The revival of the haiku commute project

A 16 hour flight from Paris to San Francisco, featuring the crack double bill of Rush Hour 3 and The Jane Austen Book Club, has prompted me to revive the Haiku Commute Project. Even if you don't remember it, you might have stepped on it in its first incarnation, which took the form of a molting notepad wedged above the gear shift in my Ford Festiva.

I was regularly writing one haiku each way to-and-from work during the spring and summer of 2006. Despite the reckless disregard for human life entailed--necessitated--in simultaneously writing a three-line poem and driving at 70mph a manual transmission car with no power steering, this is not yet illegal in the state of California. In a more controlled setting, I wrote two on the flight from Charles de Gaulle.

William took me on a freaking five mile run my second night in Paris.

Glitter limbed tower
arcing above. We run 'til
our lungs pound with light.

Later we went to the Marais.

Snap-boned, flash photo-ed,
we gulp absinthe like grief. Then
dragonfly nightward.