Three Poems

Three poems–each struggling to break into free verse unnoticed, but getting caught.

“Of Night” – A poem by Molly Peacock; from her sorrowfully sweet collection about marriage, The Second Blush.

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This piece slyly provokes our own anxieties, setting us up for our own eventual release.

From Fukuoka 2: Cigarettes

Last Monday morning I woke up shortly after six o’clock. Rainy winds were crashing into the window above my futon, directly over my head—it would be impossible to go back to sleep. My alarm was set for an hour later, but it was just as well: today I would set out on my own for merely the third time. My mission was to settle on the perfect language school—to pick one of the several clustered together in a prominent downtown district called Tenjin.

The weather was as unpleasant as it’d been since I arrived. Temperatures wouldn’t peak above forty degrees all day and the rain would persist through the evening. I rubbed at my eyes and stared at the ceiling until a particularly forceful gust shocked me to life. As if conspiratorially, the kettle hollered loud from the kitchen five steps down the hall. (Dad had been up since five, as he tends to be, maybe doing pushups or stampeding through Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo). I drank my instant coffee, felt better, took down some directions, and was left to my own devices as Dad headed off to work.

Later, on the subway platform, wind sweeping the rain underneath the awning into disinterested faces, I waited for the Fukuoka Kuko line to take me to Tenjin. The first train came and I boarded as practiced. Sitting on the plush seats in the oddly empty car, I was caught by two successive impulses: first, today would be a cathartic day; second, this train had come from the wrong direction. Seized by indecision, I got off seconds before the conductor on the platform blew his whistle. I then stood and watched as the train began drifting opposite the direction from which it had come—the right way, east, down the railway toward Tenjin. This same indecision moved me to do this not one, but two, more times: twice I boarded and got off different trains before it occurred to me that my station, Meinohama, was the western end of the Kuko line. It only made sense that these unidirectional trains should come from the east. Thankfully, as they travel frequently, my bad logic cost me only twenty minutes.

Downtown, I traced the red-ink trail drawn onto my Fukuoka NOW map and arrived at the Genki (liveliness, wellness) Japanese and Culture School just before it opened at nine. My interactions there—totally of the proverbial variety— landed me a spot in an intensive course.

High from my humble success, I walked out of the building into a grayer Tenjin than I’d ever seen before. The rain had settled into a soft peppering, but the dangerous clouds above went on as far as the sky. In the midst of the emotional weather, of my relief at securing a venue to study Japanese, and of the song Dreams by Fleetwood Mac rocking in my headphones, I was moved by the following scene:

Huddling under the awning out front the Genki building were three perfect strangers, smoking cigarettes and staring out at the wet street. From left to right: a kid my age, his fire-red hair spiked at uncanny angles, his designer jeans sagging to his thighs, his cigarette held like a joint; a stunning woman in her early thirties, her business blouse and skirt wrapped in a fur-lined down jacket, her cigarette caught daintily in her fingers; and a white-haired man, his mouth bowed crankily, his back stooped and crooked, his cigarette held, again, like a joint.

In a moment of uninhibited sentimentality, I smiled and breathed in deep at the notion of the cigarette assembling these unlikely characters under the same awning. Not a one had any business here other than to stop and smoke their cigarettes and stare ahead as if with blinders on. I stood, stalkerishly, observing them from behind, absorbing every inch: three strangers, crowded together, not two feet of space between one and the next.

Finally my body began to move, though I had only a hunch where it was headed. It brought me out under the light rain, which I didn’t mind, and up the main streets. As my body walked, I considered:

The concept of strangers having cigarettes in common is not news to me, or anybody. As well, other cultures revolve, socially, around smoking things more sacred than cigarettes. But a montage of sorts flashed just behind my eyes. It was of the hundreds upon hundreds of cigarettes I’d seen smoked in the last week—of all the crowds huddled together in small spaces, like the “Smoking Tent” in the middle of a shopping arcade (most nearly a tepee) or the single smoking booth in a restaurant (where unacquainted people will cram together), or the table out front of a Starbucks holding an ashtray (where two gossiping women will not flinch when a total stranger stops inches away and smokes in silence just to take advantage of the ashtray). The physical closeness prompted by cigarettes here is remarkable. Strangers bunch in the vein of an oppressed minority, surrounded but immutably together in their sins.

