Sitting outside the New Conway, a pub in a leafy street in Cardiff, on a Saturday night at the beginning of September, sipping a pint of cider while waiting for some friends to turn up.
I had a blank piece of A4 paper and a pen in my pocket. I’d folded the paper before leaving home; it was meant as a stand-in notebook, since I couldn’t find one with any empty pages.
I decided to write some haikus to pass the time. The paper had been folded three times giving eight rectangles of pure white space on each side – each rectangle the perfect size to accommodate a handwritten haiku. I thought, if, by the time I’d written sixteen haikus, our friends hadn’t turned up, we’d go home,
I managed to write six – here they are, straight from the paper – unedited. Turns out they are a bit of a haiku sequence.
haikus, things to do when you're bored outside a pub and friends don't turn up
autumn is delayed by a burst of summer sun birds take advantage
near summer's end yellowing leaves start their trip to the brown gutter
like a dance they swirl on the pavements, in the road then they separate
noisy crows in trees saying goodbye to the sun when it's gone, they stop
on the bark of trees forests of green moss congeal it's complicated
