Don’t Eat A Pen! (when you italicize words)
“Parlez-moi d’Amour… ”A doorbell rings.A phone rings.A floor shines.“More storms, please!”Walking insideinvisible (un)readable bookson War & Peace,I scream in someone else’s voiceto feel my skull & lungs.A girl, wearing her father’s shirt,fooling herself, waitingfor another downpouris not me.“Rules for a sonnet?”I have no idea.(Don’t) beat the dogthat barks at the sticky unpleasantnessof the master who feeds him! Let him sinkin his own sweat,so he’ll become a “Muse-Ripping” floor mop.“Notes of anguish?”Where are they?Roses on a fencepeak their redness.“Nothing” death hangs in the airwhen we talk about love.
One Way Dialogue With Delmore
Do you mind me using the word: “fun”to describe your bagatelles?Hope not.Ego? What ego?I don’t own wheels.I don’t drive.Rain keeps falling on usas if it’s the end of something.We save your “inside” stories gulped in a deluge.We toast them in the oven to dry.“Shower or Bath?”You are lucky to have such a choice.What about the ones who have neither?Watch out!Be gentle!Pages have become too crisp to turn.They fall like leaves.A desire to write a “good” poem?What is “good”?You tell me.“fun” or “good” –Who knows!All poems are full of (un)just words,no matter.So, let’s not get ourselves bored to death,even if the rain doesn’t stop.Don’t you think that’s an idea?
2 Gardens Poems from PINK: A Paris Journal Trilogy, Part 2Cain’s Garden
in the circle shaped stillness,our lives privately take a restsummer trees scatter green flowers, full to the maximum,in the afterglow of the remote past’s form & figureI share the moment & the spacewith an old woman I have never met beforein her spring of words,I pick up the familiar word“Soleil”
To steal flowers from a painter’s garden.(To pick a pebble up in a sculptor’s garden.)
Everything changes into a memory in a flash.How cruelly beautiful it is!How quiet it is! How simply complex it is!
Coincidences Fatales.
A River.
Yuko Otomo and of Japanese is a bilingual poet (poetry & haiku) & visual artist. She also writes art criticism, essays & does translation.
