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.
Tributes
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.
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.
The Double Image Redux
Turn the photo of your mother in its frame
so she can’t tsk her tongue against her teeth:
the cold eyes will follow you just the same—
a trick of perspective like Mona Lisa’s gaze.
Summer Job
At the end of the work day
you could tell exactly how far you had gotten
and how much farther you had to go.
Zombies in Paradise
Today they’re recruiting for the Corps of the Undead;
in fetid cubicles they anticipate more dead.