Of all the industrialized cultures in which smoking is not widely suppressed, Japan’s is perhaps the most forward thinking and scientifically advanced. So it is, in my eyes, that the Japanese cigarette and its smoker are an important face of postmodern Japan—its ache, its brutal ambivalence. The culture is torn between its knack for innovation and progressivism (Japan’s international conscience, and, more recently, contributions to our new Green world, cannot go unacknowledged), and its desperation to hold on to its magnificent tradition. A Japanese man or woman with a cigarette in their hand shimmers uniquely: it’s not the sexy glamour of the Hollywood actress, or the fructose-sweet romance of the French, or the spiritual boundlessness of the Native Americans, or the cool noir taste of the American fifties. It’s its very own Japanese shimmer, inexplicable as it may be. And its appeal, it would seem, had me hooked.

My legs stopped in front of a cigarette machine. Across the display, each pack—Marlboros to Lucky Strikes to a name I can’t read—was three dollars. Incredible. Understanding better what was going on, I inserted three 100-yen coins and pressed the button beneath the pack of Seven Star Lights (a Japanese classic). The machine beeped and squealed and I stood confused before it, rain pinging into my forehead, until I heard my coins tumble into the change compartment. I reached in and pulled them out and then tried again with the same result. Men in suits laughed discreetly as they passed. I thought to ask for help, but didn’t. Finally, assuming this endeavor was over, I was surprised to find my legs acting on their own again. They took me around the corner and stopped in front of a cigarette stand. I sighed. “Konnichiwa,” I said. The vendor smiled and nodded her head. I requested, “Sebun Suta, raitsu (lights), kudasai.”

“Mm, mmm, hai,” she answered. “Raitsu desuka?”

She held up the right pack and I nodded, making what I hoped were the appropriate noises. I paid for it, and a lighter, and found my way back to the main streets. Rain dotted the first cigarette I’d pulled out. I thought hard about whether or not I really wanted to do this. My earlier indecision must have followed me from the subway platform.

I hadn’t smoked a cigarette sober in some years—I hated the way they tasted and I hated the way they smelled.

That Japanese shimmer, a part of me said.

I lit it, and inhaled. I got dizzy, and nearly fell over.

Then the perfect song with the perfect marching beat appeared in my ears and I inhaled again, even deeper, and started walking through the rain, passing the cigarette from hand to hand each time the wind changed in order to avoid the clingy strings of smoke. Head abuzz, I was nearly stumbling like a drunk. The catharsis I’d been expecting was on its way.

From Fukuoka

The second weekend of my visit to Fukuoka has come and gone. In the face of the ten more I have to look forward to, I shouldn’t be worrying about the passage of time. But as I can barely remember what’s happened to me in the last nine days, I see fit to write this blog and, hopefully in doing so, drill my experience into my long-term memory. I’ll write as much as I can (while writing as little as I can), whenever I can.

I landed at Fukuoka Kuko (airport) late evening, local time. Even having left Seattle in the middle of the night, I was able to time my sleep on the flights so as to arrive in good enough shape to avoid jet lag. Baggage retrieval was straightforward (Dylan, your duffle bag was crucial—thanks). Difficult as wielding three months’ luggage is, I inconspicuously made my way to a lobby of waiting chairs where sat Dad in a drowsy stupor (my plane had been delayed). He woke up and greeted me empathically; I passed along my biggest suitcase and we headed outdoors to the taxi stand. The nearest car’s driver packed the luggage in the trunk, making enthusiastic, guttural noises. In what sounded to me like fluent Japanese, Dad gave him our destination, and we were off (driving, of course, on the left side of the road). I updated Dad on the recent past:

I’d been out cold from Seattle to LA, was out cold for half of my LA to Incheon/Seoul flight—the other half I spent reading a novel, or watching the Korean Air flight attendants (dressed in teal jackets, beige skirts, tireless smiles) coddle the myriad Asian toddlers that waddled through the isles. In the Seoul airport I sat with coffee and watched out the massive windows, wondering at white-capped mountains and the meticulous runway managers. Finally I boarded the delayed Fukuoka flight and, in the same time it takes one to fly from Chicago to Detroit, the plane reached Kyushu Island.

Here I was.

In the cab I told Dad his Japanese sounded great. He denied as much (as would most culturally-refined Japanese), explaining that fluency would never come so late in life. He pointed out landmarks, traded remarks with the driver, and twenty minutes later we were home at the apartment. Surely delirious, I elected to stay awake and eat a bowl of bean curd with soy sauce instead of go to bed. I don’t remember how it tasted.

