so i wrote a book of haiku, a hundred, and i entitled it post-covid haiku: all else is now obsolete and i delivered it up to amazon about three days ago. it had some problems in the construction - at one point i spelled my name wrong, and, inside was a misspelled word, nowehere. i fixed those in the kindle version and went back and fixed it in the print version the following day, which would have been saturday, maybe. i was proud because i'd had a writer's block for quite some time - getting almost finished with things and then not quite finishing - and now it seemed like i would be able to not only finish and publish this one, but finish and publish maybe three more right behind it, not haiku; one is short stories, one is historical/genealogical, and one is my memoirs, which could be tough if i grapple with telling the entire truth.

the haiku were not incredibly controversial, in my opinion. i'll give you a few of them:
covid in punjab –
with spring’s blossoms, we can see
the himalaya

her pickup order
four hours late, and even then
it’s missing th’chicken

cap ‘n’ gown just arrived –
all twelve years he got good grades,
now th’schoolyard’s empty

you get the idea. the vast majority of it was from my own experience, and as in the second (my wife) and third (my oldest son at home), the experience of my family. like all haiku it has seasons in it, though some were a little sloppy, assuming that if it was about the covid crisis, it was spring. cherry trees sprung up to represent washington, as that's where we have lots of pretty ones. it was not acridly political but did have trump preening, blaming, etc. as we have all become familiar with.

well here's the rub: amazon rejected it. they said something about not wanting anything about covid that was not from the scientific community, and i can understand that. they may not have had time to read it. maybe the covid title flagged their censoring machine. or maybe they were afraid it was in code, aimed at getting people to rebel.

when i finished it, i took my momentum to a book of short stories that i have been working on for a couple years. i just dropped stories in there, when i had the time to write them, and i'd gotten about 23 of them, and figured that was enough: edit, proofread, gather up a cover, and fling it in there. at the last minute i wrote one: hope beats the coronavirus; this was actually saturday night, and i finished it up today and did the last of the editing. now i'm wondering if i should just scratch out that name coronavirus and in fact bury any reference, just to slip it by the censors.

the thing is, it's not like i make any money off this stuff. haiku, in fact, almost zilch; nobody buys it. toward the end of my haiku days (in a rush i finished e pluribus haiku 2018; i never did one for 2019, and kind of left it behind), i joked about how i could express myself freely in haiku because nobody ever read it. now i'm curious whether someone actually read this one, but i also feel like it's genuinely possible that they are just flagging the word covid and rejecting anything they don't understand.

in china people were very critical of xi and began using trump to complain about him, trusting that they could say anything about trump that they wanted, and slip it by the censors, and thus speak freely about something that was important. i agree that freedom of speech is important. as a poet i've always used it to express my true mind and i have no intention of giving that up. on the other hand, it's no surprise that in such tumultuous times some topics are very sensitive, and people have no desire to get in the middle of a huge storm. i even told my wife something to that effect the other day. sentiment for "get back to work" is strong here and people have not yet really taken it seriously in our county, where we have only maybe three cases, and hospitals, rather than being overrun, are sitting idle as they've canceled all unnecessary surgery. it's as political here as anywhere: the "open-it-up" folks as vocal as the "please-stay-home" folks, and there is general suspicion both that devos and the wealthy are sponsoring the open-it-ups, while the liberal deep state and the mainstream media, determined to bring down djt, are sponsoring the please-stay-homes. in such an environment, it's best to lay low. i won't even tell my neighbors how i feel.

in that spirit, it's back to the drawing board for my haiku as well as the short stories. get that c-word out of there - both c-words, for that matter, anything that might flag the censor's attention. i don't see it as censoring on the part of amazon (createspace really, which is part of amazon) as caution, and staying out of the limelight. if people are out there making money on quack conspiracies (i'm sure they are trying), i'm out there just trying to document the turmoil of a single week in april, and writing for the history books, what it's like to read positively unbelievable headlines. just in the last two days were a couple that i'll mention; i'm not sure they made it into the book. in one, the fbi had actually confiscated hospital supplies from a shipment that a state had bought from abroad; they sent the fbi, who simply took the supplies, and didn't say what they were going to do with them. this sounds kind of like a war on the states: tell them they're on their own; tell them the feds will be of no help; make them compete with each other; prevent them from taking care of their own hospital supply chains. pure crazy making.

in another headline some people got up a demonstration against the quarantine, and it did appear to be funded by devos and the wealthy. they want pressure to reopen the economy. why? maybe to fend off the ultimate stock market crash, which i believe is yet to come, but which is in the balance. but do they not realize that lives are at stake? it begins to look like the feds and the wealthy are hoping to clear the deck, and get rid of some of these poor people who ultimately tend to vote democratic anyway. the heck of it is that what with church services being held in person, professional wrestling being redefined as essential, and beaches reopening, there will be plenty more statistics to chew over in the next couple of weeks that will make us wonder what they were thinking. it seems quite obvious to me that it's an incredible time in history, and i want to document a little what it feels like to be on the receiving end.

as i've said, i have ten children, some steps, three adopted, all with their own perspective, but we have the last four out here at the end of a road in the dry foothills of the sacramento mountains of southern new mexico. i have the luxury of being able to stay home, having just retired, and i have serious things i want to write, but have also developed a haiku sense of balancing nature on the incredible moments of daily life. i recollected those skills and figured, here's a spring to beat all springs. here's a blossoming cherry tree that brings with it the full weight of the president's karma. and i am determined to document it, from the point of view of virtually everyone who i know who was part of it.

back to the drawing board; results will appear soon enough.