Great Throughts Treasury

"To make a single poem we need to kill. We must kill many things. Shoot, murder, poison many of the things we love."

"Hiding raw feelings has a kind of innuendo hint about it. It is like watching a well-made cartoon. Adults can laugh and children can, too, for different reasons."

"Poetry is not a receptacle for manifest feelings, but a place to hide raw feelings. It makes totally unspecific amorphous feelings distinct and clear."

"This reminds me of yin and yang. The black exists in the white, and vice versa. However the true meaning resides not in why, but how? Perhaps even when and where. Why is not good because as one girl told me maybe the person does not have the knowledge yet."

"Poetry subjects give its form and shape. However simple or grand the topic is perhaps strongly related to its rhyme and meter. This is not to say a haiku is to be a simple poem."

"Bird Language - I don't think anybody has seen my footprints no matter what sand beach washed by waves no matter what desert assaulted by sand storms no one can understand the meaning even if they hear the words. So the words are nothing but bird language. Small birds come up to me, but eagles and hawks just watch cautiously with their sharp eyes from high up in the sky. Even though my Japanese language is clear no one responds. A few did but they're all dead. My meals are simple. If there is a little cheese and red wine, that will be enough. People say nicotine prevents senility so less than ten light cigarettes. As for reading lying down on a wooden bed I read the world's miserable stories and histories and as I read I fall asleep. When I open my eyes it's a refreshing morning I put in my clean false teeth and open the morning paper. It doesn't matter to me whether the dollar goes down or the yen goes up. It's nice if there is a report of an interesting murder. There is even a smell of religion in the human behavior called murder. There is no chance of a drama exactly like sex being born in the Holocaust of one human being poisoning other human beings or shooting them and asserting an alibi. Speaking of which I remember a foreign movie called "Murder Without Passion." My epitaph is decided. Carved on the stone in the forest in bird language "My life was beautiful.""

"1999 - I heard talk about ants somewhere I firmly believed that the ant is a symbol of industriousness. That is completely wrong. For example; out of ten only one is diligently carrying food. The other nine just wander around back and forth and left and right. I hear pretending to be very busy full of vitality and being lazy. I want to become an ant, too, joining the group of nine. Sometimes I should make an ideological scream and what is more surprising is the ant's sleeping habits. They are awake only two hours and spend a good twenty two hours asleep. 1999. I want to publish a book of poems by that name if I can survive that long it will be a full eighteen years. I will remain asleep like the ants. I want to write a diagnosis of the mental abnormality of the one that silently continues carrying the food. Today's work is over so good night."

"Fly - What kind of dream do you have when you wake up? Are you being chased to the end of the earth by a blue lion? Or do you drift while you drink golden whiskey in the arms of a dead man? Morning the bell of a hung over telephone rings. You stretch out your leaden arms. Oh, I wasn't having such bad dreams. The blue lion and the golden whiskey. At the moment you wake up things that go to sleep for the first time inside you you see only in dreams. I cannot say it well but at a certain moment in a man's life there is even a dream where you cannot see the horizon on land or sea."

"Crisis is my nature. There is a fierce hurricane of feelings under my smooth skin. There is a fresh corpse thrown up on the desolate shore of October. October is my Empire. My delicate hands control things to be lost. My small eyes watch things that are to disappear. My soft ears listen to the silence of people who are to die. Fear is my nature. The Time that murders everything flows in my rich blood. There is a new hunger trembling in the cold sky of October. October is my Empire. My dead armies occupy all cities where rain falls. My dead patrol planes circle in the sky above the lost souls. My dead mobs sign their names for the people who are going to die"

"The Cherry - A mountain cherry tree in the forest covered with dark and light young leaves after looking at the petals I go out to town. The cherry trees in town have been created by human hands from natural cherry trees i the small garden at my house a Yoshino cherry stands quite stately. At its roots wild birds and cats that lived eighteen years are buried and in those cherry blossoms the light of death and the sadness of life dwell."

"The Light at Thirteen Second Intervals - I don't like new houses. It may be because I was born and raised in an old house. There is neither a dinner table to share with the dead nor space for a sentient being to grow. It was maybe twenty years ago that I wrote in a poem "a pear tree split." I planted a pear tree again on the small lot of this new house. Morning. Watering it is my job. I want to grow death at least inside of the pear tree. At night I read Victorian pornography. My only illusion is "I have no illusions about the future." Yet, at that moment there is a light on the horizon forty kilometers outside my window. A light from the lighthouse at Oshima Island at thirteen second intervals."

"The Way Home - I shouldn't have learned a language. A world without words. How good it would be if I lived in a world where meaning does not become meaning. Even if you are revenged by beautiful words. It has nothing to do with me. And even though you shed blood for some quiet meaning. It has nothing to do with me either. The tears that are in your tender eyes. The pain that is falling from the tongue of your silence. If there were no words in our world I would merely stare at it and leave. Is there as much meaning in your tears as there is in the core of a piece of fruit? Is there an echo of the sunset in one drop of your blood which makes you tremble in the twilight of this world? I shouldn't have learned a language. Simply because I learned Japanese and bits of foreign languages I stand still inside your tears. I return absolutely alone into your blood"

"While I Can Still See - The light of stars, the flowers in the fields, the horizon at sea rolled back, the horizon on land upside down; there is a face under the hat. If I open a door someone is there a bird's feather; a small animal's footprints carved in snow. The rapid descent of the evening sun in autumn the hazy moon in spring. I once wrote "Time does not expire, people expire." I've seen any number of people expire and I will expire in the end. I can see but what in the world did my eyes see only time."

"Withered Leaves and they died without even shedding green blood before they return to the soil they change to the color of soil the color of the silence that has died one death. Why does everything seem transparent? Even though we walked endlessly through the border of day and night through the withered leaves. A man whose star is fixed does not turn back."