Wedding Vows

Tim:
As I make my solemn vows to Naoko, I want to thank my family and friends for preparing me for this day.

Naoko,
no one else can hold the light as you do,
boldly cupped like nectar in your slender
hands. no one else bears so well the weight of

my dreams. when i perceive the place where true
growth begins, there is only you, Love, at
its core. here, all light wears your silver scent.

“When I think of you,
I feel eternity most intimately.” (from Takamura Kotaro)

I promise to honor the daily rituals that have become our ceremonies,
and to continue to celebrate the beauty we find in these mindful gestures of love.

I promise to always communicate with you from the center of my existence.

I promise to make our love “a moving, growing, working together, whether there is harmony or conflict, joy or sadness.” (from Erich Fromm)

I promise to always and forever be grateful for the gift that you are in my life.

Eien no ai wo koko ni chikaimasu.

Naoko:
As I make my solemn vows to Tim, I want to thank my family and friends for preparing me for this day.  Though she’s not here today, I’d especially like to thank my Obachan for her constant presence and love; Arigato.

if you were my poem
I would savor you
allmorningeverymorning
like our sweet morning coffee
and dance along to the
rhythmic clickings
of your spoon against my cup

if you were my poem
I would find
a coffee cup
still atatakai from
the warmth of your lips

thank you,
for leaving behind
a kiss
on my morning sip

“When I think of you,
I feel eternity most intimately.” (from Takamura Kotaro)

I promise to honor the daily rituals that have become our ceremonies,
and to continue to celebrate the beauty we find in these mindful gestures of love.

I promise to always communicate with you from the center of my existence.

I promise to make our love “a moving, growing, working together, whether there is  harmony or conflict, joy or sadness.” (from Erich Fromm)

I promise to always and forever be grateful for the gift that you are in my life.

永遠の愛をここに誓います。

Lucky

I reflect on my deviant adolescence and early adulthood, and I wonder what life would have been like for my family if I hadn’t been so lucky. I tested the reach of my ancestors’ protective arms. I am humbled, I can’t believe I survived. Already drunk at 13, I was fearless, audacious, feisty to a point unimaginable in my sober states. I found new ways to give luck the middle finger. Bottomless drinking. Drunk driving. Innocent recklessness. It was as if I were playing tag with death. I resented my family, especially my Papa, and I escaped in drunkenness just as he did. Go figure. I learned from the best.

Our families and relatives were big drinkers. Mama drank regularly with us inside her. We all had a predilection to alcohol. We never lacked lessons on drunkenness from Papa, and it became our refuge. I don’t remember much of my childhood, but his drunken episodes linger with foul clarity.

Our life was full of pretense. A good-looking family, we appeared happy. A shallow extravagance filled the void created by the absence of affection and integrity. A sleek, black Mercedes. A racehorse that never raced. A thousand dollars cash under my pillow for my birthday. Colossal losses at casinos. Our extravagance was borrowed. Our pretense shouted that everything was just alright. It was consistently shattered along with the glasses and ochawan, the cordless phones and remote controls, even my Mama’s ribs. And my childhood. But the pretense was as resilient as any other habit. It would be right back in place the next morning, though more fragile and less convincing to me every time it reset. I learned to feel disgust.

Back to my initial question…if I had run out of luck earlier in life, I wonder how my family would have reacted. If I was dead, would they be more reflective? When I was a premature baby with a high risk of retardation or blindness, did they pray? If I had fallen on the other side of chance, retarded or blind, how would they have treated me? With love? Remorse? Shame? Would they have embraced compassion, or would I have been too heavy a burden to carry? I began life with slim chances at survival or normalcy, and here I am now. Just lucky, I guess.

