My Inaka

Orientalism is
far from positive,
yet here we are,
police at the door,
dancing to sabotage
in the best way possible.

Lao Tzu said
that in both
ruling a nation and
gutting a fish,
only the small things
are important.

Being on the margin,
we stretched that margin out,
painted over the darkness
in vibrant hues
and called that margin our home.

We were all sempai,
all kohai, all bound
to each other.

We sabotaged,
dressed in black,
the ninjas of inaka,
recycling electronics
and rewiring our heads
as we made the
Gaijin Ghetto ours.

Faces brown, faces black,
faces white, all doves
riffing off a culture like jazz
the way gangiro girls
do at matsuris: all non-straight
hair, non-black hair, non-dark
eyes.

Hands raised, in class and out:
why do you ride a charinko?
and
why did America bomb us?
were the two that resonated
answers
while the same people
who asked the questions
burned bleach into their hair,
quoted American
movies at every turn,
and never once stopped
being Japanese.

The little things
ah!
the little things,
like cheap meat from
nine to ten,
green lights called blue
and blue things called
yellow
and (yellow) dancing girls -
the ones who get paid
to talk to you - falling
like leaves in fall once
they figure out you
live here.

Wait til the skirts see that this
foreigner, this gaijin
rode to the bar on a recycled
bike painted spray-silver
just so another bike wouldn't
get stolen. With a wicker
basket and three angry
padlocks.

You'd never know that,
during a thunderstorm,
wee kleptomaniacs
rampage through the city,
stealing all the umbrellas
marked Y - O - U.

Maybe it was the smile that hid
this; or maybe chewing
intestines that wouldn't be
swallowed simply meant
more beer.

Every Monday made you smile.
Every Monday was a block party;
every Monday natives & foreigners,
young & old, thin and fat and
lovers and cheaters and singers
and jokers and people normally
separated by geography and head-
boundaries clucked til the wee
hours, chickens come home
to roost.

The Headline Sofa/For SuperBen

Headline:
"The stench of martial
law pervades the country"
and, deep
in the countryside and
safe from such
screaming, a farmer rises
with the sun to let his
chickens feed.

By eight sweat rivers down
his head, every last
piece of grain pecked,
and the chickens run
free as troops-in-jeeps
rumble through the
baranguay.

Now the news has reached;
now the farmer herds what
he has, and
now the pen is shut, the
screen door is latched - not
that the outside couldn't
force its way in anyway.

Talking outside is hushed and
text messages cease as the
farmer wonders, wonders,
wonders . . .

as a boy he ran naked through
brush and barbed wire and
never thought to arm himself
with clothes, or shoes - now
he wonders what they may
try to take away.

Two sofas, covered with cloth,
are rice sacks: neighbors
tease, chortle when he sits,
but now they are no sacks left
in the storeroom,
you see?

As a child, he remembered that
things not held to the earth,
not tethered or locked,
not hidden in plain sight or
unspoken,
disappeared by nightfall.
Some blamed vampires but the
boy was realistic: he knew better

As a man, he knows better than
to be conspicuous admist the
rumble of jeeps painted,
flora-like, jeeps armed with
aggression and watching eyes.

Reassurance

"The beauty only comes when they're older",
uncle said, beckoning the trees closer
with a crooked finger and lopsided smile,
and she and I are saplings,
she gone and I fearful,
fearful of being cut down,
fearing of being shaped,
fearful of the man with pruning shears,
just o so fearful.

Lightening's peal,
a sudden reveal,
casts light on the stoic oaks,
silhouetted against a turbulent sky.

"Hope I can stand that tall",
whispered I but my uncle was
off toward the tree's base with
all the grace and tenderness
left after sixty summer suns.

"One of these may split tonight",
his knowing tone turned
might into will.
It seemed beauteous:
tracing the act back to one
hand or another was useless.
It simply was, yes,
it simply was.

My metallic buckle had become
an electric accessory - only
a suit of armor would target better -
but my uncle paid no mind to the lightning,
crept up to the trunk,
stalked it,
sniffed the storm air,
ran hands over the rough hide,
and waited for Nature's attack.

"If I die", he said,
"let it be here,
here with this oak, this field,
and nothing to spare me from
how I was born."

From pink hue to midnight blue,
rough bark to smooth cool stones,
stiff branches went to bend in the
breeze, we stayed and the
whole show felt like home,
looking lazily as Nature
threw thunderbolts,
clapped our ears with ferocity,
and put out the stars
for our wondrous eyes.

