journal 28/12/10 (vancouver-tokyo-manila-)
Here is the woodland of his hairline, cedar & pine. Here is a poem about death, three numbers & the police asking me where in the house my friend is, me not knowing, listing the prescriptions, booze, & drugs, shifting a few degrees off axis as the officer hangs up. Here is you, removed from me: still slender, maybe debating as you always did the Beijing-Siberia sleeper train trip; the night ferry to Korea. Every man of my life has a system written with cartographic inclination; I’m an inkling, a cipher, a gateway to other worlds, still feeling the roll of pocketed sky after long days overground.
Here is the shimmering intonation of sorrow, of smartness, a memory of lemon juice & feathers, a surreal incidence of echo, your name written within every other’s. Kanji makes me think of you, mist rising from a bowl of boiled noodles, the pastel scenes beyond, jet-liners & tarmac & the utalitarian beauty of leaving time & time again. I write myself in circles; to return to verbalization is to return, inevitably, to you: my lousy first love, my most profound yet inexplicable feeling. Masked in oil, we can grapple with each other or we can just let go. Night falls over Tokyo…
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Night falls over Tokyo & I wonder when every word I write will cease to be addressed to you. Strange to pass thru Japan without your eviscerating presence, a ramen cafe & views of the runway, loneliness & saudade sudden & unexpected as tropical rains. The colours there, a palette close to that of the dream-portrait of your uncoupled life; a gutting emptiness fraternal to any self.
What living is this, day-long flights & the listing filtration of the true south. The weather without wind, the wind itself a different thing whether fibrillating passage thru palm or pine trees. The sky is a vaster thing here; the colours a richer oil of green & road & gold.
Against instances of instability, my father keeps a glock & a stack of green dollars in a house-hidden safe. My attention rides to-and-fro across a riddle of rooftops, a thatch of banana plants & a dim factory by the sea. The skyline palm-blurred, smog-burnt, a sweet adventure of truth & illusion, image. Following flyovers, we amass clutter, a mash of culture, hidden salt-kissed bodies & billboards & awnings barely tethered, a cascade of zinc roof into such grassy & litter-rich lots. That still wind thru the barely-structured skyscrapers, units for sale with a lack of backing; that rain into the open roof of abandoned institute now verdant with palm & banana tree, lemongrass & lotus leaves, the high note of sparrow song & the ubiquitous soft slap of rubber slipper against heel.
Houses & apartment blocks, ambitious & dense developments. The kiss of a thousand dusks, a myriad of equatorial dusts of equal human & mysterious origin: the ships low in the harbour with mainland trade; the cyclical hum of air conditioner; the rising thickness of a garbage fire, the diesel & chickenscratch & flamed coil of gourmet restaurant; the dandruff of street dogs & policement, the castaway crumbs of every laughing meal, the plants un-potted, the skewered meats, the house fires & pilfered electrical current, the inexplicable smokestacks & endless sky-puzzle of transpacific flight, the feet thru a field, the steel & mortar poured for a new flyover further south, the stuttering engine of a bangka in the bay, the homeland soil tread by expats & young backpackers, the skin of thirty million, attack & decay.
It’s a strange thing, this cylindrical light & me making an ass of myself, too foreign & familiar at once. I think of my hand on Josh’s forehead, the albums that played thru as we kissed & played at belonging to each other those first new nights in bed. I think of the ladder & the mirror-pool circled by stone in a nameless Hastings gallery, how we must press on to find newness — we must remain open to narrative as of yet unrealized.
