among things we visit by the water

There is always a way forward.


Pete Yorn sings a version of New York City Serenade. I started to learn it in Texas, and found the lady who brings down walls. I drank whiskey and my fingers itched. The e string sweats and expands faster than the b.



And sometimes I would sit in the lawn and watch the oranges disappear like the sun.




I coughed up blood once or twice trying to recall a name. I can remember the letters, just not how to pronounce them. [cross-cutting in a dream sequence] The actress helped some with the vowels, but I would roll over in my sleep and elongate them.



Plastic bottles and crumbs and wrappers accumulate on long drives. Even those taken to the ocean.




And men develop rough hands and can stand firm anywhere, unless they are on the land. I wonder would I continue wobbling long should I find myself on solid footing again.






The signs on the highway show the distance we are driving away from Sendai. 193 km. We are driving towards distance, nothing else. 200 km. More.




The forests are disappearing like oranges, bundled in piles next to the rusted tin roofs that burn with salt and sun.



Someone is cutting down the trees, and I am tempted to snort in disgust. But I love to think what it might be like to sit with her near a fire, reading comfortable books in a comfortable voice until she falls asleep.

The less I look to the planets, the more I feel their gravity. And they reflect a scorching light that does not waver in the atmosphere.




Steadiness. It is a recurring thought today, along with conversations I should like to have back, we might summon a lawyer and renegotiate the past, have it notarized, and pretend to start again.




But if a lawyer knows things about love, they become cold. Quiet. Remote.





There is no soul in such revisions. What remains is a space between the necks of lovers, even as their faces are joined together.

I sometimes dream her, and always forget what she has said

She advocates sitting with tea near dreamtime, equating a morning silence with something mystical.

He is beginning to accept that he is set in his ways: routines do not suit him. He prefers the edge of a circle, a banana with a vitamin, eggs rotting slowly in the refrigerator.

Perhaps, he thinks.

He spent a month tracing the contours of the word mystery, this without tea, but in the end produced a film about mustaches and geese, peppered with the old external acting, in the style of Charlton Heston and Richard Chamberlain--the only way to know that a man feels is if he is screaming it into the sky, the rain, the sea, the sea of monkey faces.


Responsibility is a word she counters with moral vision. She bandies it about town, but will not tell how much it cost her.

I have grown tired of the sound of my own thoughts, and women always cry in dreams.

Some of Tokyo

Some Buildings of Tokyo

Some Trains in Tokyo

More Theatre Instructions for Texas folk

Go see this show.

Raindrops, Tobacco, Crumbling

I traveled to Matsushima, and spent a few hours.



It is made up of around 260 small islands, all covered in pine trees, and is home to Zuigan-ji Temple, founded c. 800. The horizon was a uniform gray, and in reflection, so too the sea, only darker.




Such grays flatten perspective and, lacking the sense of depth which light provides, it is only the surface of the eye that sees. Perhaps not even that. Mine was the empty face of the samurai, or the Buddha--experience not possessed, only lived in.



Or perhaps I am wrong. That is only the way it seemed. I miss my friends, but have been buried in the cold long enough to begin to consider it home, and so I begin to forget. My father says a horse that lives in a stable and only comes out to be ridden, thereupon returning to its cell, becomes a dull beast, desiring the cage over all else, not noticing that there is something off to the right of your screen. We gaze unknowingly.





And a PSA that's almost a Haiku: