Project Ajar

By Drew Halfnight

The following is a short series of American haikus about Regent Park.

I'm not writing haiku because they're the only formal poem a four-year-old can string together while taking a bath. I just like how they look and function.

People have been writing haiku for thousands of years, mostly in Japanese. Professional writers often composed them in series, with two poets trading off, each contributing a haiku in a continuous cycle with no fixed ending.

Below I offer a once-man cycle of "American haikus," which is the term used to describe the English adaptation of haiku by freewheelin' beat poet Jack Kerouac. They preserve the spirit of the original form, but they do without the strict syllabic scheme.




starless night
lonely hole of a
construction site

spectres limp the
pavements the gloom
swallows them up

look around a moment
of absence nothing doing
hop the fence

feet hit dirt pity
i don't own
a camera

for inside covering a crater
the size of the future--
a tarp that doesn't billow

metal scrape of dirt
and stone smell
of school days

where grain elevators stood
the yet-built buildings'
elevator shafts

alone, lost!
the piles of slabs
and heaps of mounds

dozing machines
talking in their sleep--
mute witnesses to

clutching the tall
fences residents' souls-to-be
looking in at me

nothing doing
left to do here
project ever ajar

only vanity bulbs
by the Golden Ring bar--
project ajar!