FAIKU (fi KU is the Japanese pronunciation, in Engish fa KU) The faiku is a short poetry form, I discovered when doing research on ancient Japanese poetic forms in a coffee shop. A mysterious man that looked oddly like Jim Belushi flipping off police officers driving by the coffee shop, requested that I review an ancient Japanese scroll that he had found in some old trunks from his mission. I asked if it was a mission for the Mormons or the Jehovah Witnesses (covering my bases) and he said no. I asked him what kind of mission then and he asked me in some Zen Buddhist koan -- Did you see the Blues Brothers? This confused me. "What do you mean?" I asked, but somehow he was gone.
All I was left with was a Japanese wall hanging. The Kanji were nearly unintelligible. Bad calligraphy and weepy watercolor drawings of bamboos and cranes bordered the side. I enlisted the aid of a Japanese professor at the local university. A reproduction of the wall hanging is attached in the appendix. The translation is as follows:
Buddha bestowed upon poets the great gift of the Faiku.
True faiku resembles an ascension and descension of Mt. Fuji.
5 steps
7 more steps
11 long steps to the top
7 steps down
5 steps
By climbing Fuji-san with your words you will discover the true nature of the human dilemma and the first noble truth -- All life is suffering. A true faiku takes you up and down Fuji and reveals that man is truly fucked.
To accommodate Twitter, the faiku can be modified to a smaller version of
3 steps
5 more steps
7 long steps to the top
5 more steps
3 steps
The remaining portions of the manuscript were unintelligible, but seemed to suggest other poetry forms for the other three noble truths.
In reviewing other Japanese poetic forms, I found that all Japanese forms -- haiku, tanka, senryu, etc. -- when incorporated into English have not always followed the strict syllabic format. I'm sure this will give rise to conflicting schools of faiku-ians, those who stick to the traditional 5-7-11-7-5 format and those who are more concerned that the form actually resembles Mt. Fuji and capture the fact that all life is suffering.
While Basho was the first great haiku poet in Japan, the back side of the wall hanging had a map of a Buddhist temple in the Okiyama mountain district. An expedition to the shinden (temple) found a lost manuscript of faikus hidden under the statute of the Jolly Buddha. Apparently the great faiku poet of ancient Japan was the randy poet by the name of Ahso.
The following are the poems translated from Ahso for the first time in print.
I lost my honor
To a Tokyo geisha girl
She tore out my heart, my cock, took all my yen
I must do hara kiri
real pain in my gut
Her T-shirt Stretched
Tight Encapsulating breasts
"Foxy Light" written On Boobs I cannot touch
Or I would be arrested
My straying hands cuffed
The autumn leaves fall
Yellow, brown, red and golden
I hung her body in the swing, her legs spread
Going down to the wet earth
Tongue and leaves decay
Latin for the Earth
Strip Club for How Tera feels
Both ground me
In unreality.
