Courage
When I wrote a check for fifty dollars,
that’s all I have I said to the taxi driver
who locked the doors of his black Mercedes.
He drove like a maniac down a dirt road.
The Wedding Doll
She boxed me—saving me, she said, for the wedding.
She shall be my centerpiece, stand next to the cake.
That was when she was twelve.
The Old Stove
Ray-J (age 13) is the content/ideas man, and I’m the form-style-structure man. To borrow from Robert A. Pirsig, Ray-J is the Romantic mode of understanding; I’m the Classical mode. He either wrote down or told me what he wanted to convey, and I assisted him in putting the material in ‘poetic’ form.
Abandoned Bicycle
A bicycle—a nice one—
has been locked to the lamp post
all summer and fall.
Hubris
We started writing ‘tan-ku’ sequences and sets during the pandemic when neither of us could travel. Mariko is a tanka poet and I am a haiku poet. We started having poetic conversations via Facebook Messenger where Mariko would write a tanka and I would respond with a haiku and vice versa, often at odd hours due to the time zone differences between Tokyo and Los Angeles.
What Will We See When the Lights Go Out?
My neighbor, near me on the bus, moves his lips
while looking at his phone. They’re like two
little birds whispering to that tiny sunrise he holds.