Wednesday, August 26, 2009

The Barbarian's Vacation

I.

It swims toward him out of the
mists of his idealized vision, its
swelling reality massaging his
tired heart as the view turns from beach to
quilted countryside to coiled
urban warrens in breath-giving
succession.
Its life washes over him
as its densely drawn picture
writing
follows him everywhere,
punctuated by the Roman letters
placed there for illiterate
gaijin like himself. He is
there, after uncounted
years of aspiration, exhilaratingly
lost, swimming in their patient
kindness as they guide him
with quiet grace.
He gapes through the rushing window
at the impossibly dense
concrete, steel, and brick
forest, its towers filled
with lives lived within
a few hundred square feet,
proceeding endlessly across
the Kanto Plain as the megacity
swallows him with indifferent ease.

II.

He gawks at the Blade Runner nightscape,
its inhabitants swirling around him
in purposeful journeys toward
home, or
toward beer and sake,
or toward rendezvous
with quietly waiting lovers
or toward laughing revelers
snaking their way
through the myriad watering holes.
Buildings from fifty years in the future
oversee the ordered tumult,
either in quiet business repose,
or blaring out eye-blazing neon messages
into the humid night, lurid with the
promise of excitement, sex, status,
and the rewards
of money spent in the lunging pursuit
of elusive happiness.
Could this really have been
the place where on that
burning night the heat flipped
the bombers upside down
and the blackened dead
lay piled up in haystacks
of shriveled arms and legs?
No trace of the ravaging fire
remained any more,
as the Shinjuku District's engine
revved higher and higher, the neatly trimmed
business people and the spiky haired
teenagers flowing in eddies of
brightly lit consciousness
all around him.
No elders ventured into this night;
it was no longer their world,
and it was no longer interested
in their gray memories.


III.

Dotted throughout
its meticulously organized
newness, he found
cross-legged Buddhas,
gracefully sloping roofs,
pious monks,
and orange torii gates.
Clap! Clap! to wake up the gods
so that they might hear our petitions.
Wrap the delicately written prayer requests
and toss them into the big incense burner,
fragrant with tradition and hopes.
Gautama is no longer a starved seeker
after the Light.
He is huge, green or bronze, luxuriant
with prosperous fat, bowed toward,
prayed to as he hoped never to be,
idolized, frozen in poses of Bodhi-like
contemplation, while surrounded
by the gold
and sumptuous decoration
he scorned and fled from
in life.
The ancient native faith for this world
(please bless our new Lexus),
Siddhartha's doctrines for the next
(please keep me from rebirth.)
The sweet-faced, petite guide told him
that a million worshipers
packed the Meiji park on New Year's Day,
all imploring the ancestral spirits for good luck
in the unfolding year to come.
He imagined them all leaving
afterward on the immaculate trains and buses,
perhaps to hit the 7-11
or the neighborhood McDonald's,
ears pressed to cell phones, and anxious eyes
checking Blackberries, the world of the kami
now left behind.

IV.

It was as if they lived to be polite,
generous, helpful, and tolerant
of his bumbling, child-like attempts
to communicate in the clipped,
subtle music of their language.
They were unsurprised by his tall,
aging Scots-Irish appearance; they
were old pros at this, after all.
Sweet faced children on school trips
sometimes joyously said "Hello!" to
him as they passed, bravely using the strange
word to talk to one of Them.
In the lobby one little
sprite tried out "Good morning!"
He said, Ohayo gozaimas'! back to the
bold young explorer, much to the boy's delight.
And everywhere
in every clean street
and every safe night time
and every right-on-the-dot train door opening
their diligence and their
quiet pride were in evidence.
He wondered how it came to be
that they had raised the ordinary
up to the extraordinary,
and whether the white-gloved
men on the Shinkansen really knew
how abashed they made him feel
about the slacker tribe
of which he was a typically
disheveled member.

V.

He could find the quiet parks
and the elegant gilded temples
of the guidebooks and postcards.
He reveled in the lazy, spoiled deer
nuzzling him in the park by the huge temple,
and his eye was caught by the occasional
old woman venturing forth in the kimono
that a proper lady always went out in public in.
He was awed in the presence of the ancient
castles that had stood as bastions in blood-drenched
landscapes of centuries past, and he found himself
reverent during the quiet dignity and fussy etiquette
of the tea ceremony.
But he knew
that the giant train stations
and the fleets of little cars beetling their way
through the perfectly maintained streets
and the thundering factories
and crowded docksides
and the endless delivery trucks
and the ubiquitous manga figures
leering out at him
and the crazy game shows
and the garish Pachinko parlors
and the school uniforms
and the office lights still burning at 8 PM
said more about their world than
Fuji-san
ever could.
He was under no illusion
that his brief incursion
into their precision guided,
buckwheat noodled world
had revealed their nature to him.
He was smart enough to know
that the preserved villages were a past
they kept alive more for him than
for themselves. He would never
know their Zen essence,
their private anguish,
their secret hopes,
their unspoken desires.
Beneath the silly t-shirts
and conservative suits were souls
that he would never see.
He was not of their tribe;
he was not of their tongue.
He had merely dipped his foreign toes into
their crowded world, seeing its surfaces
only.
He knew something of their story;
he knew the meaning of the empty,
furniture-devoid rooms where their shoguns
had ruled with imperious command.
He knew of the upheaval those like him
had brought to this land.
But he did not yet know them;
and like a novice defeated by a
puzzle box
or a koan, he left
wanting to once again
immerse himself
in the smiling mystery
of the islands that obscured
more than they revealed.




