Jack Grapes: Five Haiku

Jack Grapes is an award-winning poet, actor, playwright, and teacher. He’s written two how-to books, Method Writing and Advanced Method Writing. He wrote and starred in Circle of Will, which ran for several years in Hollywood and won two drama critic awards for Best Comedy and Best Performance by an Actor. His most recent books of poetry are The Naked Eye: New & Selected Poems, Poems So Far So Far So Good So Far to Go, and All the Sad Angels. All his books are available from amazon.com. Jack lives in Los Angeles with his wife Lori.

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Five Haikus

Watching the asphalt,
I’m run over by a car.
I was six, moonstruck.

*

I stop at the light.
The woman in the next car
almost married me.

*

All my life I have
counted syllables like this,
haikus of brief love.

*

Let the poets know
that I was a meat eater
who liked haiku raw.

*

Coal mines of my heart.
The canary dies.
It’s time to get out.

 

(These haiku are from his new book, Wide Road to the Edge of the World, a homage and response to Basho’s Narrow Road in the Interior. Author photo by Alexis Rhone Fancher.)

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