mythic promises not unlike a phoenix, and indeed, out of the wave in the most ordinary way, I rise, unstuck. Yet, in truth, I am often stuck solid, dead-beat for no reason, beaten by the blankness, bushed. What I do then if I remember it—weave a cocoon made out of the last verses from the Canadian poet, Earle Birney’s ‘Bushed’ (1951):

‘…And now he could only/
bar himself in and wait/
for the great flint to come singing into his heart.’”

Still, while quite a flitting balm to my chronic fear of deadlines and blank pages, I do un-block myself with exactly the same dreadful lines that first scare me like with my first lines here.

March 25, 2021 Posted by alee9 | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Bones and me

my first (and all through succeeding issues)

*tomorrow still a house of knives

Bones, 1:1, December 2012

my last as Johannes S. H. Berg, editor announces a hiatus 

Bones, #22, March 15, 2021

(2 monoku sequence)

slippery truths 

1.
splattered “I” shards but tinnitus chatter said of slippery truths

what frayed tongues possibly wrangled off arid infinity

here begins the march of derelict seasons spewed off cavities

found rotting on verbose nouns a myth un-clutched off insensitive verbs

 or could be the worn-out truth-chains distressed fingers unspooled

 encrypted in leprous walls a logic of sorts possibly condensed droplets 

no breath at all a weightless thud plying tin scraps of slippery truths

the broken humanoids’ lie divined as arterial glyphs lost on ears 

p 6

Alegria Imperial 

2.

the candle wick I pared to its root now a towering flame

but shredded in air a hissing ember vanishing on sacramental rims

with quivering night lamps a swarm of pulsing heat in my 

sullen darkness /red shadows wakened in spurts the wavering breaths at vespers

on Fridays whispered agonies wet my beads of the 5th decade

a ruckus of nails scraping altar drips the heightened roil in my breast 

from its pared root the candle wick erupts on geyser verbs

lapping up the darkness the frayed seams of my veil 

p7

Alegria Imperial 

(2 gembun)

a rift in beveled dusk 

suddenly I recognize the color greige half grey half pallor

lunes I once lost now gelling as a cloud lolling with me

seeping off the rift in swaths 

a faint mushroom sky my umbrella 

p.8

waken mid-route 

a raw chill stranded in the chiming wind moving with crows

my eyes sated on pockmarked clouds as if air

instead of marrow in my bones 

I shift focus to the sea my prison 

p9

Alegria Imperial 

Bones #22 March 15, 2021

March 24, 2021 Posted by alee9 | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

a rift in beveled dusk

(a parallel in fours–to be read from left to right or by column from top to bottom)

              a rift in beveled dusk  

            suddenly I recognize 

                                                the colour grieg                                      

             on wind slopes 

                                                 half grey half pallor

             lunes I once lost                                                                                     

                                                 now  gelling as clouds

           lolling with me in a puddle rim

                                   seeping off the rift  in swaths

                  my umbrella the faint mushroom sky 

December 29, 2020 Posted by alee9 | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

GLOOM

(one of my last poems at otata defunct since)

do foxes exist like we do?

thirst for what’s good like silence

sound fractures people’s heads

under cover of light

there’s iniquity dancing in the leaves

would fox howl if I whisper “I thirst for wind-drips”?

he draws his being up as if

there’s dawn in the guise of stalled words

digs the gloom

and cries leaving

purpled patches in my head

https://otatablog.files.wordpress.com/…/otata-47…

December 10, 2020 Posted by alee9 | Uncategorized | Leave a comment