
from “Transfer”
[...]
Four vending machines roll-call length apart
Unsorted, children in
Awe like I was
Rows of primary colours
Startles into stimulated blurs, how
The White Peach Coca Cola
Shook in my still look, Kiwi
Melon, Muscat Fanta
Sidelong two crows feud
Over and untangle
A sparrow’s entrails
My gosh I thought
I adore ur energies
Along I’m supposed to give weight
To the trees piece by piece losing
Shade, barely pink slivers filling in
The bored river like a puzzle, to negotiate
Spring with the crowds
My mother said so, I guess
NHK’s morning programs say so, too, overarching
The cherry blossoms’ end
The expressive phase
Just two weeks, accompanied by fragile light
Passing in grids in between each wave with each wind
I follow a single petal after another
Fluttering till its interruptions
Entering the stream below as anxious loops
Make way for the next
Celebrate our enormous joys
Slowly fleeting into the next
“One year by August,” my mother said
“Put up a photograph, when it’s time, customary”
(To remember) my brother said
I step out tired from under, see
The daylight fully, a half-ring
Beam, my life that goes on
Your death that goes on…
In death do you relive
Still the dense
Horse of war
The untoward
Consequence of
Uncontrollable intrusions
That make
Life and a body that lives it
Is there time every day
To be in rapturous appreciation
Will I know I’m in it when it’s occurring
Over the contemporary
High-rises, the next place
And the next, touring or residing
Manage the stakes
Among each new gossip
Each bodily expression of emotion
Laughter, or the unbearable ring
Of looking intensely
Until there is nothing left in its line
Filled in with new or old grief
“Not unlike baby brain”
Softly pulsing not knowing where from here
In the blank unfamiliar
Of Spring in a new place having
Just a foot in
Yeah, the sun at peak
The people slyly drunk
An inseam running
Loose onto their stomachs
Where the bodies’ wellnesses
Lay warming further
[...]
Was little, barely spoke or listened
When I first visited relatives in Japan
Unaware and no claim to Buddhist practices
Was scolded by mother for eating the offering
Placed in front of my great-grandfather’s altar
When you die you must be kept
Inside a polished box I thought
Caught inside the mouths of those remembering
The stories which create shakes in our chests
Some imagine, some believe
They’ll gather in the summer
On a festive night
How I remember it drums drone from a tower
Where people gather, accept it as a focal point, circle it
The near black fog of a sea at night clears
Light by light set out by gentle push
Do they really
Gather, and without speech?
Or I face you
Without your speech?
Do they return
To the shadow of shadows?
The light of lights?
Yes, the light will become lights
Those who have shape will lose it
The place we are now is
A place to be fished from
We fish with our mouths?