drowned asphalt
Tokyo Radiant by Philipp Zechenr
Gray linoleum floors and plastered walls.
No one asks us to be calm or to be quiet,
no blaring horns or fluorescent lights but there might as well be.
My steps are quiet and booming but the tall buildings are
brooding like an old future of Shibuya crossing.
Maybe it’s flooded with water or people,
or its crumbled into just a handful of words.
Despite it, restaurant signs still glow and the people’s feet are rooted in
the city’s drowned asphalt:
farther out we see ourselves like this.
Gray linoleum floors wash away under wet concrete or sand
the context of city and life lift with the wind.
My ankles wading;
I’m walking on telephone wire, walking on the B train tracks.
I can’t remember my name or my first address
nor the color of the eyes of the people I love
the flicker of lamp posts, or the scent of green grass,
they become stale and are replaced with
rock, quartz; rubbing against my teeth enamel, etching rough shapes of weather
forgetting where i am at all.
My steps are quiet and booming on blank linoleum floor
I feel like there are remnants of earth beneath me,
between me, like my limbs are pieces of drift.
Then: voices of other people, laugh and phone chimes
the wool of a winter coat and figures on the high line,
they protrude awkwardly; tangling tongues of relationships.
I hold hands with my mother, feel the linger of false kisses. But I sweep it away.
A flood can sweep it away.
Watch the ebb of Tokyo’s flooding water and I feel like I’m floating.
I forget the shape of my body and the edges of my fingertips
and I trade it in for a language I don’t know and for a new life. A sacrifice.
A sacrifice to the gods that live within us, our own versions of hell and heaven.
Continue living and drowning in the fiercely folding seas.