What's this? The narration is back! 

In wake of a recent discussion on what constitutes tanka/haiku in English, I've decided to exposit a little bit. The haiku format that most are familiar with is a three-line poem with a 5/7/5 syllable scheme. There's nothing wrong with that format. However, :iconCorvus32346: rightly pointed out that haikus don't [i]need[/i] to follow that format—and I don't mean that in my usual way, where all poetry is valid. I mean that you can have a traditionally valid English haiku while deviating from the 3-line 5/7/5. See below:

[i]Face Paints[/i]
colourful face paints pictures of your dead mother onto newer things

The one-line format is wonderful in that the parsing is left entirely up to the reader. While there are no [url=https://www.furaffinity.net/view/23173549/]cutting words (see comments)[/url] in English, the single line can force the reader to explore which parsing "makes sense" and to realize that, in truth, multiple versions simultaneously make sense.

[i]Face Paints[/i]
colour face paints
pictures dead mother
on newer things

Without the syllabic restriction, this take is arguably much more sharper than its 17-syllable equivalent. I said some time ago that the fewer words used in a haiku, the more abstract it gets, and this might be a good example of that. By removing "ful," "of your," and "to," there's a lot less direction given. A reader could get something unintended out of this poem.

[i]Face Paints[/i]
colourful face
paints—
pictures of your dead mother
onto newer things

Just as the one-line haiku uses the lack of formatting and difficulty of parsing to imitate the effect of the cutting words, haikus with four or more lines can imitate the cutting words by breaking lines with specific intent. This differs from the 3-line 17-syllable haiku because you can put the break anywhere, rather than only after the fifth syllable. Here, the ambiguity is made explicit on the noun/verb "paints." As you may be able to guess, this effect is identical to that of the [url=https://www.furaffinity.net/view/23247880/]free verse poem.[/url]

-Charles Michael Averin