Hello everyone. How the hell are ya? It’s a Friday night in Arizona and the cold is like a villain, riding through the town on its stolen horse. Here are the rest of my haikus.
Kyoto
Satori points far away.
The finger is no moon, really.
You are a person.
Satori is a word in Japanese Buddhism, meaning “awakening.” The goal of Zen is to produce enlightenment by forgoing logic. Zen has invented means for doing this. You may have heard of some, like the koans. An example: “A flag is waving in the wind. Which is moving–the flag or the wind?” If you fail to answer this question in more than 2.1 seconds, the master will slam his hand on the floor. You have failed. “Tell me what Zen is in one word or I will kill this cat!”
The cat was killed.
Another is about a Zen master pointing at the moon. He cut his finger off and then pointed at the moon, again. Just because there is no finger does not mean it fails to point at the moon. This is the way Japanese Zen logic works. But forging an a-logic, subverted mind, killing cats in the name of Buddha, etc. If water is not aware of wind, the wave will fear its own death. Are you starting to get this? Good.
Osaka
We old lovers pray
delicious hearts arrive soon.
Markets near the Shinkansen.
I loomed on the topic of love over octopus tentacles and the burn of neon. My Western friends Jesse and Nile would say a word about old lovers, like Miharu in the Chuo Ward of Tokyo, or a bonnie lass back in Dublin. We came so near to falling in love with three Osaka girls. We walked through markets in search of affordable eats, like ramen & okinomiyaki.
Kobe
Water falls down hill
to dresses, and restaurants.
You turn out lights early.
Kobe Bryant is a younger sister of Osaka. Only 40 minutes pressed between the constant apartments of Osaka on a train and you are all at once in Kobe. The ocean is right there and the prices are lower for fish, at least by a few 100 yen.
One day I was lost on the mountainside by Kobe and found myself at the foot of a waterfall. 3 retired Japanese women spotted me in the wood, and gave me pressed shrimp crackers. This is dried shrimp pressed into a thin salt wafer (3). Dusk caught me like a Disney character (most likely a male Pocahontas) with a smile on my face crossing the wet bamboo bridge and along the damp wood path into the light of Kobe. As I walked on foot through forest and then the urban glitter, I couldn’t help notice the dearth of each in the other.
Hiroshima
Crying in the maples
of old town Hiroshima,
the young birds are black.
An excerpt from my journals:
Hiroshima 1 December
Free of the burden of latitudes, I roamed to Hiroshima. The earth is scarred not. The people, scarred not. The ancestry is scarred, and the memory, like ghosts, endures only if you let it. You cast ghosts out like rocks from a glass house.
Hiroshima is heavy. Laden. The reminder is an elusive and almost omnipotent one. I can spot it in my head, a grandfather’s vein, and the streetcar along the bluing rivers. The Atomic bomb dome looms like your parents further down the road, so distant yet intimate and related to you through blood. My relation–the one who draws blood–makes the hospitality of Hiroshimites all the more repentant and karmically perfect, like a pruned branch resigned to transform into the pages of a long and trying story.
Harajuku
“We weave your yearning.
You perceive our qualities.”
– note from your angels
There is a lot of long winded talk in the New Age community of guardian angels guiding every human on earth through the trails and travails of modern life in an effort to keep us aiming for the karmic completion and spiritual union with source that infinite religions around the world claim is possible. The idea is your angels send you messages in all forms meaningful to you. This can be numbers, song lyrics, a sign along the road, a quote you see online, auspicious opportunities. I was deliberately looking for examples of an angel speaking to me and glanced on a business sign from the 2nd floor window of a cafe in Harajuku. This appeared as I was writing haiku. It fit the 5/7 scheme I needed. “Note from your angels” was 5 also. This haiku was the note I ended up with. No joke.
Shinagawa
Love is but a pond
on which my leaves make ripples.
Shipwrecks deeper down.
So my Japanese adventures came to a close as they began, in the labyrinth of Tokyo. Tokyo is a magical land that can both frustrate and enthrall you at once. It is like summer and winter, dusk and dawn, a mean woman and a kind man. No doubt in my mind it is a city worth a visit or two or three or five. Countless memories here in the most challenging year I have lived, and for this, Japan leaves an irreparable mark on my heart as a place of healing and bad news, of catharsis and escape, of somehow coming home in a far away place. Maybe in a past life, maybe a soulmate I didn’t end up meeting. In any case, I commend your urges to go. It is beautiful.
what we are stepping into 