Wednesday, March 11, 2009

The air is hot and silent

and the room is lit
by the yellowed light
of an ever deepening
afternoon.
I look at the leathery works
of dried musings before me,
the volumes
lined up like grizzled elders
on shelves bent under the weight
of doubt,
hardly daring to run my
clumsy, calloused hands
over them
lest they crumble into dust
under the artless weight
of my half-forgotten
question.
Do they contain
mysteries 
and
revelations
and
Everests
of hidden glories,
or are they merely
more of the same
cocksure nonsense
that has led me in
paths grown deep
with the gouges
of my weathered
circular journey?

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

I never suspected

(lost as I was on a grey,
cold shoreline)
that they were
(or would be)
and that they would
be
what I thought I'd 
never have
and that they would
affirm
that which I didn't know I
was
and that they would
so easily
demand
my once frozen love,
my self-surprising  care,
my night time fears for them,
and my almost abandoned
future,
and make me
happier
than any man has a right to be
to give them.



Saturday, January 24, 2009

They hide out of sight

in the mud-slicked hollows of
corrugated slums,
snatching from the
fattened, possessive world 
whatever
can be clutched in hands 
grown old by six.
They gather in the sewers
of night, clinging to
dank walls
while above them
the adult world rolls
through the city
like a blind
armored division,
scattering fearful leavings
in its tracks but
oblivious to the scurrying
little gullets
that pinch unnoticed pieces
from it
and hoard them in the
unseen vaults
of stillborn
days to come.


Friday, January 23, 2009

It soars up

to the very foot of the
Awful and Glorious Throne
and turns away from
the sunbright Presence
to fly to Andromeda and inspect
the nether regions of its
innermost spiral, dancing
through fields of shattered
potsherds that were once
iron-bottomed worlds.
It descends into the maelstrom
of bare-nerved bloodlust,
cringing at the sight of
trembling innocents 
crushed under the
banal weight of grinning
barbarism.
Shivering with dread, it
curls up in airy dreamlands
of mercy, cradling itself
in the arms of warm-breathed
mammals, until it jumps
into the breathless
depths of desire and
lovefierce touch,
careening along the way
to a (distant?) scene
of watching the garden one last
moment, eyes brimming
with the end of a thousand
unwritten stories.

Sunday, January 18, 2009

It builds

into a silent crescendo
at the end of all beginnings,
gathering all the chains
into its ethereal hands,
pushing at the boundary
of straining, protesting possibility
until all has been swept
into its savagely beautiful
singular embrace.
It will abolish every why,
evaporate every how,
and break down the last
barriers between here
and not-here,
now and
not-now,
and I and Not-I.
The final Amen will ring out,
and it will vanish into itself,
waiting for the next
careless fluctuation
to let it roar out of the
Jack-in-the Box
once again.


Thursday, January 8, 2009

I struggle to pull myself

into that tiny little world
where delirious points of nothing
gleefully appear 
in two places at once.
They spin maniacally
as I try to grab them,
and slip through
my hands
with mocking randomness,
daring me to follow them
as they roar silently
and bounce motionlessly
off the daynight
zig zagged valley walls
of their inside-out
little universe.

Saturday, January 3, 2009

"OK, kid, it's like this",

the grizzled veteran said to the
bright-eyed neophyte
sitting in soft expectation
before him.
"You gotta dish it out hard and mean,
'cause if you don't,
they're gonna kick you where
it counts,
and you gotta get your foot in there
first.
They're gonna cut ya, see?
They're gonna try and take
your goddam head off and 
laugh about it.
They don't give a rat's ass
what happens to you, so
you gotta cave their faces in
you gotta be strong
and not look back
and not think there was
any other way
you coulda dealt with
the sonsuvbitches."
With that, the young one
rose, went over
to the battle-scarred
warrior,
kissed him softly on the forehead,
and slashed the old guy's throat
from ear to ear.
And he could have sworn,
as he turned and walked out,
that he heard a strangled voice say,
"good boy".



There were so many of them

the line stretched out
for uncounted blocks,
its members holding 
themselves
in various postures
of 
gut-shot betrayal,
vein-bulging anger,
curious bewilderment,
heart-lacerated sorrow,
or 
drowned resignation.
He tried to look
each one in the face
(if it was still visible)
and haltingly offered
his croaking, useless regrets,
sometimes cringing
in the embarrassment
of a knifebladed moment,
at others dropping his head
along with theirs, letting
the tears flow in 
twisted remembrance,
begging their pardon,
and reaching his 
well-worn hand
around their misty 
shoulders,
grabbing only air
and speaking only
in a 
monologue.

He keeps his words

dressed up in their Sunday Best,
and sends them out to proselytize 
the natives,
and yet they seem to come back
dressed in ragamuffin style,
running their happy fingers
under his chin, guffawing
rudely, and holding up
a rhinestone-edged mirror
to his noble madness.

Thursday, January 1, 2009

He felt the barely discernible

sensation of reptilian skin
being sloughed off
in sheets no longer vile
but now simply pitiable, and
a new portrait appeared to be
spreading over the palimpsest
that had seen so many 
exhausted and hesitant
previous incarnations.
Was it sunlight
creasing the indifferent
horizon to his right,
or was it an odd luminescence 
being generated from within
a self liberated at last
from childish things?