Winner of the White Enso award for poetry.

Tokyo Furusato

by Al Ningen

"Tokyo Furusato" is a hymn to Tokyo and a hymn to being - in Tokyo. It aims to capture the scale, depth and wonder of the world’s most existential city. 
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Concerning itself with the primacy of the moment, it relates to the Japanese expression ichi go ichi e—moments which will never happen again. Of course, Tokyo is a city that has rebuilt itself again and again. It is my hope that "Tokyo Furusato" promotes the belief that as human beings we also have the power to do that, and encourages people to find meaning in beginning again.

​ 
(i) 

Once I had seen the shadow on the moon
I knew that I was free to wander
Whether the sailor or the eye
The mind the hand or the rose
Wandering is life
As all true living meeting is
And I have become a wanderer
In my own time
Late out in the years I see
Wandering is not to drift
Nor is it to be lost
It is to be where one least expects
When one least expects it
But where one needs to be the most
In the middle of life’s journey
I found myself in a dark wood
Where the straight way was lost
But found instead 
There was no straight way to find
And though direction was the cost
‘Twas the journey through the moment pleased me most
How the moment becomes the moment
Imperceptibly beckons 


So I was born 
In Tokyo
Cosmopolis
Starspun from time experience and lives
Amidst an infinity of island citizens
Who will become ancestral gods
Merchants and seafarers
Travelling minds
Officers of the power of the world
Coalesced around the rising sun
In this calm city
Its schoolchildren snowdrops 
Now flowering in naïve magnificence
Beneath an endless azure sky
In present fragility
Managed by tranquillity
Parallel streams avoid the eye’s collision
The silent architecture of the millions
Passes me by like shoals of serious beauty
As my consciousness cuts through the city 
Like a boat through a dream


In the pavilion of the real
What is east and what is west 
How shall we navigate the human trial
The uncharted sea lanes of the open mind
What means of living shall we use
What constant compass us
Directed by incense or perfume
Work of art or drop of water
Saturated with the excitement of mystery
The uncontrolled sea beneath us
Riding the eternal instant
Does one ride the surface of the wave 
Or does one ride the ocean


(ii) 

Did you live today
I lived
In Tokyo
In time
That time
Which is not this time
Which is not that time
Which is not this time
Which is now now
Here I have learned how to bow
To love to bow
Through time life teaches you humility
Humility teaches you animistic respect
Try imagining the size of the world
The span of the universe
The infinite variety of circumstance
The sublime code of the living moment
But look around 
At this city’s serenity
The people in the street
The ferryman waving to the departing ferry
The orchestra bowing as one
The bright energy of a flurry of schoolgirls
The children reading books 
The nightshift construction workers 
Shoulder-massaging each other in balletic formation
Attentive civic direction everywhere
I am humbled by these things
I am among these things
More than I am among the stars


(iii) 

In the morning in the rain
Black waves of hair
White collars
Umbrella armies
Tide forth 
A human river 
Flowing upwards from the platform
Waterfalling down escalators
I enlisted rather than conscripted 
It isn't romance but actuality 
That makes the mundane diurnal cycle thrill me
To be in this river
To be inconsequentially more than
To be validated by insignificance
Liberated by inconsequence
Romance is the love of death
This nullity is actual life
Resisting atomisation
This absorption transcendence
Fracturing light sunrise
On the brilliant bones of a city
The lark’s noise free mind
Sings like a clean limpid pool
Kissed by the fresh breath of the living moment
The unjustified beat of my heart
The moisture on my lip
The coming cold on my cheek
Insignificant significance
Who needs to be first
Who needs to be best
Who needs to be known


(iv)

The evening lights leave a hushed impression of Edo
A tender ellipsis
In time-steeped ritual
Lovers bow to each other in the midnighted street
A smile from a Tokyoite
In an unsmiling metropolis
Brings me unsought delight
In unmeasured lanterned space
The autumn muted whitedazzles of bicycle lights
Are benign firefly guides
These soft exchanges
Herald the face of pleasure
In the empire of night
Painted with darkness
To disappear with morninglight 
In these moments
I understand the negligibility of death
Unborderlined in a sea of possibilities
How unexpected space appears before my eyes
As I move across the evening skies
And as the darkness blooms
The beauty of the world is plain
Though there are those on the other side 
Who’ll never see it as they feel their pain
And the dog barking winter night 
In a letter from a friend 
Like the smile of the unborn child
This too one day will end
In final dusk
Dusk in Tokyo
Movement and indeterminacy
The essence of this city
Somewhere between reality and appearance
And these words
Love is floating above this sorrowful world


(v) 

The mountain the forest and the ocean
Have always been there
They will be here when we’re gone
They are irrelevant to the human trial
But the white page empty field
The ink river
The molten clay 
The strata of oils and charcoal
The dark forest of ebony 
The virgin snow of ivory
The guts and skin and bone of animals
Contain our true nature
Transforming instants
In unforeseen brilliance
They illuminate nature’s abyss
Challenging reality 
With human warmth
The untold sorrows of the world are comforted
The mountain peak dream encouraged
They laugh at history
Delight in change
And for all its electric phatasmagoria
Nature is this city’s seed
Its aesthetic impulse
Inspires its mathematic circuits
Digital birdsong in the metro
The mellow chirrup of traffic lights
In subtle ghosted harmony
Autumn leaves cleanly lie on concrete
With nothing in between
The detritus of the West
Absent and unseen
The overgrown ghost homes of the wider country
Hatelessly wait for the metropolis’ shaking end
But for the rest of my life
I could walk the streets of this city
A leaf blown along its pavement


(vi)

Conditioned for perfection
It makes perfect sense to care for everything
Not to worry but to care
Connected by an inner spirit of chivalry
The civic fabric of the greater good
An individual populace maintains
Their will to peace and harmony
The apparently disengaged masses
Walk with automatic certainty
As I have learned to do since coming here
At the ancient modern intersection
Near the Meiji shrine I wait with certainty
That I should not cross until the signal changes
Though there is no-one else around
While I wait I think of the connectedness of things
Because I wait I realise
The trains here only run on time because I do not cross
Everywhere arterial cables vein the sky
Wrapped in double helix contrapunctal wires
Telegraphing the city’s nervous system
Tendrilling its spine
In umbilical connection to the kite lines of old Tokyo
Timecrossing 
While under the skin of Shinjuku-Sanchome station 
The Toei Shinjuku Line runs like blood
Eleven centimetres below the Fukutoshin Line
Everything and everyone woven together
In an immense anatomy of responsible obligation
Self-sacrifice and stoicism
While on the leviathan streets
We pass each other by in invisible silos
At an intimate distance
Not in conflict but in measured protocol
Never looking
Never smiling
Never speaking
But understanding


(vii)

In the distance 
Beyond the cartoon Sunday skyline of Kiyosumi garden
The snow-capped sacred mountain looks down 
At heaven on earth
Sunshine sweetness is everywhere
The tonic fresh air is
Ionised typhoon-freed lemon energy
Easter light needlessly sanctifies a self-redeeming day
Breezes zephyr under a planet-blue sky
In a city perfect in every detail
Within the stepping-stone punctuated limpid lake
The filmic koi orange in silken motion
Undulate below the mossed bridge
The teahouse’s minimal tranquillity undisturbed
Here within the proportioned culture of a Japanese garden
Human-managed natural beauty and decorum
In borrowed scenery stands a solitary crane
Reflected in the mirror-water
Suddenly it stretches its thousand year wings
And as it effortlessly ascends
Skyward I am heavenbound to Earth


(viii)

I look with a human’s eye
At humans who look with a nation’s eye
Eyes as black as century limousines
Standing impassive
Regarding the situation
Revealing nothing
Like empty funeral cars in the rain
Mirror-windowed in the face of human sorrow
Secret eyes in the streets and on the train
Switchflick away in shy panic
You can't connect without a connection
Without connection there is no pain
So this island race their feudal fears maintain
To be seen to be looking is to intrude or be noticed
Familiarity must be earned and not assumed
Masks are a necessity
Masks are common sense
To prevent contagion disorder and romance
And cover up the unmade face of office girls
Then out of unbeknown millions one evening
Someone you could never have imagined
But always desired
Looks at you with interest 
In the black lacquer of the Tokyo night
The thrill of recognition 
In a desert of suppression
Is a direct hit to the senses
Two faces dance with each other
In Orwellian thought-crime
Sculpt the individual from the communal
Carved from one piece of time
Like a smiling Noh mask
In a city where two faces
Are communication’s basis


(ix)

The autumn pilgrims on Mt. Takao
The crocus kids and ancient couples
Women in snow moon and flower
Cherry plum peach and apricot
Persimmon fruit and ginko trees
Kumquat and daisies
Morning glory
December azure and summer skies
Winter peonies blooming on icy days
The wayside miracle of a winter rose
Autumn chill and August’s furnace
Clean rain benediction 
Les feuilles de mort of Tokyo
City breezes and shocking showers
Heat islanded in summer
Winter sun magicked
Blossom worlded
The city winds’ susurration
A counterpoint in the seasons’ musics
Golden leaves on the roof of a shrine
Autumn letters from the lifeforce
Artic air and monsoon
Commutarian rice
Spring beans for the spirit world
Winter harvest
The sea’s bounty
Whale octopus and jellyfish
Teeming thrashing tidal
Moonpushed urban world
Moving in sympathy to nature’s rhythm 
In natural cornucopic electronic synthesis 
Balanced on mythic drifting land
Flooded by human seas
Speared by life and gasping 
For one more vital exquisite answering breath
Here one cannot but live in the presence of the real


(x)

The catfish’s thrashing tail
Massages me in my bed at 3AM 
A slinky rope trick performing
The buildings being
Sprung against shock
Like the inhabitants
Whose silence also absorbs
Mutes tremors
Dulls the warning bell
No need for revelation
Or noisy complication
When one lives in liquid time
Moving anechoically 
In underwater-motion
In epiphany I realise 
I want to be buried here
Amongst silent strangers
Without ceremony or memorial
Unspoken of and unheard of
In a soundless city
Perhaps as a legend falls to casual destruction
Or to another distant detonation
The people of the Pearl River delta
Ancestral enemies
Await the same fate as we do here
Share the same fault
In a world that can't be blamed
While wrapped in plastic
Hushed like Christmas snow
The new white helmets wait 
On top of cupboards in city offices


(xi)

The fire escape flows down the building 
Like a river of original thought
Silent buildings on heaven’s streets
The silent streets of Tokyo
In inched precision 
Graveyard forests
Close neighbours to the living
Are visible through buildings 
Sliced between the living and the dead
Clean lines of purpose
Manifest as purposelessness
Where the maker’s hand is the anonymous now
In ordered jumble the neverending pristine suburbs
Punctuated by golf nets
House the multitudes of a kappa-haunted world
In Minato-ku a symbol stands 
With one foot in a Tokugawa grave
Crowned with war metal and built from life and death
In Ginza the imagined Nakagin capsule tower is a dissolving snowflake
Among millions of unique snowflakes
Metabolising as unimaginable crystals in the February sleet
Asymmetrical beyond stylisation
Axolotly enduring as one place
The city’s vertebrae as much process as object
Lasering infinitely present absence
With no heritage to remind it of its past
Scars quickly heal
And life moves on like a salamander in flames


(xii)

The streets are swept with ancient country brooms
The troubles of the world left at the door
For the troubles of the world should never come 
Inside to where the heart is stored
Inspired by silence
Touched by nothing
Nourished by detachment
Serenity repairs the body and the mind
Rescues the spirit 
From the conundrum of everlastingchangingdesire
Enriches power in calm aesthetic
Lets voices make an honest sound
Allows them to be someone
And on these streets
In saturated colours silver-chromed
The trucks gleam in the morning light
And will gleam again tomorrow and in the next day’s sun
Maintained with toyshop pride 
Here a greater consideration prevails against time’s tolls
Just as the new year shrine bell
Rings out the human flaws
The past’s neglect is managed
By chimes of moment-given care
And the lustre of the dream renewed
By someone who is no-one
For everyone 
Everywhere


(xiii)

