Fifteen Haiku For A Drinking Day, by Danny Moran
When I think of this poem I see the floorboards in my attic at my home in Prestwich, which is where I used to drink. It’s like I’m flat on my face, literally, which was almost the case. I could hardly have been more lost to alcoholism. I’ve always written but by that time I could scarcely manage a paragraph. This was as much as I could produce and it was a lifeline. I had an old notebook and I began to write a haiku for each page. Eventually I realised I was trying to tell the story of a day captured in precise moments, the way haiku does, but also with that slightly wry sense which the old Japanese haiku have.
After I got better I finished it off, so it was written half drunk and half sober. I went to John G Hall’s legendary Haiku Club in Withington and that really helped me to shape the poem. The seventeen syllables thing is old hat, of course. Japanese syllables are much shorter than English ones so the method doesn’t really translate. Jack Kerouac was instrumental in jettisoning the syllables thing. I’ve always been into the old Japanese haiku about the frog jumping into the pond and how the splash is like perception in the mind. I think this poem is a way of responding to that, and what a mess you can get in if you’re down the newsagents first thing in the morning, waiting for them to open up so you can buy a litre bottle of cider to stave off the chest pains. I tried to make it suitably post modern – in the eleventh haiku the poem throws up over itself. Danny Moran
Fifteen Haiku For A Drinking Day
by Danny Moran
dark room
the old pipe
slowly ticking
joint, back step
leaves riffling
in suburban trees
the ghost heart
birdhouse splintering
in a vice
the first drop
cold answer
in the throat
drinking whisky
litter burning
in a brazier
on the internet
loud cries become
suddenly ridiculous
on the nod
slow death
of a rung bell
the gas fire
in your room
my love
the boy
makes happen
the kiss
on the tongue
the bad taste
of rotting verse
in the bowl
today's fountain
of broken syllables
sitting thinking
nothing solid
never finished
forcing poison
sadness craves
what the stomach detests
on the internet
loud cries become
suddenly nothing
at dream's door
panic-drowned
in forgotten breath
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