Limericks and Haiku on Facebook

For those who don't have or just aren't into their facebook accounts, this may seem rather silly, but I've been having fun recently composing, sharing and enjoying simple rhymes, limericks and haikus on facebook with friends and family.

I remember falling in love with the simple discipline of a haiku, which is a three line poem of 5/7/5 syllables, no rhyme, originally Japanese. The Japanese may traditionally write about nature, but on facebook I write about coffee:

Morning alarm rang
got up, turned on computer
made coffee waiting

Quite often when I wake up I just don't have the energy to write complete sentences, certainly not until well into my second giant mug of coffee, so the haiku is just perfect for getting across what I want to communicate.

Two facebook friends who share a name but not a generation, one a cousin and the other a neighbor, then began replying with limericks. I'm very impressed by their literary writing genius, and this morning I finally came up with a relatively good one:

Do you start your day with coffee?
How do you make it please tell me.
Do you need it to perk
to get nice and alert?
Or is instant all it needs to be?

It combines our favorite topic, coffee, with the basic limerick. Of course, it's not perfect, but I wrote it for facebook, not for a school assignment.

In the summer, there's a rule
when it's open, I go to the pool
Luckily for me it's near
So no need to fear
And the water's not too cool

Sometimes I pick other topics, but I don't use the traditional sexual innuendos most people think are limericks. This is all for fun, suiting my life and describing it for my fb friends. On with my day...