Cities are life’s legends not people
People are the weather on the streets
You and I will be swept away
In the lava flow of history
Babylon will not
Constantinople
Rome
Athens
London
Baghdad
Istanbul
Persepolis
Eternal cities
At least until the final forgetting
Our own magnificent mythic mass of life
Our stars of knowledge
Our greatest joys and out darkest fears
Our triumphs and our mistakes
Our shame and our humiliation
Our love and our eternal becoming
Preserved only through artsong 
Transmitted from city to city
Like heartbeats of light and sound
Cut flowers or holy relics
Monet’s pond and Van Gogh’s sky
Foujita in Montparnasse
The Beatles in Budokan
Marcel Duchamp in Manhattan
Joyce in Trieste
Klimt in Ueno Park
All have taken their revenge against cruel reality
Its unbearable beauty and its ineluctable sadness
In summertime in a summer dress I saw
A girl from Tokyo in the Sagrada Familia
Unmistakably so
Her haiku body calm amidst the vaulting masonry
Exquisite in her bearing and the palette of her clothes
The sophisticated detail of her dress and bag and shoes 
Her co-ordinated newness and her unique familiarity
The slender grassblade twist of her body beyond design
Standing there head tilted back 
Looking up at the impressive architecture
Bathed in a niagra of stained-glass light
She is the cathedral 
So every human song eclipses
All that our living misses
When the lone and level sands stretch far away
Our songs of love will be our cities


(xiv)

In the womb of an unborn morning
Drowsy drowned drugged
Hanging like beautiful meat
Beyond the sorrowful
They dream
Unknowable at this time
In narcoleptic ballet
At the stations of a dream city
Partners are changed
Dancing in and out of oblivion
There is no vacuum that can't be filled with dreams
Dreaming duos on the train
Hydrocephalic heavy-headed
Or one alone mouth open 
A solitary corpse executed by routine
Unsought and unintended intimacy as 
A head rests on a stranger’s shoulder
Sleeping together as an unknowing couple 
Sleepers and dreamers
Dreamers and sleepers
Prop each other’s heads
In the morning after work or on the last train home 
It’s always the same
It is safe to be extinguished
An accepted sign of weakness
That shows commitment to the process
A peace beyond redemption
In open-mouthed erotic poses
Or of those awaiting execution
A kind of decapitation
An ancient lady’s eyelids in REM spasm
The range of dreamers is unending
Three monkeys in a medieval manuscript
Head down hands clasped in prayer
Head back open-mouthed
Eyeless hands turned up in supplication
In ecstatic attitudes
Outside time’s needles 
In tempo rubato
Here is another
She is a sober drunk
Passed out on her feet
On her way to work
Sleepwalking surfer
Standing unsupported on the train
She needs no support but her own enchantment


(xv)

The sign outside the Paris café is tres jolie
Inside I am in Showa Shibuya
The clanging tram cars humming telegraph wires
Jackhammers and factory horns are long gone
Ghostly music in the shell of memory
The kites lost to the electric world
The geta almost gone
The precise protocols eroded
From times when female telephonists answered
The inhabitants of memory 
Transistor century that became somehow crystal
Here two elderly Showa ladies are laughing
Elegant survivors dressed in antique clothes
Time and experience has twinned their faces
Serenely vital and Setsuko Hara beautiful
Transcending the horror of history
As only beauty can
There are no nightingale floors
To warn us of history’s approach
Finding oneself walking in the air
Among a relaxed group of young people
Or noticing the perfect brown earth
Aesthetically set down in the back of an open sunlit truck
We are buried in fresh life
Too busy living to care for signs and definitions
Too busy being human to see what is not yet there


(xvi)

There was once a Buddha made from blood-soaked soil
That is no longer here
But it was here
Or there
Or so they say
A monument to someone’s sentiment  
Tonight other things are here
The lights reflected in the pond at Ichigaya
Streaking dusk
Are charming
Midnight breezes flutter shopfront  flags
With the season’s branding
Blind to what informs the moment 
Further west along Yasukuni Dori Avenue
In darkness
The sword unrestored
The Ministry of Defence compound is silent
A few days before in the sunshine
When I saw it for the first time
What struck me most
Was the impeccable aesthetic of the trees 
Planted by voices that are no longer here
Spilled blood that was once flowing
So the past is invisibly engraved 
In dark echoes
In the padding of lions in Ueno zoo
The light dappling Shinobazu pond
In Nogizaka
In the corridors of Waseda
The platform of Kumigaseki Station
And the Dai Ichi building
Tap dancing on the roofs of Asakusa
Or so they say
Surrounding the Diet building
History is nothing 
But the mythic air we breathe
The nothing that is something 
And the something that is nothing
The triumph and the struggle 
The control and the denial
All gone
In Tokyo the Apollonian is a loyal dog that barks at pomposity 
The Dionysian to be found 
In the snakes fire and moonflowers of the present 
Night death cannot reproach us 
For the betrayal of the greater good of the past
We are still a jewel
We do not shatter
Some things last
Though we are in another’s nest
The world’s troubles and the world’s pleasures
Conjoined in uncomprehending spiral around us
We are beautiful honest and alive
In the stations 
Filled with cuckoo song
We are here and we are gone


(xvii)

Beneath a fingernail slice of crescent day moon 
Above a preoccupied city
I stand to the side behind the yellow line
Then
Our torrent fills the train in mad protocol
Improbably so
The platform ballet is performed with grace
And meatpacked we are on our way
Docile
On time
In time
Breathing in unison
We are committed to something somehow
Bound for
Bound to
Bound up
The paradox of the brutal shoving gone
The thunderous eyes above the masks
Returned to equanimity
In silent process
Data overloaded
Our wedded energy 
Passes
Chrome spaceship on the flyover
Municipal floodlights
Astroturfed roofs
Triple speed tubes
Substation
Park 
Cemetery
Laundry
Advertising
Morning sundazzle
Empty playparks
Among the fresh upholstery
Poetic faces of shy sensuality
Stand without anomie in balletic poise
Inscrutable
Impervious to the social moment
To the small child 
Drowning below them in the crush
Whose fear is not drowning
But being seen to drown 


(xviii)