Comparison Poem

Salvation comes in the form
of green grass, sea air, a
gull's wing -
certainly not this cubicle -
and freedom.
Do you understand that
there is no safety in a
cube, man-made, obstructing,
eighteenth-floored and
carpeted, that
the earth can't take down?
Understanding that, now,
understand this:
there is no "earth",
there is no "sky",
these are linguistic legacies,
rather, where we belong,
bare-toed and in the mud,
the wind whisking away our
laughter,
is everything,
everything that divines,
word-bound divisions,
aren't. When the inside
is preferred to the out,
and cubes take precedence
over the rough hot good
of sand under your sole,
you will only be confused.
For many, darkness is daytime,
yet the box-world can not
hold a candle to
life unimpeded,
even through a gale
that threatens that sort
of coil.
Not because it is written;
because this is life.
So stand up; stretch;
leave your pneumatic chair
and desk plants in favor of
smooth stones and sunshine.

True Prayer

This is
the last time,
the final time I'll quit,
the time before was
an abomination,
I promise.
I promise.
I promise to
treat life with love
and not wait
for the other shoe
to drop.
There is no way,
no way,
it will ever happen,
not again,
no.
I've made paper fold inside
itself, I've made animals
cower and
angels weep
and only now do I
really
understand. Please . . .
please . . . please . . .

And how

Scream down the sky and
bring it here, right here,
in your living room,
shove the stuff aside,
clean your table,
throw an old rag over the screen,
and settle in for
the divine,
here and now.
Dervishes chant,
seemingly unhinged,
and well-formed sigils
can only hint at
the importance
of such elevation.
Every seagull knows: not
that bald heads make
great targets, but that
perspective, the enhanced
rising above, is how you live,
how you walk as if in a dream,
how you approach any face,
how you see the beyond in a grass-blade,
how you love.

Assing, The Neutral Form

If complaining takes

the female form - bitching - why

don't we say dicking?

Things We Dreamt While Underwater

Welcome to the cool blue hive,
teaming & silent,
finite & blue,
an amniotic, an aphrodisiac,
wishing you were here.

Scales of swords float
by this underwater factory,
the peaceful place borders
on Aimless, and nears
Frivolity,
each one overlapping,
lapping at the shoreline,
looking for you.

Breathing is verboten here;
surfacing incidental.

Now we have to do, to make:
the buzz tinning our ears
as line between sea & sky
brazenly appears,
and loneliness strikes like
midnight, floating alone
on a salted sea.

Rooftop Dancing

The alarm mirrors the dialectic inside -
brrr Brrrr BRRRR BRRRR!!! -
as birds chirp early and often,
this is how most people awaken.

Davey? He was with the birds . . .
. . . on a rooftop, the sun soaking
into him, replacing night toxins
and renewing him for the day.

The fiddle lay at his feet,
strings smoking from a performance
prompted by whiskey, and fine good
times.

Is this living? With cigarette smoke
curling into the air? Dancing? Emoting?
Bitching to the heavens? Shaking your
neighbors out of their slumber?

The rattle of the soul, late,
does not come for all:
but, for those afflicted,
it must be worked out.
For Davey, fags and firewater
were only second fiddle.

Swapping tales like spit,
of Pakistan, of North
Korea, of motorbikes mired
in Thailand mud,
the expats were just wiling
away time, waiting for
double malt to grip Davey,
and he his fiddle.

Creases eased, lines melted,
eyes softened as he played,
the brogue returning to him as
he sang, the brogue that
got into all it touched.
Alley cat wails had n-o-t-h-i-n-g
on us -
and after this we certainly wouldn't
dare call it a
mere violin -
not as it lit up the midnight
sky like comet trails and memories.

What's Left to be Done

High-count sheets can not

conceal the pain of hunger

in a child's belly.

Speaker

I watched a man pound the pulpit,
promote Socratic discourse, and say
nothing at all of the way forward,
so rooted,
so cement-shoed in
the past that
perhaps the very
thought of the future
was too much to bear.

There is a joke here, somewhere,
about a man casting his
shadow on a cave wall, but
I can not find it.

Instead, what strikes me is this:
an extreme eloquence,
a urgent rhythm,
a remaking of the past,
a refusal to move into
an ever-unsure future.

Beach Scene

Untamed skin rises from roiling waves,
bathwater-smooth and kissed with salt,
then spots something below.

Head becomes feet, then nothing,
surfacing only to consider whether
something is hidden in the silt.

Sky turns to blue and dusk
as the boy, now alone,
dives again and again,
not convinced that nothing
is really nothing.

