Zig-Zag and Venus Haikus by Manga Fans

Zig-Zag and Venus Haikus

"Love, Venus," ended
the zig-zagging note. "No way,"
said the boy. "How did...?"

I zig zag my way
through life, hoping Venus will
favor me with love

Venus sighs up high
Looking down for unfound love
Eyes zig zag with hope

I'm in love with a
girl pretty as Venus who
makes my heart zig zag

The Goddess of Love,
Venus sends her pink love bolts
which zig zag 'tween hearts
-Manga Fans

Okay, talk about ironic, this week Peter was asked to judge a poetry contest! You all know that he really doesn't see the point in most poetry, and the poetry he was asked to judge was especially ill-conceived. In a cross marketing scheme to promote their releases of two manga by the same artist, TOKYOPOP and CMX had people write haiku using words from the titles. Here's a quote from the TOKYOPOP website describing the contest (I've added links to the actual books so you can see what they look like if you're interested):

To celebrate the launch of two new series from manga-ka Yuki Nakaji, TOKYOPOP and CMX are sponsoring a haiku-writing contest!

Use the words "zig zag," "Venus" and "love" in a haiku, and enter to win a free copy of Zig*Zag and Venus in Love!

Five winning haikus will be chosen by the editors of each book, so make sure you give it your creative all because these guys are picky!

Peter's response was, "Honestly, I don’t like any of them very much. Here are the 5 I disliked the least, in order from less disliked to more disliked. :)" (By the way, I changed the order here since the winners haven't been announced yet -- and since he's only one of the judges, this isn't the final list. So if you stumbled on this page looking for the announcement, don't interpret it as saying you've won, ok?)

Honestly though, when you have 17 syllables to work with, and somebody else mandates 5 of them, how creative can you really get?