poets who pause to pontificate poets who write for grants poets who count syllables poets who admire texture of words i work and have no time and i have no time for poets who have all the time poets who find poetic moments poets who teach laureate poetry poets who chatter on Facebook it is blood in the veins to kill and give birth and die i am the true poet, not you i am the true poet, not you poets of the revolution poets weeping tears at bars poets who don’t write lyrics poets of pure soundless music angels of suicide bridge of neon, cliff of ice we are the true poets, not you we are the true poets, not you
In sports, career, dating and other games people play in life, there is always a winner and there is always a loser. Most people spend their time and energy trying to win because winning is crucial to basic needs like survival. The fight of life is about reducing abuse and getting ahead. But how deceiving life can be. It is not really about this kind of winning vs. losing at all. Each and every life holds potential for being a different kind of win that produces no losers at all. Think about the certainty of death and think about what you value the most _ what gives you truest and purest fulfillment. Life is about yourself _ and only yourself. This kind of winning is about winning for yourself. It is a win that cannot be handed to you. It is not being defined outside of yourself. People can win the game of life, hoarding riches and status and empty feel-goodness and turn out a total loser in finding the meaning of life. When you create that music, that poem, that story that feels just right, and when you feel so very close to the meaning of life in that moment, that is a win. When you find that love with no reason except that you love, whether it’s for your lover, your child, your protege, your art, the people of the world, or all the generations of humankind that come after you, that is a win.
japanese cars must be like sushi, tempura, kaiseki the designer pontificates at a party to add value and defy the challenge from hyundai of korea like yakiniku korean barbecue and bibimbap
think of all the poor people in india the nun swishing her black habit prays the chicken soup swimming in the urn turns into urine and the bread into styrofoam sponge in our throats
let’s have a picnic here, mommy, OK? my son plunks down in the grass he eats boiled eggs, claiming his place in the japanese family, believing they are delicious, the best in the world
when will my husband be able to eat again? my mother asks the doctor, who answers, “never” after brain surgery, tubes trickle paste through a hole in his stomach he gurgles in mucus, his eyeballs batty with fright
If you ever panic about the impermanence of life, if you ever get worried about your job, your relationships, your future, if you fear death, the best way to put all that turmoil to rest is to reassure yourself that death will come _ surely, whether you worry or not, whether you try to stop it or not. All of it will end _ surely. Since you know this, you could conceivably go berserk and kill everyone you ever hated before you kill yourself. This is one obvious scenario. And daily headlines tell us some people really do this, thinking they are justified. OK and so why doesn’t everybody go out and do this, since death comes oh so surely. We want to leave this world a better place for those who are still alive, and this means that we don’t really deep inside believe that death ends everything, though it comes, surely, as we know it. There is something else that goes on forever. Like our love for our children, including other people’s children. Simple things like the light of the stars, the taste of food in our mouths, a blade of grass, the scentless smell of the wind. Simple things that are so forever complex.
Sometimes I get struck with irrational panic about what is going to happen to my poetry and stories after I’m dead. Maybe I’m just worried about what’s going to happen to me after I’m dead. But I worry for the future of my poems. The technology of Google Books has worked as an eye-opener about the uselessness and irrelevance of such worries about how writing, already obscure, may disappear and be forgotten. Books are rapidly getting digitized _ including books sitting in some corner of a forsaken library. Google Books has publications I had forgotten my works were in _ like “A Good Day to Die” and “Ally” _ a review in Ms. magazine of an anthology that has my work, a paper I wrote in college. It is heartening, though it should be obvious: Once you’ve written something, it is forever. I should have known this. But it’s reassuring to see the publications pop up as data in a simple search on your laptop. Poetry is about the search for the eternal. Poetry is about connecting with the human condition that is forever. I am not afraid of death, although I tremble in utter fear of death. I know I can play the moments in my life, over and over, like reels of a movie, like lines of a poem, like a Google Books search. I can travel back and forth between now, to times distant that came long before, and back again to that unknown sleep that comes after death. I can play those moments. Each moment that is now is eternal, even after I’m gone.
