I AM the Haiku Buckaroo!

I WON!! Leslie's Haiku Buckaroo contest, that is. So now I AM the current reigning Haiku Buckaroo, and I will proudly display my badge over in my sidebar forever and ever. I would like to thank Laurie, who judged this contest, for picking my particular haiku verse from the (I'm sure) thousands of worthy entries. And I want to single out Leslie for my enormous thanks, but also for my equally large blame. Yes, Leslie is receiving the first ever Blame It On This Blog award for getting damn near the whole blogosphere writing in haiku. It's all her fault! (Thanks, Leslie!) Finally, I'd like to thank Jenn and Allison and everybody else who pushed cajoled convinced me to enter the contest. I actually submitted ten verses but this was the one that won:

In the dusty room
a broken piano leans.
No more music here.

If y'all will indulge me for just a moment, I'd like to relate the history of this particular verse. I've been something of an urban explorer, peeking and poking around abandoned buildings and hidden places and such for a long time. It started when I was a kid of about ten or eleven years old in southern Louisiana. At that time there was a large long-abandoned house in the woods on the dairy farm at the end of the street where we lived. Everyone (all the other kids, anyway) said it was haunted, but something in that house attracted me and I decided to break in enter anyway. Once I got inside, I realized that I was apparently the first person to ever enter after the previous residents had left years before. The house had obviously once been very nice but now was on the verge of falling down. Most of the furniture was still in place, but paint and wallpaper were peeling from the walls and everything was covered by a thick layer of dust and cobwebs. And in the living room there was a grand piano with a broken right front leg that somehow almost exuded a tangible air of sadness as I gently touched a key. The house was haunted, not by ghosts, per se, but by that sadness of being abandoned. I left the house, reveling in my status as a hero to my friends, but the piano stayed with me.

Fast forward to Long Beach, California about 10 years ago. I was walking past the ballroom of the hotel where I was staying when I saw a grand piano in the corner of the room. In that instant, the haunting emotion of that broken piano from so long ago demanded to be expressed. I went back to my room and spent hours trying to write a story or a poem to let that sadness out. Nothing seemed right and I ultimately gave up. The piano stayed. Fast forward again, this time to two weeks ago and the Haiku Buckaroo contest. As soon as I decided to try and write a haiku, the verse you see above came to me. Yes, I wrote some other verses but I had to compose them; that one just appeared on its own. Now, although that emotion is still with me, it has been expressed and I feel almost as if the spirit of that old house is satisfied that the world knows how it felt to be left behind.