In this drifting land
It can't be found on the map anymore
But I went there anyway
Expecting to find withered loneliness
I found joy in beating hearts
Much the same as anywhere in this wicked world
Where people are moved by things
Showa men dreaming of kisses
And rabu
Grace playfulnessss and delight
Music and song
Mixed with tragedy and wine
Flirting with love as ma-chan sings
Outlasting regret fear and uncomprehension
This is the east of the eastern capital
Unpretentious and endangered and almost gone
And it is very much like the city east of The West
It doesn’t matter where you are
Or who you are with 
The attributes of poverty are for everyone
Here it is plainly true that all kinds of riches exist 
Beyond the reach of what other people think
The crazy old man who paints pictures
Is no longer here
But there are others 
Muttering old man
Amongst his cigarettes and fuss
Looks at you and you think
He sees my weakness
But you have no weakness
Only fear of weakness
The cure an honest heart
And walking in the quiet backstreets of this place
I hear many honest hearts
Beating in wells of silence
Echoes that the backpack budget hostels can’t drown out
Some kind of hopeless integrity
The unrecognised dignity 
In human anonymity and humility
Ancestral in its own deficiency
The beauty of the people of the setting sun
But there are even older spirits in the air
Walking towards the execution grounds
Where the uncounted who opposed
Are now redeemed by their opposition
Although no more
And the never-counted remain forgotten
They arrive at the reed moor
And they stop at the looking-back tree
A willow of course
And look back on what they are leaving
The years of moons   
The times of snows 
The cherry blossom and the burning maple stars
The seasons of their lives
Did they regret their freedom or their present capture
Did they fear for their past or their future
Was the light fantastic night dissolving 
Or the cursed day beginning
Did they pray at the little shrine
Or was their head still spinning in the wine
Did they recognise their living
Was just death in its beginning


(xix)

Somewhere it must be accorded
In spacetime it is recorded 
The one-year wife is recovering
And happy having a week ago
Borne her first child
The conductor is beating time for the orchestra
And all the musicians following him
The nurse removes the bandage
But the patient cannot see
The street sweeper is sweeping the leaves
The dry-cleaner wraps the suit in polythene
And tapes it closed
The unfaithful couple enter the love hotel
Seen by no-one
The fly lands on the baby’s nose
The schoolchildren are boarding the train 
The crowd cheers in the Tokyo dome
The salaryman slides naked into the bath
Last night’s hangover almost gone now
The young man contemplates the horror of existence
The sumo wrestler is calling his father
Who recently became sick and will soon die
The novelist stands vacant at her desk by the window
The streetlight flickering behind the rain-blown tree
The bartender is pouring the cold beer
The taxi driver waits patiently at the lights
The mistress raises the whip for the first time
Having recently bought it in London
The shop assistant fixes her smile
The priest rings the funeral bell 
The assistive technology students click 
Bump through the corridors and up and down the stairwell
The waitress welcomes the customer in from the rain
The station master dispatches the train
While the foreigner sits next to an empty seat again
The teacher points to an example
And the pupils raise their heads
The oldest son is feeling a twinge of pain in his back
The loyal daughter hides her sorrow at the wedding
The movie ends 
Life goes on
The city is a kingdom of moments
Life a momentary kingdom
Vast and anonymous 
Here pain rhymes with fantastic times


(xx)

The crane fountain in Hibiya park
Means nothing without language
But without a word
Returning to her nested home 
Wedged somewhere in a nook
Amongst a sanctuary of nests
Safely unlabelled and hard to find
The osteoporitic bird woman understands 
The silence of her being echoed in the city
As medieval as the crows that look down on her
And on us
She has not forgotten what it means
Though she has perhaps become forgotten
She has learned neither to resist 
Or acquiesce to time’s requests
She is its witness
She is a timepiece 
A clock heard in the distance
In the timeless morning sun
Hands moving in inevitable gesture
Going where they came from


(xxi)

Another Tokyo morning
And as schools become nursing homes
Metropolitan mothers ride chariots
Carrying unknown children into a virgin future
Tough beauties with pearls
Need no validation through recognition or past glories 
Their daily glamour is self-justifying 
The morning express black storm of their hair
Controlled beauty raising an elemental flag
Turning a quotidian journey into extraordinary moments
To be treasured for their unique alchemy
Infusing poetry in the routine
As much as the street signs and road markings
The colour of the traffic lights and the crossing sounds
Poetry is the fabric of this city
A city that distills beauty from nature
Van Gogh with blue eyes and blossom-tinted glasses
Proclaimed that people here live in nature
As though they themselves were flowers
The woodcut myth of Japonisme
The simplification of the ungraspably actual
Blooming here they cannot flee their modern roots
Like the Europeans who flee when times get shaky
They are just daily people like you and me
Like them and him
And everyone who breathed for awhile 
Before sinking in the sea unseen without a trace
So it is each day I look to the everyday sky
To see the chariots of the sun go by
The eastern light glorious behind them
So they inspire my waking dream
As my ship sails forth on new unseen sea
For they have become the vessel of my dreaming


(xxii)

Above the scented park by Komazawa stadium
Is an unlimited expanse of holiday blue 
There is not a cloud in the sky
Before the reflowering
There were no blue skies in Tokyo
No satellites to be seen
Things were rough coarse harsh and dirty
From firebomb to building site
Desperately hanging on after the collapse
The bump of discontinuity almost negotiated
Still inhabited by hungry ghosts
But unrecognisable
Synthesised ancient modernity was finding its feet
Like a new-born deer in a forest
Or a robot on the ice
Inside the paper walls
Beside the rice
Beneath the cotton
In the heat of survival
From the faint blood of millions in the night
A single unified heartbeat almost imperceptible
Only just noticeable on the ticking vein in a small child’s neck
Life’s satellite
Pulsing into space the silent necessity 
Never give up
Do your best
Be patient
Persevere


(xxiii)

I too travel in the realms of gold
See gold and silver stored like rice
In the palaces of Ginza and elsewhere
Where entwined big business
Makes a mockery of justice truth and loyalty
In mercurial lies
As it always does
Money towers tower
Proclaiming height as power
The once celestial reach of the pagoda
Dwarfed in time by rakes of greed
Women in Parisian gowns
Antartic ice in whisky sours
Highballs drunk with gold
Japan Inc.on the town
Money flowed like silk roads
Kimono fortunes to be made
A crystal bubble 
Begetting a crystal lifestyle
Until it shattered
And a fragile people woke up 
To see the old path vanishing 
Melting like a shadow in the sun
Sunrise on san chome would never be the same again