I haven’t received a single phone call from my parents since I moved to the States 13 years ago. Not on my birthday. Not at the New Year. Not even when my Obachan passed away. Never. I could be dead, sick, or in danger and they wouldn’t know it for months. There must be meaning in this. We exist without each other, except for our brief, annual visits. Without the extravagance, the pretense, nothing is left to fill that familiar void for me. This distanced silence accentuates their vanity. They ignore the problem and replace the feelings with luxurious gifts. That’s the solution they’ve cultivated and carefully preserved. I don’t want another Gucci bag, I just want them to call me.

I write to them. I write about them. I continue to write and there’s no response. Nothing.

Seduction

These films of the unconscious induce my curiosity to crawl back into that darkness, that unfolding of vivid visions, of esoteric illusions. My will to wake suffocates. I know I should get out of bed yet I am seduced by this delving, already under the spell of naked gravity.

There lies something dark in this act of self-observation or, rather, a submission to my unconscious state, to my subconscious existence. What does my submission mean? My choice to hand control to my subconscious by putting my consciousness to sleep…what does this mean?

Yet another dawn of submission, relenting to euphoric, effortless sleep. To drift off and away, to sink, float, and drown in weightlessness. What lies beneath this deliberate momentum to be swallowed in sleep? Laziness or torture? Pleasure or punishment? Is it a giving up or a giving in? A release? A surcease?

Tonight, haunted by those dark hours of dawn, I am buried in restlessness where time expands its frame, becomes thick and heavy, extends its arms exponentially.

I am saturated with sleep, disturbed.

Plum Rain

梅 Rain
Plum 雨

ume candy jollies around my mouth.
my teeth and tongue frolic in sweet-tart sap.
finding the perfect crease,
the ume pit plants itself,
on my tongue,
spreads its roots into the walls of my mouth.
branches multiply before my eyes,
bursting with blossoms,
that declare my peace, my love,
my nature,
each a ripe, red blush.

just as the first ume bud opens its lips,
a fragrant downpour of ume rain in japan
unlocks Mama’s ribs,
her caged heart soars.
a crisp plum breeze
resuscitates the weary wings of her withering spirit.

she listens her way home,
humming a song to her soul.

she sleeps in my branches,
singing a lullaby of mercy,
of resolve.

it is a gift,
belonging.

Ceremony

for Beyond Baroque Reading

I didn’t steal the fire;
They made me from the earth to punish themselves
for lifting the veil,
for the secrets they glimpsed,
for their whispered confidences.

I sit in the corner,
my shadow chews guilt and regurgitates loneliness.
I do know why I’m here; I am to be held responsible;
I will be the mistress of ceremony.

Depression visits, wearing a pink slip.
Vulgarity knocks around without a word,
and Mania hangs out on the porch.
Pity fucks hard at misfortune.

An archaic desiccation staggers Pandora’s morbid universe, and unlocks the box.
Melancholic dust that falls short behind lust and schizophrenia,
worms through the cracks of dawn.
The first items and entities burst out, wild, mad, chaotic:

A diaper soiled in hard liquor.
A kid’s backpack with cigarette burns.
A toilet flushing down green bills.
Mama’s broken ribs, a lost fetus, her postpartum depression.
Papa’s crushed balls.
And then I recognize, Obachan’s smiling forgiveness.
Onichan’s imprisoned dreams.
Oneichan’s bruised youth.
Papa with his whores on the days of our birth.

I bend over the box to coax and encourage the reluctant.

Emerging slower now, timid, are the raven crooked wings,
the perfunctory misdemeanors,
bliss poisoned by the stench of ignorance,
the vacuum of tradition.
Hatred and Jealousy undress, copulate,
and give birth to the desperation that manslaughters justice and rapes virtue.
The cracked skulls of the effortless dead gape and watch as
A Black Sheep in a diving bell chases a Scapegoat.

My tongue, a cancerous piece of cantankerous meat,
has been abducted.

I get into bed with Calamity,
I wrap myself in barbed wire;
I am calmed by stabbings of truth.

I had seen it there, still inside the box when I closed the lid.
Though they are not yet ready for it, Hope remains.

my oath

I will
no longer snooze
on my pen.

