Alan Peat
Whole
On a table that will collapse to form the middle section of a bed, a young boy is putting the sky together; looking for its edges. He has already made the girl at the keyboard. There are very few holes in the man beside her … but the floor beneath them is unfinished. It is essentially a race against bedtime. Complete or incomplete, they’ll break up before the table legs are folded.
deadheading
a secateur’s blades
in full sun
I have Jackson Pollock’s Convergence in a box—the Springbok, 340-piece edition (1964): a deconstruction of a deconstruction, inviting me to engage at a tactile level. There are horses in there; horses and dancers that will emerge from the chaos. Time is my own now; there is no curfew, no one else to take apart or put together—just a thing in pieces with a jigsaw to unbox.
white room
suggesting old ways
to unwind
About the Author
Alan Peat is a U.K.-based poet and author. He was runner-up in the 2021 British Haiku Society’s Ken and Norah Jones Haibun Award and in 2022 won a Touchstone Award for Individual Haibun. His book of collaborative ekphrastic haibun with Réka Nytrai, Barking at the Coming Rain (Alba Publishing, 2023), is available by e-mailing alanpeat@icloud.com.
Gosh, that first line of the last haiku really turned everything upsidedown for me.
I thought I was in a caravan at first, my parents had two very small cheap ones, holidays and rentals.
Then “white room”!
Setting aside the famous song, these meanings:
“Only Murders in the Building” season 3, episode 4 explores the concept of the “White Room,” a real phenomenon in acting where actors lose sight of reality during a performance.
white room in American English US
a room from which all contaminants have been eliminated and in which temperature, humidity, and pressure are controlled: used for assembly and repair of precision mechanisms, in preventing infection, etc.
“White Room Syndrome”
In writing it refers to scenes lacking description, making characters feel like they’re floating in a blank void, hindering reader immersion because the setting isn’t visualized. It stems from insufficient sensory details, environmental cues, and atmosphere, but can be fixed by weaving in details about sights, sounds, smells, and character interaction with the surroundings, rather than just long descriptive paragraphs, to ground the reader in the scene.
Or perhaps it is the protagonist from the song that poet Pete Brown (Scouse poet, beat poet etc…)
The song’s lyrics have characteristics of a villanelle which lends itself to the song and its music (by Jack Bruce).
The repeat line “where the shadows run from themselves” appears three times, and in this mode to end the song:
I’ll sleep in this place with the lonely crowd
Lie in the dark, where the shadows run from themselves
My mind delightfully exploded with ‘white room’ and no curfew as if all of a sudden.
I will be revisiting this haibun often and I won’t worry if I cannot decipher it, it’s utters magic, that’s all I need to know and to feel.