(xiv)

In the February morning chill
In the shadow of the Docomo tower
Beneath a day moon
The National Noh Theatre is silent
Separated by transmission and relevance
And the artifice of eternity
The deeper truths are not for everyone
Some see only surface in the mask
Their own face there on the screen
While themselves unseeing
New worlds die
Old worlds freshly birth
As we are used up by the newborn city air 
The masks’ breath clouding
Like horses in dawn’s forgotten field


(xxv)

It will be at the port through a window 
Where the boundless ozone sea breezes rush and whip
Past the glistening fish market
On the monorail nearby the Statue of Liberty
From Odaiba enveloped in distance
The Fuji orb gleamed in the sun
In the autumnal spring
As below the Rainbow Bridge
Like a restless crowd
The coastal water moves in impermanent glory
Its tender violence
Peaceful and wild
Unfeeling nature
Flows around these naked islands
The experience and the idea
In sensuous reality
Anchored in the gurgle suck and slap
Of silent silken water
Of that which moves
Against that which stands
In directions the compass nor the algorithm can plan
East in South in North in West
In East in North in South  
In momentary infinity we do not move 
But cross the river of forgetting
Into the open sea
Startlingly correspondent
Brother and sister lovers
Spilling seed upon the spray
The timeless rapture of the choir becoming
Meaning in music without meaning
That has no ending or beginning
That is the song that it is singing


(xxvi)

I am inside a giant’s heart 
On the 53rd floor of the Mori tower
I cannot see you in the bloody chamber
There is no longer any cynosure
Nor body to put things in their place
Wombing between language and sensation we are fluid life 
Amniotic riverside beggars in the presence of absence
In brief transit through red rich emptiness
Past or future irrelevant in the blood-filled now
We move through ghosts 
In silence in a blackened room
Knocked-over chairs and lipsticked glasses
Something happened here 
Where something is now happening
The charred piano is played by no-one
With unfelt touch and untouched feeling
Chamber music from the mind of an unheard of genius
Profoundly moving and timelessly sad though never here
Its heartbreaking silence overwhelming
Outside Roppongi is a silver day
Where the humdrum inches in blind process
Too misty to see the dividing masses in winter woollens
The Skytree gleaming in the sun
The fly landing on the nose of a baby in Akebonobashi
The rainwashed streets with the city trees attending
Here in the sky it’s too high to hear dusk chiming on earth
The sound of the monorail spiralling 
The nearby firetrucks sirening politely
As they negotiate junctions
Or the ships disturbing the water in Tokyo Bay
The random wonder of mundane beauty
Is enveloped in face to face distance
Absented by a silver wall
Inside we are porcupines keeping warm together 
Individual without causing offence
What we don’t know about each other
We have no need to know
Distant enough not to damage through indifference
Otherness is understood
Cool sociability recognising everyone’s uniqueness
The other’s unknowable interiority and depth
Gently we cohere in oceanic stillness
Deep-sea diving in serene chambers
Outside darkness fell unnoticed
And the world changed in countless chaotic ways
The present’s vital impulse to break free from itself
Elastically resisting encrustation in creative evolution
Life incessantly becoming more than we ever anticipate
I swim into the deepest gallery
Towards the earthquake mirror
Gilt framed and imperial in an empty room
Symmetrically sited between two Louis XV chairs
The silvered glass is gone but the golden frame remains
Calm elegance surrounding the scarred disrupted wall
A frozen memory of the vibration we move to
The undulating flaw that makes life start and end
I look for myself in the crack’d space
A spectator to our laughable vanity
But there is no longer any sign of life
Once on a morning train near Tama Plaza
I saw a group of uniformed schoolkids
Effervescing like lemonade
When the train suddenly jolted
Synchronised they shunted as one
Like drops of water on a shaky surface banged
Maintaining their precise correspondence
In sudden shock and easy laughter
Correspondingly we all must move
Untethered to each other wander forth
To disappear and be irretrievably reborn 
In the brightness of children
Wherein we rebehold the stars


(xxvii)

On Nihonbashi bridge
Stupidly umbrellaless
In sheets of rain and time
I am saturated by the watery Saturday city
The cityriver veins spread out unseen below
Torrential ventricals
Waterways 
Rushing here and there
Under time and concrete
Is this the past or the future
The moment’s movement too close for history
No longer cloud-hidden
Immediacy logic overflows
In rivulets of everything becoming everything else
Inside the flow of encrypted movement
I swirl within the water’s motion
Seeing the sounds splash
Feeling colours made from change
Crystalline windows to the past
Misty apertures to visions of the future 
Hex-coded and shifting
Scale colour texture form and time
The language of things themselves
Inexplicable but irresistible 
Indifferently defiant
Pouring through me incessantly
Eratosthenes may calculate and calculate well
Yearning to understand the complexities of the world
But there is no calculus for sensation’s tidings
Sense drowned in sound
Canals submerged in bubbling chance
In every corner of this island chain
The sea breaks inevitably on the rocks 
The surf hissing fizzling scintillatingly gasping on the sand
Grains of sand that once were mountains
The ocean drenches everything in its wake
Waking everything on its autotelic shore


(xxviii)

Bamboo and mulberry surrounding
In the tea hour I take off my watch
Time-stopped 
Space-absent moment eternity
Attached lightly to the soil
Inhabiting now
Interlocking mind and beam
Without intelligence
Like a work of art
Secret geometry is seized
There are wires in the flowers
But this is no machine for living
This is living
Collapsing mansions of millions of years
Into a paper house


(xxix)

In Oji at midnight in the Janus moment 
The foxes move in ancient ways
Below the towering neon branches
Of the city’s electric mountains
Powered by time before electricity
Lit by the life-force
They proceed towards the shrine
While behind an antique fan
As captivating as a child
An old local Showa lady  
Who has never been to Shibuya 
Asks 
As if we are travellers from another world
What is it like there


(xxx)