Plum Blossoms

ume candy jollies around my mouth.
my teeth and tongue frolic in sweet-tart sap.
finding the perfect crease,
the ume pit plants itself,
on my tongue,
spreads its roots into the walls of my mouth.
branches multiply before my eyes,
bursting with blossoms,
each a ripe, red blush.
they declare my peace, my love,
my nature.

just as the first ume bud opens its lips,
a fragrant downpour of ume rain in japan
unlocks Mama’s ribs,
her caged heart soars.
a crisp plum breeze
resuscitates the weary wings of her withering spirit.

humming a song to her soul,
she listens her way home.

she sleeps in my branches,
singing a lullaby of mercy,
of resolve, like a dream.

belonging,
it is a gift.

Poetic Political Rant

vigilantism corrode morality
ferocious dogmatization justify celebration of extremists
militia chivalry raid lunacy with bonbons
sweet nepotism, luscious cronyism
manipulative foreplay gone sour
crooked barbaric symphony
preaching to choir of ignorant hypocrites, evangelicals, racists
hungering victorious memorial of retaliation from Ground Zero
changelings rape this cunt of a country
shameless disregard
repugnant stench wreaks havoc
minds unhinged, fledgling citizens
imbue proliferation of cancerous magnitude
exhort nostalgia awake, prompting immediate active change
should have rejected that stolen ticket, miss congeniality
pageantry tactic, pathetic yesterday’s news
homeland security needs rehabilitation
revolt spuriousness with revolutionary folklore
paying homage to history’s lessons.

Perfunctory Misdemeanors

Caffeine dismembers childhood evocation
visceral tearing apart deafens revelatory numbness
keen sustenance above prolific measures
vengeance hungering existential disaster
melancholic goose haunts that white house
cut beef eradicate historical detachment
archaic desiccation flounders universe into Pandora morbidity
exhortative quest marks chew only to regurgitate loneliness
black market massacre, grotesque neurosis dissects mother of pearls
imprisoned breaths choke on gushing waves born to drown traitors
execute perfunctory misdemeanors
chant away foreclosures on broken limbs
bombs of burdens succumb derelict abandonment
dry quicksand silver hung gangly contaminated visions with treacherous leaches of gangrene
hell is home
no better place to be
fuck hilarious cunts and dykes
pitiful apocalypse as I the scapegoat
eating paper, killed with words
welcome death sentence, in bed with calamity,
calmed by stabbings of truth.

Amorous Silhouette

Cocoa buttery lust adorns my body like graffiti art he left behind for my eyes to drink, my mouth to savor. Our essential, seductive aromas, hidden pleasures of secret notes flow through love canals, beneath sensual curves, to ignite tongues, thighs, cheeks. They swell in yearning, as heirloom fruits stretch, engorged, absorbing tantalizing heat. Moist flesh, dripping with sweet nectar, counterbalances the delicate bitterness of separation. His thoughtful warmth encloses me in a bud of velvety petals. We belong; our passionate kernel thrives, even in mutual solitude, reclining under moon-shadows, lying like spoons, plump with adoration. Our voluptuous silhouette of irresistible reverence softens cacophonous distant winters with a burning humidity under the aphrodisiac sun. Erotic stars ripen foolish tears and become the amorous jewels of cerulean lovers. Fine, crystalline precarious thorns, juxtaposed against our oceanic thirst for intimacy, bestow a crowned honor to the beholder of voracious loyalty. A faithful knot of vows awaits kimono winds to deliver snowflake kisses and unveil cynical misanthropists with the splendor of a thousand red-crowned cranes. Beads of red sparks wash away black dust; dizzying glows intensify with a heart-shaped craving to satiate ravenous existence. Smitten adulation, an unwavering twinge, resuscitates the poetic, exotic romance in our tender spirits, jazzing up our sweltering, unconditional engagement of devoted love. Our uncompromising ring of friendship promises courtship for infinite reincarnations.