Humidity slaps the shoulder blades
and cigarette smoke buffets the face.
I, incoherent of subway train Kanji, dribble
past fingerless Yakuza and toothless farmers
whose mauling stares tell me I’m the circus freak
on display tonight.
Engulfed in digital upon disembarking as
street corners shrill out SOV sentence structures.
More corpus weight than the Richter Scale
can measure strangles every sidewalk.
But only seismic Pachinko Palaces open
wide to devour purgatorial pension plans.
Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines
are buried somewhere in the neon. Monks
and priests try desperately to extinguish the
glowing Karma of this kaleidoscopic city.
Ronald McDonald doesn’t look the same and the Colonel’s
secret recipe is dripping with Tempura. Coca Cola
looms large and brutal as do F-16s with
Rising Suns painted on their sides. Starbucks is a
neighborly face that comprehends my pointing
fingers and mumbled domo arigatos.
Familiar phrases somehow twisted in
translation adorn every other t-shirt. Reverse
engineered English to fit archaic advertisements fill
Gaijin goggles that search for a west which has
now become the East.
Today the sun rises from the ocean.
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