Like fireworks we cannot hear but see
Fireworks we cannot see but hear
Or fireworks we cannot hear or see
Like the sound of them in the Ryogoku sky
Reaching us asynchronously lagged in woodblock ink 
Or the absent heat of the moon at night
The long-dead man that we admire
Whose still-point voice seems to capture
All the world’s pain and rapture
The woman we desire 
In Asuka’s otherworldly beauty captured
Untouched fire trapped in porcelain 
Everything that is within
Everything a vision offers
Or an illusion
Or an inspiration suggests
Is not the vessel but the surrounding 
It is not the house’s walls
But the emptiness of its halls resounding
The space between the flowers
The space that lies around us
It is in the sunlight coming in
Through the door of the deserted home
Virgin energy brimful of the possible
Promise yet to be fulfilled
The space upon the canvas or the bamboo screen
The silence in the music or the scene
What the onnagata doesn’t say or do
That which we might deem lost
But is never lost 
Is always there and always missing 
Invisible aesthetic
In unseen beauty and senseless sensation 
Indivisible like life itself invisibly ineluctable
Even nothing is something


(xxi)

This place is a garden
A rushing river
A limitless rural metropolis
Civilisation camped on a living creature
And rivers do not age 
But are instantly renewed
Movement is how they are defined
Citizens we flow as tributaries
Fall as rain upon its buildings
Become snow which makes the streets a melting dream
This place took me like all the rest
Into the current of its inevitability
Koi in rain drains
Inhabiting the same impermanence 
Where self-loss dives to be self-born
In an uncontrolled overgrown jungle
I stand in a clearing after snowfall 
And watch reflections of trees in water
Fresh flakes of thought like leaves upon it
Devoid of future intention
The cars hissing by
Sleet fleeting on my eyelashes
White thoughts on a white page
Here by Edo castle
This place which is now and not now
Annihilates all that’s made
To a white thought on a whiter page


(xxxii)

The casually wealthy greying handsome man
On the quiet Aoyama street
Has been to Europe
Knows how to dress 
And has the means to do both
He knows the worth of his startling country
Its allure and its limitations
He is a self-actualised individual
He has mastered the schwa
As we both wait in silence at the crossing
We both recognise we are part of something bigger
And we both respect this
We are committed to the process 
A process that surrounds us like the Tokyo air
Something greater than individuality
Surrender to some kind of civic religion
But for me waiting is a choice
Him tethered to the riceborn feudal gyre


(xxxiii)

It is April
The coach arrives first 
On his tourer
Then the coaches of his train
Arrive with purpose
Nine glistening wine-red retrofuture-helmeted young boys
With backpacks and baseball bats
Accordian into place in picture-book colours
And I am transported
Into a cartoon world of benign human beauty
As the daily universe goes about its business
Nature’s air surrounding 
Entering everything


(xxxiv)

On top of that tall building
It catches the eye
Peeking out from behind the jumbotron
Now showing a film warning of terrorists
A giant holographic cat in Shinjuku 
Irritably meowing at a passing crow 
As it flies through the Shinjuku canyons
It is a black eagle drawn by Hiroshige
Bombardment of sound everywhere 
Saunterers and strollers and rushers
Girls holding hands
Black leather hot pants
A young man smoking in the street in selfish defiance
All watched by them
The blacksilent crows 
Perched imperiously above
The kites are gone but they remain
From Roppongi to the nightingale valley
Unnoticed they fly
Have always flown
Through fire and earthcrack
Isolation and war 
Basho and Hachiko
Serin and sakura
Isolation and occupation
Woodblocks and sun tribes
Assassination and coup d’etat
Chaplin and Einstein
Dog shoguns and ronin
Mobos and mogas
Bubbles and blackships
Harvest and famine
Transistors and samurai
Humiliation triumph ascent and decline
Above the death of the floating world
The crows have flown 
Cawing high above Yoshiwara
Just as they call out in Kudanshita today
High in the sky above the Yasukuni shrine
It’s nothing you can taste or smell
But in life’s deeply ordered chaos
Reality has a way of making itself known
Hypostasis in the bitter caw of a crow


(xxxv)

Tokyo Cubic Garden
Underneath the trees they approach
From all directions 
Called by a silent bell
Entering religiously as if a cathedral
Beneath the monumental commercial columns
The morning building shadow’s cool 
Is a mountain pool
The facade an immaculate mirror
Reflecting the luscious ice-cream clouds above
Set in transparent life-affirming blue 
Immense walls of alpine crystal beauty
Natural heaven here on earth in Toyosu
Edged to the north by a black rainslicked wooden walkway
There is no border between the concrete and the forest 
The glass and the river 
The chrome and the silver fish
The landscaped streets and buildings
Seen from dizzying tower heights
Are as perfect as an architectural model
Using the sea as a drawing board
All this was drawn from water and vision
Finance and ambition
Maybe greed
From the mountain air of imagination
Cloudless and invigorating
A dream of the future now


(xxxvi)

For example
The hunter’s bullet and the hunted prey
This is no longer this
And that is no longer that
They are both things simultaneously
There is no such thing as an atom 
That isn’t part of a process
There is no such thing as an autonomous person
Connected to village family dead parents and ancestors
But there are no inevitable rules of the stars
Everything bends and depends
Nothing is absolute
At the centre of all relationships
Absolutely
There is nothing
Nothing is more real than nothing
There is no still centre of the spinning world
There is being
Evaporating over our heads 
Like the cooling mist of the street arcades
And there is nothingness
In the damp cracks of the city
And in the bright Ueno sunshine
The changing same goes unnoticed 
You and I intermixed
We are the numberless leaves that give the tree its beauty
The discarded shoes that walked the summer streets
Used and fused together by life
If not there is no life to celebrate
For a ceremony with one person is meaningless


(xxxvii)

I am dead now
But it is me
Under this cerulean sky
On Tuesday afternoon in the universe
Above a ramen shop at Sensou-ji
I am that man in that old photograph
His back to me
Pushing his bicycle away from the shrine
A wanderer below the sea of mists
I cycled the curve of time to get here
By the edge of the Sumida
Past the Asahi building
So bizarrely appropriate for an oceanic city
Arrived to find busy Edo commerce 
Barnacling tightly to the humpback whale
The shrine and the brothel side by side
Amongst the boots and thighs 
Plaid kimono and berets
Tied men invisible in black suits
Even the perfect sky 
The profusion of colour and noise
The sake the incense the dango and the masks
Asakusa nostalgia and the goddess of mercy
Can’t deny we are really just the sun shining
The river flowing
The cooling metro breezes blowing
The bicycle wheel turning
No more no less
Unexceptional people
Unexceptional miracles
Undivided


