I’m not the only one who finds inspiration in the police blotter column.  Cartoonist Owen Cook mines the weekly Police Log column of the Carmel Pine Cone for Police Log Comics: comic strips which illustrate the verbatim text of a police log item. Here’s a sample:

I take a police blotter item and strip it down into a haiku; you fill in the details with your imagination.  In contrast Owen’s comics retain the terse, impersonal verbiage of the original story; but his illustrations interpret the text for you, and in unexpected ways.  Yet he leaves plenty of room for your thoughtful speculation.

I think he and I get to the same place, by different roads. I heartily recommend a visit to Police Log Comics.

In the meantime, more haiku are coming soon; keep the faith, and thanks.

 

As I write this I’m sitting at the dining table late on a Saturday night. Music from Radio Swiss Jazz streams through my laptop.  Specifically, a middle-aged Swiss gentleman named Erich Nussbaum performs a cool swing version of the theme song from the sixties-era “Flintstones” cartoon sitcom. (“Flintstones! Meet the Flintstones! They’re a modern stone-age family…”)

That’ll bend your brain, especially if you’re as sleep-deprived as I am.  Next I am expecting William Shatner to poke his head up through a hatch in the floor and invite me into an exciting new world of discount hotel rooms via the Internet.

Or not.  In any case, that the world is surprising is no surprise to me.  I have read so many news stories of crimes large and small, that surprise itself seems unsurprising. Except when it comes in the form of eccentric Swiss jazz musicians.

And yet: while there may be only so many ways to sin, some gifted individuals manage to bring a special nuance all their own to theft, assault and – my special field of interest – disorderly conduct.  Police blotter stories are all about disorder. And so are the haiku that I derive from them. What’s more human than disorder?

And so please accept another batch of haiku: from the backwoods counties of Georgia to the elite ‘burbs of the PNW and points in between.  And as always, enjoy.

 

He phones to threaten.
Behind his bluster, softly:
(click) a gun is cocked.

 

Wanted for fraud, him.
Last seen catching the next bus
for anywhere else.

 

A dog who hates him,
awaits him, whenever he
strolls down Lower Drive.

 

Her Nike gym bag,
left behind on the sidewalk,
didn’t wait for her.

 

Cops’ Tips for Couples:
Relationships issues are
best solved when sober.

 

Somehow it made sense
to enter the neighbor’s house
and steal her laundry.

 

Busted by the storm.
Cops seeking shelter barge in
on his cocaine deal.

 

He wants a record
of his girlfriend’s father’s threat
to “whip his ass good.”

 

Ex-wife incursion.
She smashed all the windows, and
his new girlfriend.

 

Someone’s having sex!
They leave used condoms in his shed.
He could lock the door.

 

The teens have no clue
as to how those cans of beer
appeared in their car.

 

 

 

This blog is new, but police blotter haiku are not.  I’ve written them for years.  And I’ll publish the best of them in book form later this year.

I’m designing the book now.  And I can’t imagine anything more boring than page after page of three-line poems.  So there will be drawings.

Well, photos really – but processed through an image editor to look like drawings.  It works pretty well. And I don’t draw. But I shoot pretty well.

I’m prototyping the conversion process now – mainly with photos swiped from the Internet, but also with photos provided by friends (which I will use in the book). But in the meantime, for your amusement, in prototype: illustrated haiku.  Enjoy: