Humorous Computer Haiku

Following are humorous haiku related to computers, culled by alert readers from anonymous internet postings.

Poor Shiki must be turning over in his grave!

No keyboard present
Hit F1 to continue
Zen engineering?

A cup of hot tea —
Jasmine calms the troubled soul.
Your program has crashed.

The Tao that is seen
Is not the true Tao, until
You bring fresh toner.

Three things are certain:
Death, taxes, and lost data.
Guess which has occurred.

Windows NT crashed.
I am the Blue Screen of Death.
No one hears your screams.

Seeing my great fault
Through darkening blue windows
I begin again.

The code was willing,
It considered your request,
But the chips were weak.

Printer not ready.
Could be a fatal error.
Have a pen handy?

A file that big?
It might be very useful.
But now it is gone.

Errors have occurred.
We won't tell you where or why.
Lazy programmers.

Server's poor response
Not quick enough for browser.
Timed out, plum blossom.

Chaos reigns within.
Reflect, repent, and reboot.
Order shall return.

Login incorrect.
Only perfect spellers may
enter this system.

This site has been moved.
We'd tell you where, but then we'd
have to delete you.

Wind catches lily
scatt'ring petals to the wind:
segmentation fault

ABORTED effort:
Close all that you have.
You ask way too much.

First snow, then silence.
This thousand dollar screen dies
so beautifully.

With searching comes loss
and the presence of absence:
"My Novel" not found.

The Web site you seek
cannot be located but
endless others exist

Stay the patient course
Of little worth is your ire
The network is down

A crash reduces
your expensive computer
to a simple stone.

There is a chasm
of carbon and silicon
the software can't bridge

Yesterday it worked
Today it is not working
Windows is like that.

To have no errors
Would be life without meaning
No struggle, no joy

You step in the stream,
but the water has moved on.
This page is not here.

Hal, open the file
Hal, open the damn file, Hal
open the file, please Hal

Out of memory.
We wish to hold the whole sky,
But we never will.

Having been erased,
The document you're seeking
Must now be retyped.

The ten thousand things
How long do any persist?
Netscape, too, has gone.

Rather than a beep
Or a rude error message,
These words: "File not found."

Serious error.
All shortcuts have disappeared
Screen. Mind. Both are blank.

Because of its fixed form and predictable syntactical structure, haiku can be generated endlessly by computers. The results are occasionally interesting (cf. a million monkeys at a million typewriters) and frequently hilarious. It's a little like computer generated sentences. translations, and mission statements. For example:

Drunk epic ancient
fisherwomen blossom, smiles —
glisten, piercing grim

Generate your own at http://www.selendy.com/haiku/

Since its early days, there has been confusion about three related terms haiku, hokku and haikai. The term 'hokku' means "starting verse," and was the first of a much longer series of verses known as 'haika.' Because the hokku set the tone for the remainder of the poem, it was considered special enough that poets began to compose hokku without following them with the rest of the poem. Beginning with the great master Masaoka Shiki, this poetic form grew into the haiku in the 1890s.

So important was Masaoka Shiki to the form that there is a Shiki Memorial Museum, publishers of "Shiki and Matsuyama" which includes the following definition:

"Haiku is a poetic form which takes nature in each season as its theme and expresses inspiration derived from nature. Since the natural world transforms itself swiftly and since inspiration is fleeting, they must be caught in words quick, short and precise. The traditional rules for haiku are that each verse uses seven or eight words, a total of only seventeen rhythmical syllables (5-7- 5), including a season word. In diction haiku values simple words over obscure and difficult ones."

A modern haiku is a poem of 17-syllables in three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables. A haiku is probably the shortest poem in the world (three lines, 17 syllables, shorter than most poems other than Muhammed Ali's "Me. Whee!"), and its development is native to Japan, uninfluenced by either China or the West. Because of this brevity, the poet must be concise while concentrating deep understanding into the poem. Technically, a haiku must have a word which evokes the season. The poet usually evokes changes in nature in order to express the intangible world.

Because it is relatively easy to learn, it is commonly taught to schoolchildren, and most amateur haiku advances litle beyond this level. Even so, the form is still quite popular in Japan, and even amateur haiku written in English can be popular.

A few haiku resources on the web:

• The Shiki Internet Haiku Salon
  
  
• Haiku for People
  
  
• The Art of Haiku Poetry
  
  
• Dogwood Blossoms: Online Journal of Haiku
  
  
• The Japan Poem interactive haiku experience
  
  
• Why Haiku is So Popular in English

  Many thanks to Yosuke Ichikawa for his valuable contributions!

Precious, vouchsafed deep
Within the auburn forest
Pools of cool, clear green.