“I want an apology from the police and prosecutors,” was what Toshikazu Sugaya, 62, said after winning freedom from what DNA tests proved had been an unjustified 17-year imprisonment in a murder he did not commit. Slim and soft-spoken, Sugaya looks more like a gentle grandfather than any stereotype of a murderer of a 4-year-old girl. He is drawing an outburst of public empathy in Japan, a nation where nearly 100 percent of criminal trials end in convictions but Sugaya is just the first retrial case in 22 years. Since 1992, more than 215 people in the U.S. have been exonerated, including 16 who were at one time serving death sentences, according to the Innocence Project. For federal cases, the wrongfully convicted can seek compensation of $100,000 a year for each year of incarceration for those on death row, and $50,000 a year for each year in prison for those not on death row, the non-profit legal clinic says. But for state cases, half of the states have no compensation statutes. In Japan, Sugaya, for now, wants an apology _ at least one clear vindication in this culture where a heartfelt apology can get bigger than life. To make it even more profoundly Japanese, he also demanded the authorities apologize to the dead. His parents died while he was in prison. He will visit their grave, and he would like the police and prosecutors to also go and offer their apologies, he said on nationally televised news. Sugaya, a kindergarten bus driver, had been sentenced to life in prison in 1993. What struck him the most about the city landscape after he got out were all those stores, Sugaya said, while not being sure exactly what they were. “This shouldn’t be dismissed as a mistake,” he said. “I want my life back.”
I had the pleasure of collaborating with American/Brazilian dancer Abel Coelho July 6, at What the Dickens. This blog was how we met. I wrote about a Dairakudakan Butoh workshop, which Abel took part in. He left a nice comment about the entry. And our correspondence began. He is in Japan again this summer. We met at Ebisu station near the statute of the god. We walked over to What the Dickens, then did this together. Pretty good for two people who just met. The MC who introduces us at the beginning of the video is poet Tomas.
Ikiru by Yuri Kageyama Reading at the Pink Cow in Tokyo June 8,2008.
When you cut your finger against the end of a piece of paper, and it hurts and the blood spurts out, you remember blood, lots of it, curdling red ink with a sweaty smell, is rushing around your body, all of it, brain, eyeballs, cell tissue, spine, toes, your heart is pumping like quivering red rubber and your lungs are going in and out, in and out. When you stop to think about it, you want to scream and you almost forget how to breathe. People who believe in Reincarnation say it would be a waste of lives to have so many people alive and then die and so god must recycle all those lives. It is nothing short of a miracle we continue to live everyday despite all the deaths everyday. And each one of us is dying gradually everyday. But for the most part, we don’t get shot, we don’t get run over, we don’t crash, we don’t get a deadly disease, we don’t get stabbed, beaten to death, crushed in an earthquake, commit suicide, and we live live live live. And each day adds to the next day and pretty soon we are old but still we live and we don’t think about the blood circulating or the each and every breath we take or the fact that we have averted death for the moment. We are alive. But we could at any moment take a long silver needle and poke it in our eye, blinding ourselves in blinding rage. We could jump into the wind from the station platform as the train glides in with a rattle, although the mirror is there to remind us how ghostly we look and make us think again how foolish this act is that we are contemplating to die this moment instead of the next moment when we do get shot or get cancer or our hearts stop or our lungs fail. My mother is dying of pancreas cancer, and I can finally smell death, that unmistakable stench that sticks inside your nostrils for hours, maybe even a day, trailing you from the hospice room. She has lost so much weight she looks like a bird, her nose pointed like a beak in a mummified face. She lies curled up in the bed, her arms clasped into herself, a scrawny