Following a visit to a retirement home a while ago, I came up with a haiku, almost completely formed, in the middle of the night…I needed an image to go with it, but sadly had none of my own, so a trawl through iStockphoto came up with the one below.

slumped in chairs
heat turned high; a screen flickers
as winter comes

Still needs some tuning, it’s not slick enough.  The second line was originally “a screen flickers, fire crackles” but of course, there are no open grates in an old people’s home…

I would like to point out that this haiku is not meant as a slur on retirement homes, but more to do with the loss of mental faculties and lack of free will in many of the old.