Plain Song

Most don't notice a meadow
stuck among others
just one other Kansas plot
to over-flatten the earth, but

think about the glories of open space,
of fresh starts and renewed resolve
forged by survival and desire
and a plot to call "home."

Think then about its denizens:
bee balm and sweat pea,
cornpone and suckle
all once just seeds now gone
to bloom

a lopsided grin to match
the sweat on a brow
and only a cynic would
think of stamping down these ruts
when the sun warms the soil

reprise

Don't want to focus on hurt.

Now want to focus on art.

On with the show.

Cognizance

She peers into my eyes,
the best chocolate Nestle never made,
and is confused: why is this guy
across the counter? Why is he
with a sea of garmentry?

She speaks of the deadlines that organize
a dry cleaner's life: have a shirt
in by eight-fifteen and get it back by three.
I say, today I meet with product placement
at three, that I can make it by five,
and she huffs, somehow offended
her service does not fit into my lifestyle.

We take turns defining our lives
and unaccepting the other. It hits me,
why must I explain my life away?

Her forehead furrows (in accusation?),
bumps the air, bothers me into thought --
my frame made bulky by a tailor's needle,
my double-breasted grays betraying the latte
in my skin --
as her fingers dance through a rack
of sportcoats destined for the City.
What about her? Her stooped shoulders
could be my mother's; those crow's feet a gift from
another me, and I realize she is the only one
I have even seen here, tensing whenever the entrance door moves,
sweeping the chipped counter clean with her palm,
a Vietnamese patroling a dry cleaner on a streetcorner
with grills in the windows. I want to tell
her the truth, tell her that I too shut in
when the sun goes down, but the look in her eyes
says she is convinced I am not her,
though we share heritage, our progenitors
having pulled rice stalks in twilight
half the world away.

Thoughts While Shopping

Two friends are having a rhombus
the edges have yet to be seen
or perceived beneath bellyfat;
she's given up chocolate, caffeine,

and traded all jostle for docile
at the first sight of ultrasound pics;
she fears her stomach colossal
and craves dill pickles and lemonade mix

but she can't get 'em herself; he has
to bring it, awoken out of cold slumber
and he lumbers downstairs to the kitchen,
his dreams disturbed and nighttime encumbered

while we all silently wonder about the photos,
about the kid's future appendages and hair --
noting the ultrasound shows neither
and wonder whether it's fair

or even whether l'il rhombie is his?
I mean, our friend's so paunchy, the fetus
geometric. Should he get a DNA test,
ask for her full sexual treatise . . .

and as we buy baby blue clothing
with big eyes and Japanese bunnies
we picture the oblique-angled gigolo
and whether our friend'll pay that support money.

Duet

It's a hospital: the way visitors talk about
anything but illness is the language we share,
talking about so-and-so's newest whoosit and
say-and-say's trip to wheelay. It is cowardly.
It is wholesome. It is the way people are

when just too much lies between the lines,
when each feels the stakes are too high,
too desperate to attempt to say what is in
our hearts, what crouches in the back
of our minds, waiting for the utterance

which will free it from its chain of longing
and solitude. Instead it continues: we watch
movies, talk music, and avoid those pregnant
pauses where nothing is said because we fear
everything could be.

On Love Amongst the Rice Fields

Those roads shrink to the size of minds,
their shoulders broken, their edges cracked and ridges raised,
and the cold kisses each imperfection.
Here rice fields lie burned in renewal
of once and future stalks.
Here arguments run in circles
around pained eyes and moaned looks.
Here the denizens set feet on tatami and shiver
without end for a love that might go on forever.
Here stances will soften, and compassion
creeps into locked hearts, all quiet-like
on cat-feet, and the past will fall away.

Some Love for Blake and Curry

Bay leaf, bay leaf floating bright
amidst the rueful onioned night
preserved in box and fridge and then
microwaved to heat again.

electionend

the anger we leave in floorpuddles we leave
to remind us of our settling hearts
while our running noses remind that sickness
still sits in the room, that the whispers
remain insistent with twice the to-dos
because now we believe in something
to come, with something to do instead of
daring fate, instead of walking under white
ladders and pacing down black
cats because bulletproof we weren't,
though committed we felt, nothing had changed

The Remains of Japan

Only after
the knife sliced hilt deep
into the side
of Inejiro Asanuma did
the bodyguards come,
refs throwing a flag
on retaliation but missing
the original crime,
not unlike bodyguards
on Jerry Springer.

Live the grainy transmission
showed a nation divided
in its politics and its people,
divided enough to want to fell
"the human locomotive" rather than
include him, felling a man
whose mother perished at birth,
whose father perished at 42.

The granite around Inejiro's grave
is warmed with green and bloom,
flora not normally associated
with a man who'd meet with Mao,
a man who'd stand up to the nation
that cratered the Earth.

And the seventeen-year old who
evaded the "bodyguards"? Let's
lump him in here too as someone
who'd die for a cause, a country.
Now I stroll Shibuya and
Harajuku and see a dress-up race
distracted by neon cell phone
yellow cab phantorgasmia, and wonder
about its focus, its root,
its future.