embryonic chick in a nest, and her beady eyes are expressionless, unmoving, staring into your eyes, and she won’t close them because she knows you are her daughter and these may be the last moments, and she needs to look, but you just want her to close her eyes so you can leave and forget. She couldn’t even speak then. When she could still move, when she was at the hospital, not the hospice, where patients are getting treatment to live, she was just a burden on the nurses and they want her to move to a hospice, she would grow delirious on pain-killers and start walking around the hallways naked, announcing: She must leave now because Otoosama _ her husband, my father _ has arrived to get her. My father is dead. Before that, when she was still undergoing tests, and she had always instructed us she never wanted to know it, if she ever got cancer, and so we couldn’t tell her, she says to me: “I wasn’t a very good mother, was I?” This is a very important conversation. But I brush it off. I don’t want to talk about this, do I? because then wouldn’t we be talking about her death? “I watch you and your sister, how the both of you think about and interact with your children,” she says. “And I realize I wasn’t a good parent. I know this watching the both of you as parents.” She goes on, matter of fact, her father, was a big believer in education and sent all his children, even the daughters, unusual for those times in Japan, to urban schools. My mother was second from the youngest so she was barely in elementary school when she was sent to live away from home with her sisters and brothers to go to good schools. And so she grew up never knowing the intimacy of a relationship between a mother and child. She doesn’t have to apologize. And I should reach out and hug her, but all I remember is how she never stopped him, her husband, my father, when he beat me, how I had to cower, never apologizing, and all she did was sit quietly and pray and be patient and believe the anger will pass like a typhoon, leaving behind just tiny purple bruise marks on sallow skin, as sanity returns to the Ph. D. in engineering, professor, salaryman, head of the household, and all would be well. He needs a break from work, it is stressful, he needs to go the family beach villa. She has already made arrangement, and I must go with him, the ever faithful daughter, because he can’t go alone. “It can’t be me. It must be you,” she says, as though this is decided, ironing the white shirts and folding them on top of each other on the tatami mat. She doesn’t tell me until years later. She worried about me every day, praying he wasn’t beating me. He didn’t beat me. We took turns rowing a wooden boat. We went fishing til our fingers smelled like worms. We lowered cages into the water with fish heads, and drew them up to find crabs entangled with each other. But I can’t forgive, not just yet, though no one has to apologize. I call my sister on the train back from the hospital. “She is going to die,” I say, breathless, more from excitement than from sadness. She is dying but she is realizing and she is changing. What she is saying is so profound she had to be dying. Really dying. It should have been like the movies. I should have forgiven her, a moment of reconciliation before the moment of death. You are a good mother. Remember all the Ryunosuke Akutagawa stories you read to me in the kitchen, but you told me the stories I wrote, secretly, in big block letters in a worn out notebook were petty and would never amount to anything? Remember how you wanted to go back to school for your Master’s degree, but you had to cook and clean and you gave up? Remember how you won awards with those elaborate sumi calligraphy on rice paper, painting ancient words no one could read? Remember how you sat naked in the bath tub, thinking your solitary thoughts, and you hated your husband, my father, because he bought you the wrong-size ring in an overseas business trip? Today, you taught me how people keep evolving til the last moment of life. No, you are not a bad mother at all. This is the best gift you have given me. I have learned the lesson of death although I still can’t understand how we manage to keep living day by day, lungs breathing and heart beating and you feel so faraway and I can’t remember barely anything else about you.
