Dango

Bunkasai

Not so much about culture, but class themes
that involve cross dressing, matchmaking,
haunted hauses, dice games, candy and the like,
students from other schools, mothers and little
brothers and sisters and little sisters` friends
sprawling around in a school sanctioned version
of original matsuri fun, the only thing lacking
kimonos, stalls of yakisoba and the like,
students milling, leaves falling
autumn gold and red.

Crouching, Hidden

here where so much effort has
been put into industrialization,
stocking the shelves with age old memories
of privation and overlord intransigence

a neighbor is catching up, making up
for 50 years without western blessings,
itself a land of dragons and tyrants
with a serious bone to pick,
copying every move that once worked
to its rivals advantage

who will get in between these two?
they are circling eachother with locked eyes
flexing muscles, the slightest flicker.

Odyssey

All rise and greet the sun, humble destroyer
who doesn`t much intrude on our lives,
filaments we are of a great wave a surging,
let the coffee calm our nerves, let the red and green
LED blink on and off intermittently, lost in a sea
of neckties, rasping coughs, grey skirt glances
panty hose seams

innured against the charms of nature, and of the sky
that peeks through the rooftops, once a great God
to be appeased through festival and beating of drums,
now a peek through the curtains, not a ripple on the skin

I have lost that loving feeling yes, sperm count lower
droning about a queen bee, in this case I`m
faltering, addled, wired sprawling urban disaster

oh Ariel, goddess of dishwasher detergent and
Narcissus, perfume of young ladies of Ginza at dusk,
I offer these thoughts and prayers to somehow
see me through, my only connection to the sea
and Ionia the thin seaweed wrapping
of convenience store onigiri,
a blind oar in the deep.

Blinders

In the stream each morning,
in the train speeding towards Tokyo,
in the early workday crush, I follow
this path to a forested dead end,
a mix of new rectangular family granite, all polished
and indicative of new wealth, crowding the older
lychen-spotted buddhas and strange animal-headed
divinities, one statue with crocheted hat
dark and dank, mottled bright green with moss,
this nature, so close and unexpected
will disappear when I put on my blinders
and swim.

Windmills and Tills

the real gilt pavement big city world
shinjuku hosts inhabit, the money poured
and flowing like bottles of champagne,
how we talk and talk as if the earth is tilled
with manners and renumerative expectations,
we watch ourselves and the world around us
turn to tills and money lending schemes,
trees and forests marked, awaiting their fate,
little wonder Masako feels trapped,
I wonder if she can teach her child to resist?
no, her daughter already
looks on things with moneyed expectation,
surrounded by, dependent on the hunters
of men that set us up and cast us atumble
with not a twinge.

Guest Worker

For the past years past expression, excuse me
I`ll just be in the other room screaming my head out

it`s never stopped me before I know but I always thought
if I nudged things enough I could get this ball a rolling,
nothing budged

I know they value my skills in a superficial way
and I know that they wont cut my job or my pay, but

if life was all that, and if that nourished us fundamentally
we`d be creeper plants all green and trailing along
the edges, spilling out to be cut

the Scream

Now that my waking hours are populated
by the dead and strange skeletons in suits
hovering and pressing firm and steadying
themselves on the speeding rattling trains
I no longer wonder to see faces in trains,
at school, millions of faces at once innocent
and wraithlike, a deep jutting of souls.

half completed, just begun

They don`t often know
how to read foreigners
the way we do, checking others
at a glance, catching subtle body
indicators of experiences past
and present, where we think
this member of our society
may be going

Those around, while reacting
to the mannerisms which
indicate you have lived
a time in their culture
and are conversant
with their signals, don`t catch
all the baggage you carried
to the land of the rising sun

This is a leavening then,
unburdening
and unlearning, to find
a journey half completed
just begun.

Mankai (Full Bloom)

Such a delicate pink mixed with
the green foliage,
not overpowering with ruffles & ruffles
of wedding festive cloth,
no borderline gaudy popcorn wigs
these cherry blossoms,
but icing on the rich cake of a dark shrine
anchored by one large, old rope encircled
elm, 3 or 4 or five hundred years
no one knows, this old religious forest
sprawling in a way that I thought was
lost in Tokyo, hidden in the quiet hilly folds
just a spit from Roppongi crossing
and Akasaka short-time hotels--
Petals have reached full bloom,
already taking flight.

the rock-splitting cherry tree

The back-country front and center,
twisted old tree cutting a crease down
this heavenly bubble of bready dough boulder
rising from the center of a car turnabout,
Wild natural city symbol-cum
civic lawn ornament
facing the Morioka Courthouse Building,
a civic work for once
done tastefully in pale brick,
a look that might be welcome
in the American South, Raleigh
or some place like that