Many of us
Grow up thinking
What is in between our legs is
Dirty
Unmentionable
Scandalous
Need to be locked up
Secret to be hidden
It has so many
Other names
Too funky
To call it what it is
Self Destruction
in poetry
life
Empty Nest
in poetry
I'd be lying
If I said that I like my belly
It is no longer flat nor smooth
It is soft with waves
It giggles when I laugh
Plentiful and
In need of forgiveness
It sags
It cradles
It comforts
It will give you
Something to
Hold onto
It is where
My children came to
Be
It is an ocean
Warm
Safe
And Peaceful
They swam and wiggled
As they shaped and morphed
I felt their delights
While I dreamt each nights
Now it is my
Empty nest
So dear to me
It bore love
Like nothing else I’ve known
愛 or Love?
in life
When I first moved to the NYC at age of 18, I started living my life in English and all the sudden, I became this selfish person. I was starting every single sentence with “I.” I am talking about myself all the time. I woke up. I went to school. I felt tired. I ate this and that for lunch. I am happy. I am sad. I’m talking about myself all day long. “I” have never been this way. What is going on?
I grew up in Japan. Japanese language is very different from English in its thought process and structure. We hardly ever use pronouns. Most of the time, it is pretty obvious who and what we are talking about from the context and flow of the conversation. “I” is omitted. (So as he, she, it, etc) Only foreigners who are studying Japanese say “I.” Lol. Also, in Japanese, verbs come at the very end of the sentences and everything else - nouns, adjectives, adverbs, etc. - come before verbs. We don’t do articles, either. For example, the word-for-word translation of “I ate a delicious cupcake” would be “Delicious cupcake ate.” There is no “a” and there is no “I.”
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Container
in poetry
after i poured my heart out
i noticed that there was no container
to hold the contents;
nobody to catch it, either.
now i’m empty
and what’s poured made a big mess.
How I Got here // JAZZIT Interview
I have often been asked, “How did you get a job as an Artistic Director?” Well, I didn’t get a job as the Artistic Director of The Jazz Gallery. Dale Fitzgerald has given me an opportunity to build the place from ground up. Eventually, The Jazz Gallery has grown to the point where I needed an official title to the outside world and “Artistic Director” seemed befitting considering that I have been setting the creative directions for The Jazz Gallery for the past two decades.
Ashley Kahn has interviewed me a while back for the JAZZIT magazine and I talked a lot about how I got started in life, in music, and at The Jazz Gallery. Here is an original interview in English.
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