(xxxviii)

Every language carries a culture
English says you can be anything
Japanese says you can be Japanese
In a reception room at the Spanish Embassy
There were lots of people talking
In different languages talk was the lingua franca
The talk was of cultural exchange and gender fluidity
Among Western bores with younger trophy wives
I talked to a beautiful Japanese dancer 
A dancer who couldn’t dance anymore
Who lives in a gilded cage in Roppongi
Trained by an acolyte of Martha Graham 
Married to one of the bald rich
She made me think of her idol’s humble beginnings
Her American energy and her genius
Her sense of wonder joy and curiosity
How she believed like Baudelaire
That it is the flaw that creates the beauty
Things made more beautiful and mysterious 
By what is left out unsaid and uncontrolled
One part always incomplete aching for the other
That enables a sense of being
Makes dance and art like life an act of becoming
We talked about Noguchi
How he sought the world
Within the limits of a single sculpture 
Concrete nature precariously balanced in time
The composition and balance of space
For him the drama and essence of life
The closeness of earth and wood
Interstellar space nature…
Talk talk talk 
Talk talk talk talk talk
In English or Japanese
How talk unites us but divides us from life
Born to the instant we live and die in silent time
Constantly rediscovering ourselves in that focused instant
The very quickening now of our lives
Where ancestral footsteps
Born and reborn in us
Glimmer silently like stars in uncertain poetry and motion
Beyond language
Forever in the now
Like stone or the flames of wooden cities burning


(xxxix)

A sliver of moon in the eveningblue sky
Perceptibly waxing before my very eyes
Embryonic
Birthing the night
On the foreground rooftops
The planet earth electric colours
To the south the hypodermic Skytree
Under my skin injects some kind of heaven
The graduated sunset skyline
Makes me think of those at sea
Trawling the waterways of this water empire
And those on the rim of the world
Before nautical dawn and after nautical dusk
Sailors cannot navigate horizonless
And in these magic hours
Amidst true dawns and false dawns
Empires of light
Far flung paradises
First light illuminating virgin beauty
Witnessed only by satellites
In evening twilight
Morning twilight
The kingdom of crepuscular animals
Vespertine flowers blooming in a moth-pollinated world
Enchanted islandhood
Moments of transition
There is crepuscular beauty
Beautiful and unstable and self-redeeming
Night music from an eyeless sun
Where the dream as long as it is dreamt is real
Here we are never on our own
But sail on waves from the same ocean as Atlantis
Enlightened undestroyed by the siren song
In this light we are alive
Each night I keep a vigil in the dark
And light two candles 
One for the living and one for the dead
Appreciating darkness
For without darkness there is no dawn
Still darkness needs a vigil
It is too easy to miss the dawn
To be silently consumed by the cold air
To gutter irretrievably 
Tonight I see the soul of the world in the Adachi sky 
As it signals the presence of the absent
I see the morning sky in this evening sky
Evanescent beauty on the shore of memory
Night falling like light on the shore of nothingness


(xl)

On the evening of the double seventh
At Zoujou-ji
A heavenly river of lanterns
Pours lava down the steps of the temple
In the summer dusking sky
Altair and Vega meet at last
Night has come up with the furniture of stars 
To comfort us with shadow
And looking to the stars
The furniture of stars does comfort us somehow
The trials of the world forgotten
In this human-made moment
Weaver and cowherd
Salaryman office lady and student
Young children families and ordinary couples
Those in wheelchairs pushchairs or gerontian attire
Are woven together on the loom of beauty
On the flickering dream of constancy
In glowing threads of glimmering desire
Love manifest in the movement of stars
It is Tanabata
Tonight there is no need to herd the magpie or the sparrow
The pure clear sky is the only bridge we need
To float our hopes downstream 
Whether in rising sun or sunsetting world
Beneath dying planets or under falling rain
In pleasure or in pain
When these candles’ lives are bought by flame
As they must be 
As in time we must be
Tomorrow we will still flicker on
Forgotten paper fluttering in the wind
Unread by a roaring world 
Once again too busy to love


(xli)

I look up 
To see amidst the convergence of trajectories
Mathematical ratios of mass and space
In epic scale like a scene from Metropolis 
In vivid cool-shadowed summer colours
A shinkansen unobtrusively slicing 
On elevated rails like a silent river 
Through the heart of Hibiya Midtown
Backdropped by the impossible 
Buildings beyond pyramid dreams
Framed by others higher
Passing over the heads of others still
In mute streamlined beauty
Blue and cream silken modernity 
It is a kingfisher catching fire
Free from meaning or intending
Blue skies above presiding
And in this moment all of time
And in this moment null of time
And in this moment nothing else but this
Overflowing only with itself
It is music rather than logic
I capture its immeasurable electron course
Like a painting captures feeling 
For we can never truly depict the present
While living in the same dancing moment
Dancing in the arms of fleeting life
Startled and startling in the elan vital


(xlii)

The perfection of the evening air
In the pre-typhoon breeze
In it I am enveloped 
In the liquid embrace of unconscious oceanic balm
The glow of the dynamo on my black bicycle
Mechanically electrically magically miraculous
Humbly moving through the marine air 
On the wetted black mirror streets
The body conquering the mind
Moments flowing through veins of modest joy
The greenery
The silent buildings
The gentle beauty
Unobserved and never to be seen again actuality 
Anonymous wonder
These peaceful streets
This timeless night
Just being 
Alive
I too was once in Arcadia


(xliii)

No summer sirens to be heard
Phased out by mountain silence 
In the hot canyon of the street
Clean beauty
Summer robed
Unmediated being
Inhabitant of now and not now
A yukata dream
She is a tranquil mirage
A cool apparition
In cream elegance
Her abundant obi
Wrapped around her
As a ribbon round a bouquet
She is the space between the flowers
Her localised reality
Existing in another time it seemed
Unassumingly elegant
Modest and dignified
Graphically feminine
Poised and graceful
Perfect in brushless realism
This was the vision I saw today
But here in Tokyo
Such visions are reality


