The Last Agile Haiku: #37

The gods are crazy.
They want it all...yesterday!
Yes, the gods are mad.

Something Haiku has in common with forms of expression like Twitter and other micro-blogging platforms is the constraints placed on the length of the expression - the number of syllables in the case of Haiku and the number of characters in the case of micro-blogging. But there, the similarity ends.

I think of Haiku as a flower about to blossom. On first read, it's unassuming. Boring, even. With patience and reflection - either in the moment or over time - the deeper beauty begins to unfold and reveal itself. Not that any of my Haiku is particularly insightful or beautiful, I write it for fun and if anyone else enjoys an "Ah, ha!" now an again, then that's just grand. It certainly doesn't hold a candle to the works of Issa:

A frog!
Quietly and serenely
He gazes at the mountains.

Or Basho:

The old pond;
A frog jumps in:
Sound of water.

As for the likes of Twitter or Gab or Mastodon or any of the other dumpster fire clones, I can't say it any better than Joel Spolsky did 14 years ago:

Although I appreciate that many people find Twitter to be valuable, I find it a truly awful way to exchange thoughts and ideas. It creates a mentally stunted world in which the most complicated thought you can think is one sentence long. It’s a cacophony of people shouting their thoughts into the abyss without listening to what anyone else is saying. Logging on gives you a page full of little hand grenades: impossible-to-understand, context-free sentences that take five minutes of research to unravel and which then turn out to be stupid, irrelevant, or pertaining to the television series Battlestar Galactica. I would write an essay describing why Twitter gives me a headache and makes me fear for the future of humanity, but it doesn’t deserve more than 140 characters of explanation, and I’ve already spent 820.

He pretty much called it, eh? And today we have the genius of AI to convert those little hand grenades into nuclear bombs that destroy indiscriminately. The Internet is no longer the place to publish things like Haiku. And with that I close source my humble Haiku endeavors, to the cheers or wailing of a vanishingly small fraction of people drifting around on the InterTubes.

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If you have any questions, need anything clarified, or have something else on your mind, please send a DM or email me directly.