Asao B. Inoue's Infrequent Words

Dreaming I often dream dreams I don’t remember. I mean, I know I dream. I wake up and remember for a few seconds sitting in a room with thousands of chairs, and my Nana, who has been dead for more than three decades now. Or I can feel the feelings under the images of my wife and me in a hotel room we’ve never been in, in a city we’ve never seen, and I can hear the feelings of love I’ve never heard slowly recede, evaporating like moisture on a windshield on a hot day. The dream is gone and all I have left is its remembrance. No details. Just the feeling that I had a dream, and a vague sense that it was good or bad or scary or warm, like a handprint on a bedspread that is barely noticeable a few hours later. Photo by Kiyoshi Inoue, "wesandre" I read somewhere once that we have to dream, that dreaming is the way our brains process all the information we acquire during our waking times. Dreams are the filing system that our bodies use to make our lives in our heads. I i...

A Nice Belgian Beer I Had Recently Here's another prose poem I've been working on, probably 'cause of all the Coronavirus stories and thinking that's been going around. So, I've been thinkin' about death, since it's so present these days. Thinking About My Death No one thinks about death. I mean, not their own, not for very long, not for more than say, a minute at best. But even that is a long time to ponder one’s own mortality, to visualize one’s body a corpse in a casket, with others around you, looking, crying over you. Your eyes sewn shut. Your best suit or dress on. Your mouth closed permanently. You there and not there. When you’re dead, there is no more anything. You’ve eaten your last olive, the really salty kind that you love so much. You’ve seen your wife’s drowsy smile in the evening as you both climb into bed for the last time, or touched her nightgown, a soft satin or cotton, as she brushes past you in the morning getting ready for he...

I'm currently waiting to hear about a manuscript and so I've found I have some time to do other writing each day. So I thought, why don't I put some of it on my blog. So I'll be posting poetry, and other stuff here each day. Not much. But enough, I think. I hope you enjoy the poem below as much as I enjoy writing it -- it's not done, I don't think. Feel free to comment, but please be compassionate. Thanks for reading. Walking I walk in a forest, or through a field of grass, or down a chalky sidewalk, or in classrooms after classrooms, down aisles of students with their papers and books in tumbles on their desks, through dark and bright rooms filled with tables and chairs and people sitting at tables in chairs, talking, and talking, and talking. My walking is a practice of necessity, of coercion -- or is it consent? My walking is a practice of contemplating the things needing to be ignored, that hurt to hear, or that give us joy to know -- I mean, really ...