(xliv)

Summer sirens in the summer heat
Everyday ecstasy in the street
Life meets death in daylight 
As buses pass in Kita-Senju
In the shadows of a basement restaurant
A funeral party including 
A tall and fine funereal young woman
Her black height light eclipsing
Chat prosaically
As if death was an everyday occurrence
Which of course it is
She says nothing
She is death as life
Mystery as meaning
Absence as presence 
Sorrow as pulchritude
The passivity of her face
Vacant as an empty mirror
Silently expresses nothing but what is
For there is really nothing to express
As the coffee is served 
It is proudly revealed she is wearing
Her dead grandmother’s pearls
Which have in turn been handed down 
Set against the black universe of her clothes
They are an ordered archipelago of planets
Once triumphantly brought to sunlight 
By smiling ama sea women in Mie
In defiant formation they richly endure
From generation to generation
Defeating darkness through memory and ritual
Resisting gravity in orbits of beauty
It is then that she begins to cry


(xlv)

I love the Tokyo rain
As it turns the sky to silver
It is the rainy season now
Humid hot but a price worth paying
As I watch Tokyo Story 
Here in the same city on this rainy night
Silver halide rain on celluloid 
Pours through the air as timeless duality
Between the silver city and the silver screen
Carrying uncertainty and dreams
What rains have poured between then and now
Showa rain
Heisei rain
Reiwa rain
Billions of trillions of unknowable raindrops
Hitting nameless discrete forgotten targets
A falling ocean
Instants lost in the vanishing
Clock ticks and breaths
Births and deaths
It is always the rainy season somewhere 
Tonight on the screen 
Then and now
Time and space between
Setsuko Hara is the sun
Not Juliet nor Amaterasu
Too modest to be heroine or goddess
She is beautiful beyond desire
And powerful beyond power
Human nobility in a working girl
Tonight at the Obon celebration 
At the Yasukuni Shrine
30,000 lanterns were extinguished by rainy circumstance
All the drops of rain
All the drops of rain
Will the rain ever stop
Just as rain falls in London or Paris
So it falls here 
Like time
Unthinking
Unmoved by the Tokyo story
Unmoved by the human trial
Inexplicably dreadful  
Irresistibly beautiful


(xlvi)

Autumn is the springtime of big cities
A quicker wit than mine said this
A New Yorker
And I a Tokyoite agree
First seen by Baudelaire and Manet
The city is the fountainhead
And though the water from the tap is getting colder
As summer’s heat departs with summer perfume in the park
Lush green cool flattened grass
Flattened by heat and desire
Gives way to dark
Beside the momiji’s  fire
The heart becomes warmer
With memories of beauty
In September they will sprout like buds
In October unfurl and blossom
In November’s dark they will glow like embers
Then exist as ash as if they were never there
Emotions solid at first glance
Will turn to liquid
Then to air
Then to nothing that can be remembered
The last ember blacks and it is dark now
The mathematics of impermanence
Run their course
Soon it will be springtime again


(xlvii)

The time was now
By the Kyobashi metro
The monumental colossi stand empty
Banks guarded by ranks of gingko trees
Hushing the business district
Leaves like piles of gold 
Enrich the Sunday streets
Brimful of mute energy
The city becomes the space between breaths
The correct combination for the vault clicks
In oxygenated vacuum
Negative space resonating at the zero crossing
In eigentones of fresh December air
Balances the books of the soul
With mountain lake serenity
With intoxicating clarity
Beneath forever blue skies
In symmetric depth
Mirrors this anonymous moment
In meres of metropolitan glass
The details of a changing scene
Though silence has invaded
And the workers have fled 
There is what people call a man 
And what people call a woman
Painted in the scintillating winter light
But there is no duality 
Neither mystical trinity
Only the ineffable reality of  presence
Life unified 
Beyond profit and loss
Prudent or reckless philosophy
Pygmy cogitation or extraordinary insight
There is no Byzantium
There are no Forms
The universe is not my mind
And my mind is not the universe
There is only this
This when the time will be now


(xlviii)

Tricked by life into believing it was possible
That there is a world beyond
Some prevail and others fail
Our younger feelings
Can't be felt later in the years perhaps
Their anaesthetic charm cut out of us
By a daily knife
But when one is born in life
Birthed by wonder
Every feeling is firstfelt
Scalpel subtle
Without a god
Truth is plainly revealed
And so I felt when I saw this marvellous city
There are millions waiting to take your place it said
The air you breathe
The food you eat
The space you feel
The time you have
Will you give it up so easily
Like an old foolish king
My friends are rotting in the earth
While here in my hand I hold
A picture of tomorrow today
I have learned not to expect a reward
But tell me I am not a lucky man
They have gone on ahead
To set my place and make my bed
How nice to end up somewhere
Where you are known and loved
To return like a long lost child
To laugh and sing and dance again
In perfect death
Still for now I wander a stranger 
In imperfect life
Pour out of me
River of life
Joy of life
Acceptance of life
Foolish wine of life
Caught in wond’rous elevation
On the cusp of chance and intention
Free from fear’s awful wings
No-one knows me and no-one cares
It is the burning 
Not what burns
It is the living
Not who lives
I stand indistinguishable 
All my life and times in me
Framed in unique anonymity
Such liberation
To be free humble and alone
Buried in the moment
Walking in newborn sunshine I am disappeared
I chase after rabbits on this mountain
I fish for minnows in this river
The passing moment my constant companion
My newest friend
Mindless
Symphonic
Furusato




Above 
So far above
And further than that
Beyond perspective in fact
The freezing sky
Dancing eyes unblink there
Pouring forth lightyears of hope
Tearing the fabric of now
Like an infinite riptide
While deep below the surface
Of this depth-scraping
Death-defying ocean city
I am a wave of my own becoming

​

Al Ningen comes from the city of Glasgow in Scotland. He is a city lover, who has lived and worked in London, Dublin, Paris, Barcelona, Los Angeles and Kuala Lumpur. He now lives in Tokyo which he considers ‘home’. Previously he has worked in television, journalism and the music industry. He is currently working on his first novel.

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