Once just one more visible visitor
In the frantic, epicanthic broth,
It’s been four years for me now
Lost in this fold of Asia.
It swallows, you know?
It tunes you out, Tokyo,
This glittering jewel
Of people and people,
This distant dream, but
Do you find yourself
Swept up in the sweet
Sweet potato vendor’s song?
The exotic in the everyday?
That’s why I stay.
Four years,
Pushing past the barcode baldies
And the tissue superstars,
The eggskin children
And the L-bent old raisinettes.
Sauntering behind
The stickbone bums of cooing coquettes
Clacking their heels,
Calculatingly naïve.
These roku-jo ojousamas,
Pretty preeners,
Processed and packaged
With their poodle men
Who went from hara kiri
To a hairadise of
Heroin-chested hipsters,
From bamboo spears
To brand-name gear.
This is not otousan’s Tokyo.
But it’s mine.
And I get the question a lot,
Been here long?
Um…yeah. Four orbits,
Three mamacharis.
Two poems that bombed,
Maybe more.
Many ways to mark
Time here, you know, life here
So that you don’t forget –
Four blotto birthdays
Three just-for-now jobs
Two terrible troughs
One half-forgotten friend’s funeral
Zero savings.
My stamen stiffens in desire
To parlay purgatory into paradise.
Though gone too easily,
My easy money evaporating in the
Endless ephemeral entropy,
In the nightly strobe of cerebral surrender.
But it’s the deep throb of possibility here
The glimpses you get here
The secrets you know here
The people you love here
The gems you germinate here
And the way you treasure up here.
Tunneling tetris-like
Though throngs of thousands,
These people amaze me,
Frustrate me,
Obsess me
With their contradictions.
Among them my friends,
Flinging feelers to the sky –
Where u at? What u doing? –
Gripping our gadgets like gonads,
Twin thumbs hummingbirding.
I mean, we’re weaving our strands here.
In this anthill agnosia –
Free radicals in a colossal
Collective organism.
Snatches in batches of foreign tongue,
The drowned-out drone
Of ambient articulation,
Almost understood.
This is my Tokyo,
Plum-wine parklife
In a vibe of non-violence
And the gentle rhythm of jan ken Japan.
This is my Tokyo –
Despite the someday someday of no solid dream
The faded furniture future
Of intangible success and
The addictive apple
Of amplified image,
It is unreal, unlimited,
Unlike anything.
It’s hard to impart
Why I cannot depart.
Maybe someday I’ll be smarter,
A self-starter,
I’ll map it out, one day,
When I have it all figured out,
When I have it all treasured up.
But for now it feels nice
To take train after train here,
To tube chopstick tracks
Across the teeming terrain
Of this whirling wonder of the world
Which so weirdly, wildly
Wants to call itself home.
———-
Japanese translation key:
Roku jo – standard size of a Japanese studio apartment
Ojousama – queen
Hara kiri – suicide by ritual disembowelment
Otousan – father
Mamachari – old lady-type bicycle ridden by almost everyone
Jan ken – rock-paper-scissors game commonly used to decide things in Japan
Lost in a State 