A mouth hanging open
Vacuous eyes glaze over…
I do not get it
Wow.
I’ve never read a poem that more accurately described my life! 
This is the only haiku I have ever written, for an English assignment in 10th grade.
Haiku
A three lined poem
Can’t contain no rhymes at all?
Stupid assignment
I got a B… but it was the most popular one in the teacher’s lounge.
BWAAAAAHAA! So my meaning actually did come through!
Astro… you poor kid, come on over and I’ll try to fix it.
Isn’t that an extra syllable?
Now, if you had said "A mouth hangs open . . . "
Oh well, pretty good for a first try, I guess. 
The point of a haiku is that the restrictions mean you have to think really hard to condense the poem’s meaning down to its absolute minimum. A good haiku will give you a sense of time and space in the tiniest little phrase. The original ones as popularised by Basho also had to contain environmental detail. His most famous one is:
The old pool.
A frog jumps.
The sound of water.
(Not adhering to the 5-7-5 rule because of translation from the Japanese.)
For all the laughable simplicity of this poem, I find that for me it actually does conjure an entire mood and sense of place. I can see the whole scenario in my mind, despite it only being 10 words long. Anyone else see a rocky, moss-covered pool in a forest, lit with dappled light, and hear the silence broken by a plop and a splash? I know I do.
Anyway, most haiku you see on the web ignore these considerations and just stick to the syllabic form, and are therefore dull, uninspired, and pointless.
Here’s one of mine:
Dublin Bay is blurred
Behind the winter raindrops.
Or are they my tears?
If you want rhymes, try the “limeraiku”:
There’s a vile old man
Of Japan who roars at whores
“Where’s your bloody fan?”
To express ones thoughts
In seventeen syllables
Is very diffic…
(John Cooper Clarke, 1978)
I once lost a bet on tour with my band and could only speak in haiku for 48 hours thereafter. We were in Key West, and every moment not on stage we were drunk as monkeys running around town. not the easiest situation to create delicate poetry in.
It was really hard at first, but got surprisingly easy very quickly. I can still whip out haiku faster than anyone I know because of it.
For example:
I am so thirsty
Please let the bartender know
More whiskey for me
When you come back in
Play the pickup more quickly
Last time it dragged some
Please explain to her
That I am not retarded
I just lost a bet
And so on - for two days. It included patter from the stage, and it didn’t matter how intoxicated I was - if they heard one non-haiku phrase come out of my mouth, I would have had to drive the entire way back until we got out of Florida.
My first attempts from many years ago:
Translucent dew drop
Hesitates on edge of leaf
Holds its nose – and jumps!
Shiny tomato
Pinched in questioning fingers
Cries juicy, red tears
Bathers turn on spits
Of sand as Sol, the summer
Fry-cook plies his trade
With foamy fingers
The surf massages one and
All in broad daylight
Distant lighthouse winks
As fog and moonlight conspire
With lovers and sand
The gull, its wings a
Wispy, feathered fan, searches
The wharves for handouts
The evening sun primps
In the ocean’s vast mirror
Before stepping out
Cheeks are turning red
Eyes are bugged out of my head
Jocky shorts too tight!
I really like some of those, DesertGeezer.
My first was:
Don’t cry when I die
You don’t know what death is like
I may enjoy it.
The odd thing was, when I wrote it, I had no idea what a haiku was and had never heard of the form. It’s just coincidence that it fits the rhythm scheme.
I prefer doing double dactyls or clerlihews these days. More challenging.
My left kidney is gone.
I saw it there on my plate.
My left kidney is gone.
First five syllables
Then seven, then five again
Stupid bloody things
OK here’s my second haiku:
The cryptic message
upon my computer screen
leaves me mystified.
Same theme as my first, but with fixed syllable count. I’ve tried to work in a sense of place (infront of my computer) but how to work time into it I don’t know. It seems like too much of a complete sentence though.
How about (my third attempt):
A cryptic message
upon my computer screen.
I am mystified.
I’m going to have to keep working on this. I started out posting this as a joke, but now I’m getting into it! Thanks for the pointers and examples everyone!
OK, here it is with a sense of time, but no sense of place:
Reading a message
Rich morning coffee in hand.
Meaning is unclear.
OK I’ll stop now.