Slam the Phone

(Warning: self-indulgent poem ahead.)

Softbank is one of the biggest cell phone providers in Japan; their celebrity endorsements are the stuff of legends, from a single photo of Brad Pitt with a porn 'stache to an entire series of billboards, movies, songs, music videos, and concerts featuring a boy band called Smap (that, as far as I can tell, doesn't exist outside the advertising universe, kind of like that FreeCreditWhatever pirate band or the Black Eyed Peas). Also, the mascot is a dog named "Father."

A while back, I had to spend an hour and a half waiting for the only English speaking member of the Softbank staff, and since I had hilariously forgotten to bring a book, all I had to entertain myself was my cheap-ass Jellybean cell phone that boasts features like Calendar and Notepad. Here is the fruit of an hour and a half trapped in Softbank, with the original formatting preserved as closely as possible:


for all the sleek, the bright-lit
mirror white shined clear to t
he next century, for the packe
ts, for the whimsy, for the unli
kely friendship of a white dog
and a smiling mute black man,
for the blessing of the apple co
rporation and his holiness mick
ey mouse, for the freshest beat
s piped in from the west coast,
for the promises made by an ar
my of vested men and the vang
uard of pleasant women who ca
nnot help us, for the soft milky
leather and multifareous jellybe
ans and offers of unprecedented
generosity, i am not happy. i ha
ve stayed in the neverland of do
gs and fluorescent day for too lo
ng and find myself aged before
my time.

Elegy for a Stranger

I know this might not be everyone's cup of tea, but I've been having a hell of a time finishing another, more conventional (i.e., predictable) post about Pocky or somesuch nonsense. So, here's a poem I wrote after a suicide on the Nankai Semboku line made everyone late for work a few weeks back. If poems aren't your thing, may I direct you to stop reading and go play some Scrabulous.

Elegy for a Stranger

We crowd into antlike furrows, scurrying through steel metropolitan veins,
Close our eyes and jostle into silver wombs that slide,
Timed to perfection, are jettisoned, creaking, to Sun or Sea,
We unhappy many.
Today contractions are interrupted, the wa disturbed
(All but obliterated, though propriety remains)
By the specter of untimely death--
Rumors ripple through the unspeaking gray bullet.
Most of us pour onto a sun-soaked concrete island three stops early.
More delays in Sakaihigashi, hundreds of Plans B dashed,
Hundreds more appointments late, though excuse slips are distributed by conductors.
No one dares speak, yet it is generally understood
That someone has, well, you know, on the tracks.
It happened at Sumiyoshi Higashi, right where the line splits,
Where an uncelebrated dotted blue snake diverges,
Anaconda becomes hydra.
Somewhere here amid the familiar trees,
One of our fellow weekday warriors came to a different conclusion
And gave up fighting the good fight, lay down arms,
Painting some anonymous meter of steel that we will grind over this afternoon.
Though surely none of our silent, truant crowd
Knows our fallen comrade, we are the worse for losing him:
This ill-timed dagger has rent the great curtain of our shadow-play
And revealed a nearly empty house.
"How could he?" we all ask, "and on such a nice day?"
Trains are never late in Japan.

We feel guilty about enjoying the unexpected moment of sunshine, seconds stolen from our next air-conditioned cave by a tortured soul who would now disperse or else hang from the power lines and chill our bones other mornings,
mornings where we arrive at work without interruption.

Osaka, 5/17/10

Everything is Mostly Nothing

Everything is mostly nothing, my love.
Everyone we know or ever have is an after-image, a patchwork dummy
Stitched together from tight assemblies of dust motes,
Each of which lives its long tenure in vain pursuit of companionship --
We are beings of air and light.
Our constituent pieces, blind and cold, unbearably old and without memory,
Pass infinitely close to one another, tantalizing,
Seeking collision but never managing it. We stumble and search
For fellow clouds of light, and when we find one another, you and I,
It is always new. We muddy our colors and press our hopes together,
Mingling our clouds to find particular solace and discover new ways to fly.

Our shadow drama is reenacted in the cosmos:
Lonely white souls scream and call to ghosts,
Stranded on burning diamond islands, marooned in the firmament
And glimpsing the winking of their closest neighbors,
The production of helium from a distant, long-dead hearth.
They, like us, shake and swirl in the black.
Somewhere, I'm told, they love in all colors
Bloodred passion spitting cinders,
Blues the size of a thousand suns if no bluer than yours or mine
And if you listen hard enough, even on the shores of our podunk ball of rock,
You can hear the beating of the worst of us,
The loneliest hearts their sorrow in perfect time.

Like all of us, I bear a secret (please don't tell)
In the deepest of my swarm of lost fireflies:
I am not real. I am a mock-up, a phantom, a fraud,
A flicker of the imagination held together by the incredible force of will
Or cooperative self-delusion.
Somehow, you turn on me your piercing ocher flames, and you see the truth,
But the pulsing blue lightning you carry rearranges my pieces,
And for you, I cannot rest in the cold grips of nothing.
You see a forgery and inspire reality,
You see a smudge and it becomes a Seurat,
You see a Magic Eye and create a Picasso, or at least a higher quality fake,
3D, HD, warmer, more lifelike.
From a lot of nothing, you make something.
Creation is an unfriendly place, and they say it's getting bigger and colder all the time;
Improbably, our twin fires burn together and warm us.

-- For Jenn, on our first anniversary of running off to the Las Vegas Wedding Bureau and coming out an hour later giggling and married.