Orienting (no pun intended) myself has been the theme thus far. Fortunately, having been here twice before means I’m mostly relearning, rather than learning. The smell of the tatami mats on the bedroom floors was instantly familiar—the kanji (Chinese characters representing groupings of Japanese syllables) on the subway monitors were, and still are, completely alien. On my second day I jumped on the bicycle I’d bought during my last visit. Originally gold-painted and respectable, it was now rusted, banged up—basically looked like I’d dropped it from the roof of the Nishitetsu Hotel and raced downstairs to dowse its battered frame with a pale of teriyaki sauce and tar. That’s what four years under a pavilion in the apartment parking lot will do. But I recalled a certain car I’d once driven—it had this same abandoned-for-four-years look to it—and all the ways in which it helped me survive unruly adolescence. Indeed, this bike would be my new loyal companion—my new old faithful. After all, I would (and will) need to ride it just about every day.

Fukuoka is a bicycle city. Everywhere you look there are students, salary men, ancient women, all pedaling away. You will see chives protruding awkwardly from the basket at the front of a bike on their way home to be chopped and sprinkled over dinner. You will see handlebar bells being berated by indignant thumbs in the wake of a near collision. You will see it all, everywhere you look. So I was forced to re-master the intricacies of a boy’s relationship with his bike. They are like horses: they sense your fear, they believe in you as a rider or they don’t. My beat up, rusted piece of shit would see me through the worst (narrow fence openings, or the foot-wide bike lane on street-sides when a motorcycle driver decides he is in fact on a bicycle and deserves to use this lane) if I instilled my own confidence.

The bike gets me from the apartment to the subway station. Here I park it in a no-joke bike-parking structure, then hand a pink ticket to one of several possible elderly men with liver spots and hearty dispositions (one of many societies of working class men forced into retirement because of age). One of them flips his stapler like a six-shooter as he tags my ticket. Each time he pulls it off we cheer.

On the subway, Dad explains the oddities before my very eyes. He also explains those more covert, the things occurring beneath the surface. The Japanese are an incredibly complex people (forgive my generalities). They are nuanced, razor sharp, elusive, unnervingly perceptive. As time goes on I’m sure I’ll have no choice but to delve into this more specifically and thoroughly. But for the time being, I take my father’s word for it.

Among other discomforts, the constant spotlight—akin to that of a D- or F-list celebrity—takes the cake. In order to remain sane, it’s most important to remember that, to the Japanese, I am not primarily brown-haired, pale-skinned, or wearing a North Face rain-shell: instead, I am simply Gaijin. Foreigner. This is not to say they can’t see beyond ethnic differences like you or I. It’s to say that being a foreigner here—and especially an American foreigner—means being scrutinized by eyes curious, loathsome, and awestruck alike, whenever they think you’re not watching. Par for the course. I find myself returning that subtle scrutiny. They (again, forgive the generalities) are delicate, and in the end, mean no harm—rather, their convictions about the west (and westerners) are influential forces in their lives. With that in mind, it’s difficult to be offended when people avoid sitting next to you on the subway; or to be alienated when someone goes out of their way to sit close to you as they can get.

Nine days in, I’m probably not aware of how uncomfortable things can be. I’m hoping I’ll find out. I’ve now ordered the wrong drink enough times to know how to order the right one. I’ve crudely and impolitely asked where to find a bathroom enough times to know how to say it slightly less crudely and impolitely. I’ve made enough faces flush; I’ve blushed enough times myself to expect it on a daily basis. I’ve learned that Suntory whisky (think Lost in Translation—yes, it’s a real brand) is in fact not as good as Bill Murray makes it look. But it’s just beginning. I start language classes one week from today. Doors will soon swing wide open—doors to new parts of town, to the nightlife, to more enrichment and to plenty more embarrassment.

After I’ve memorized the pertinent words, I’ll seek out the ticket-tagger at the bike-lot and stagger my way through a request: teach me to flip a stapler like a six-shooter.

Japan is beautiful, shocking—from the deadly silence and woody scents of the Shinto shrines to the bare thighs and Hello Kitty come-fuck-me boots on the schoolgirls walking home—I don’t yet know the half of it.

Bones in the Yard Demo

Bones in the Yard Demo–a collection of spur-of-the-moment, software-inspired pop songs about the danger of never going beneath the surface.

Come Sweetly