Now the night watches,
twinkling, inky, pondering
how to break him of this quest.

The night stands tall, knowing
nothing can be done to
unconvince someone who swore
that something was there.

Seoul Food

Can we fly?
Do we fly?, the question
begged, as a Korean
winter swirled into our
apartment, baby
swirling within a womb.
We cried, but no matter.
Questions need answers,
questions need answers.

Singers sang in
subterranean suites;
Samoans sold fruit in the
alley and gave us Spock-like
salutes; seranades of
ajima soared upward;
bus stewards stopped for no
one on the third route 'round
Seoul, hat shadowing
steely eyes and a countenance
that only wanted to
go home.

We could go home, all right,
the doc said it would be the
last week to fly,
and the calendar became a
knell that freed. Taxi drivers
driving like salmon upstream
scared us less than the days on
a page.

Would we go?
Would we stay?

Shrimpburgers squealed sounds
of something - we should have
known - and made the
decision easy; food poisoning &
an IV type can persuade even
the heartiest to rest.

Bags lugged emotional and
tangible things that only
weighted the taxi down as it
whisked us to the airport,
through January snow.

Connectedness

Even pebbles that

skim across the top of the

water leave ripples!

Across the Field

The rain, cold and piercing,
does not straighten the shaggy hair,
does not soothe the wounded eyes,
does nothing of the sort.

He is out because the boyfriend is in,
a guest, a VIP,
another Trojan horse of a man,
guaranteed to surprise and
horrify, as his
own father once did,
as many have before.

Sometimes the hurt comes out,
in flashes, in the
form of a tight spiral or a
headslap, the latter a
reminder of what
was done to him.

His mother medicates herself
against him, the walking
talking reminder of a virus
that once got in,
and will again.

Branches snap and puppies
run from nature, out of
balance, hat slammed low,
dripping cold drops,
hair pressed to skin,
slogging across the field.

To A Friend

The air is stiller by
way of graceful vibrations:
we are guests of a man who laughs as
he smiles, talks as he
laughs, and lets the trace of
a smile make his point.

That trace appears as he admits
"I studied Christianity" - the
past tense implying two things:
that he does no longer
and that now he digs a bit deeper.

We talk for six hours,
less an interrogation,
more a meeting of souls,
while our children flit in
from the next room,
radiating the pleasure of
new and gracious friendship.

I feel the same way.
The conversation goes from
his training to my teaching,
from "just sitting" to the
computer he's building from scratch.
"My brother's an engineer",
says he, "so I
wanted to try, too."

He wants to practice his English -
which helps because I have yet to
see a Japanese dictionary explaining
nam-myo-ho-renge-kyo:
the devotion to the teaching of the
law of cause-and-effect, he states,
quite plainly.

Later I notice four computers
in the entryway,
"The one I showed you",
he smiles,
"is number five."

True grace, like stream water
caressing the pebbles at the bottom,
is an elusive quarry,
one arising from rare in-the-moment
moments where it is enough
when
all that you are
is all that you are.

Thank you Gen, for teaching me thus.

Open for Business

It's official -
all over the radio in
squelches and fits -
Nature's open for business.

While humans feel the
need to mount & charge
Nature just produces:
who knows how dragons
summon wind from heaven?
In the interim, watch, awe-
struck as windows buckle,
branches snap,
powerlines zap,
and old ladies nap,
privy to the store,
remembering what they've
seen since time before.

The wind howls admist houses,
the buildings funnel it into
even greater fury while
gravity pulls at sideways rain,
perhaps incredulous,
and the water runs
in torrents to the sea.

Maybe it's a message:
the unrooted are swept away.

The earth remains,
sublime & unsubtle,
wiped-clean and scented,
like an unmarked babe
smiling to the sun shine
that replaces a grey veil.

And grass glows neon,
rising to the sun shine,
knowing why.

Gaikoku Deadbeats

Chris, our Sinatra, moans. Or maybe
his feet make the noise. This is
her entrance cue, her . . .

. . . stockings run like the small children that
we have become, under lamplight.

"Whayoowan?", she says, her hair true brown,
not unnatural, a true gangiro.

We are drunk but not horny;
she is gentle and not whoring,
yet here we stand, bathed in
spotlight, with pained chocolate eyes.

It is Kobe - afterhours -
and our youthful fuel has
closed down the clubs,
wandered into steakhouses,
laughed at $60 filets,
eaten cheap beef bowls,
drank rice wine (for warmth),
scratched at crevasses,
scoured for hostels,
and now this.

