Deconstructing a Haiku

A furry fury
rampaging in the bracken,
a wolverine's lair.

I posted this poem on Friday morning during a flurry of haiku written during my last break of my full-time overnight shift. I thought I would use it here, to illustrate the lightning-in-a-bottle process that is how I write poetry.

With less than two hours until the end of my shift as an overnight stocker, I realized it had been some time since I had written poetry independent of the myriad Twitter prompts I take advantage of, spurring my creativity. So I chose to forego the prompts for the nonce, using the opportunity to write several haiku.

As I wrote, my focus bifurcated, splitting between the words I was writing and
various seeds for poems. These seeds are thoughts, images, phrases, and other fragmentary bits that creep into my writing. One of the most common seeds comes in the form of plays on words - puns, double entendres, homonyms/homophones, paradoxes and oxymorons, and alliteration.

The alliterative phrase of a furry fury stood out to me, so I started thinking about what kind of creature would be considered as such.

Wolverines and badgers are, pound for pound, just about the most vicious mammals in existence. Especially when backed into a corner, when on the defensive.

From there, knowing I was going to write about a furry fury on the defensive, it was a matter of trial-and-error, looking for the correct words to fit the constraints of the classic haiku: Three lines; Seventeen syllables; First and third lines contain five syllables each.

I still needed to give the reason the wolverine was being such a fury. And that reason came, with the thought of its den. After trying a few combinations that didn't fit, I came to the final wording.

All in the matter of five minutes from initial seed to posting the poem on my Twitter timeline. Most of the process taking place subconsciously, or intuitively.

And now you see how I write!