Haiga Feeds the Eyes

The zappai set — the poet laughing at the form. It closes the series, and it is the one song that is about the haiga themselves. It opens on the joke every poet knows (senryu are always perfect until you have to write them) and on the title poem: haiku and senryu bring images to mind, but haiga feeds the eyes. From there it lets the form misbehave — machine-prompted nonsense, tongue twisters, pasta sonnets, bees that can’t spell, a purple dog at the piano. It is arranged to get sillier as it goes, and it ends on Shakespeare, lightly vandalized.