It is after the quake,
and the great ferris wheel,
rebuilt, wharfside, casts a
shadow on the bay.

Last night we slept on the train station
floor, the manager poking us with
a metal rod usually reserved for
stabbing garbage.

Rousted, we stagger through seagull
streets, homesick, smelling salt water
while (i am) dreaming of San Francisco.
Our smell repels, gaikoku deadbeats
that we are, receptionists
shutter their doors at the sight of us;
it is in her eyes, and our:
She has been shuttered, too.

A place? To sleep? She smiles.
"Don't need one", she says, "salaryman
pay me well. I am Christina, born
in Brazil."

My adopted town has this too;
refugees from Sao Paulo, Recife, Rio
Branco and the countryside,
living in the foreign block -
my block - smelling
of linguica and techno and wavy hair,
producers of PS and Pajero and
things unaffordable as they wire money
back to their families.

Christina makes more in an hour than
they do in eight.

Maybe, Christina says, I have an idea.

We are deep in the heart of
love hotel country,
where paper thin walls separate sub rosa lives,
where couple copulate, lovers fornicate,
and businessmen just plain fuck.
She guides us by moonlight -
she knows these streets well
enough that if she weren't home here
one couldn't tell.

Alcohol lubricates Chris and he talks-walks-
sings. Only the night is stronger than he.
And Christina? Well, lubrication for
her means other things.

Furious puffs form, adding to
the stench, of our smoke-circle,
cockamanie plotting, naked
without the rain.

The name squints our eyes with
it's garish green glow. Arcadia.

Desparate and stinking,
delirious and smirking,
the biggest body enters the lobby
as five crouch low under the
lip of the counter.

Engaging the desk girl,
she slides me-body the key,
I hand it to Chris,
crouched next to me and
gleeful, delirious,
he stumbles up stairs
running devil-may-care,
low super-stealth style,
Christina last in her silk
stockings, running from
despair.

We chortle cleverness and
deadbolt the door, hide under
bedframes & behind closet doors
but we hear steps rise behind us,
a knock, and
a voice, just as Christina,
kneeling behind the bed,
passes a picture of her
daughter, three, to me,
under it:

"Two - only two!" the voice says.

Hidden in closets, in bed and under,
all sense time is short for our
love hotel plunder.
Giggling and hissing,
uncontrollably missing
one crucial fact -
we've been sighted by
cameras from both front &
back.

The street welcomes us with
a cooling blast of the breeze,
and we follow it,
save Christina,
down to the train station
by the bay where the marble
is soft and strong heads
may lay.

Edward Said Cooks Adobo

I chop up chicken breasts -
boneless, skinless, oozing-through bird -
and saucepan sautee them as I read
about Palestinian elections.

"Hamas will receive no aid", the headline
screams. I eye the words as bell peppers burst,
onions make me weep, and,
the two get chopped up,
as I, teary-eyed, try not to add in
an unlisted ingredient: finger.

The article continues: "Israel will
not recognize the new government",
it says, ignoring the popular vote,
ignoring the cries of the displaced,
ignoring the optimism of the moment
as I ignore the part of the recipe that
says one head of garlic, crushed.

The dull edge of the blade ushers in
most fowl, then the bell pepper mingles
with the onions in a vinegar soup of soy,
boiled until (at least) a dun-brown hue;
soon foods are interchangeable.

It's all going to the same place,
natch, and I have
yet to meet a food more virtuous than
the others. My kitchen witch keeps smiling
as it all goes in the pot,
too amused by food fusion
to say what is and what is not.

Pressure Drop

Cocksure certainty is not him but
silly certitude is;
dots dissolve,
a diaspora lengua,
then nerves nab him,
strap him in,
and take him for a ride.

He is still cocksure,
the bravado of sperm and resiliency of
youth, grinning and growling,
about the social gravy which boiled down and
caused him to drop in the first place.

There he sits, catatonic.
His girlfriend strokes her
long braids with shivering
fingers.

"Fuck - he's out of it", I hear,
but he knows that "in" & "out" is
something you can fake-
a false compassion or the
tension of orgasm -
and mats the grass with his backside
as the world wings by.

With great love we look at his
half-mast eyes and sigh:
who's carrying him?
someone blubbers and,
suddenly,
he's up,
on his feet,
conjuring chaos,
and the world's rhythm is his:
now spitting invective dragon-like,
now claiming spiders have infiltrated
the grass,
leaping,
spinning,
doing kung-fu
as a maniacal mime might,
and our group bonds behind
him, this
watchable winning wind-up
doll . . . just turn the crank and
watch
him
go