When you cut your finger against the end of a piece of paper, and it hurts and the blood spurts out, you remember blood, lots of it, curdling red ink with a sweaty smell, is rushing around your body, all of it, brain, eyeballs, cell tissue, spine, toes, your heart is pumping like quivering red rubber and your lungs are going in and out, in and out. When you stop to think about it, you want to scream and you almost forget how to breathe. People who believe in Reincarnation say it would be a waste of lives to have so many people alive and then die and so god must recycle all those lives. It is nothing short of a miracle we continue to live everyday despite all the deaths everyday. And each one of us is dying gradually everyday. But for the most part, we don’t get shot, we don’t get run over, we don’t crash, we don’t get a deadly disease, we don’t get stabbed, beaten to death, crushed in an earthquake, commit suicide, and we live live live live. And each day adds to the next day and pretty soon we are old but still we live and we don’t think about the blood circulating or the each and every breath we take or the fact that we have averted death for the moment. We are alive. But we could at any moment take a long silver needle and poke it in our eye, blinding ourselves in blinding rage. We could jump into the wind from the station platform as the train glides in with a rattle, although the mirror is there to remind us how ghostly we look and make us think again how foolish this act is that we are contemplating to die this moment instead of the next moment when we do get shot or get cancer or our hearts stop or our lungs fail. My mother is dying of pancreas cancer, and I can finally smell death, that unmistakable stench that sticks inside your nostrils for hours, maybe even a day, trailing you from the hospice room. She has lost so much weight she looks like a bird, her nose pointed like a beak in a mummified face. She lies curled up in the bed, her arms clasped into herself, a scrawny embryonic chick in a nest, and her beady eyes are expressionless, unmoving, staring into your eyes, and she won’t close them because she knows you are her daughter and these may be the last moments, and she needs to look, but you just want her to close her eyes so you can leave and forget. She couldn’t even speak then. When she could still move, when she was at the hospital, not the hospice, where patients are getting treatment to live, she was just a burden on the nurses and they want her to move to a hospice, she would grow delirious on pain-killers and start walking around the hallways naked, announcing: She must leave now because Otoosama _ her husband, my father _ has arrived to get her. My father is dead. Before that, when she was still undergoing tests, and she had always instructed us she never wanted to know it, if she ever got cancer, and so we couldn’t tell her, she says to me: “I wasn’t a very good mother, was I?” This is a very important conversation. But I brush it off. I don’t want to talk about this, do I? because then wouldn’t we be talking about her death? “I watch you and your sister, how the both of you think about and interact with your children,” she says. “And I realize I wasn’t a good parent. I know this watching the both of you as parents.” She goes on, matter of fact, her father, was a big believer in education and sent all his children, even the daughters, unusual for those times in Japan, to urban schools. My mother was second from the youngest so she was barely in elementary school when she was sent to live away from home with her sisters and brothers to go to good schools. And so she grew up never knowing the intimacy of a relationship between a mother and child. She doesn’t have to apologize. And I should reach out and hug her, but all I remember is how she never stopped him, her husband, my father, when he beat me, how I had to cower, never apologizing, and all she did was sit quietly and pray and be patient and believe the anger will pass like a typhoon, leaving behind just tiny purple bruise marks on sallow skin, as sanity returns to the Ph. D. in engineering, professor, salaryman, head of the household, and all would be well. He needs a break from work, it is stressful, he needs to go the family beach villa. She has already made arrangement, and I must go with him, the ever faithful daughter, because he can’t go alone. “It can’t be me. It must be you,” she says, as though this is decided, ironing the white shirts and folding them on top of each other on the tatami mat. She doesn’t tell me until years later. She worried about me every day, praying he wasn’t beating me. He didn’t beat me. We took turns rowing a wooden boat. We went fishing til our fingers smelled like worms. We lowered cages into the water with fish heads, and drew them up to find crabs entangled with each other. But I can’t forgive, not just yet, though no one has to apologize. I call my sister on the train back from the hospital. “She is going to die,” I say, breathless, more from excitement than from sadness. She is dying but she is realizing and she is changing. What she is saying is so profound she had to be dying. Really dying. It should have been like the movies. I should have forgiven her, a moment of reconciliation before the moment of death. You are a good mother. Remember all the Ryunosuke Akutagawa stories you read to me in the kitchen, but you told me the stories I wrote, secretly, in big block letters in a worn out notebook were petty and would never amount to anything? Remember how you wanted to go back to school for your Master’s degree, but you had to cook and clean and you gave up? Remember how you won awards with those elaborate sumi calligraphy on rice paper, painting ancient words no one could read? Remember how you sat naked in the bath tub, thinking your solitary thoughts, and you hated your husband, my father, because he bought you the wrong-size ring in an overseas business trip? Today, you taught me how people keep evolving til the last moment of life. No, you are not a bad mother at all. This is the best gift you have given me. I have learned the lesson of death although I still can’t understand how we manage to keep living day by day, lungs breathing and heart beating and you feel so faraway and I can’t remember barely anything else about you.