Hello, Story Finders!
Today, I have a tanka comic instead of a haiku. The tanka is arguably the most important poetic structure in Japanese poetry. It’s the ancestor of the haiku. A tanka has five lines. Traditionally, the first and third lines have five syllables, while the rest of the lines have seven syllables.
Each panel in today’s comic is a collage I made in my notebook.
nightmares on my walls ghosts in family pictures a monster's dead stare the midnight ocean's blood tide phantoms creep in the shadows
Stories Lurking in the Shadows
Cole Sear may see dead people in The Sixth Sense, but I see stories. Even as a little kid, I would find stories in knotholes on the fence as I was forced to stare at it. Every cloud, shadow, or stucco pattern became a series of stories to me.
I’ve worn glasses since I was seven years old. Part of the reason I was scared to death of the dark my entire childhood was that all I could see were blurry shapes that morphed into monsters because, without my glasses, my eyesight was atrocious and my imagination was always running amok.
The way I approach poetry, even my haiku, is through story. Each poem unfolds as a story. This is also my default for approaching life, which keeps things interesting but also makes it harder to maintain equilibrium.
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