Another Night in Tokyo Grey

At ten o’ clock my eyes close and the blue city appears.  

Everything you see I see from the elevated train rattling 

over our bedroom.  The cats curled at our feet, the woman 

in the row home looking up from her window 

where she sighs at the billboards of white sandy beaches.  

The people here always ask why you left California.  

Your answers are in the older part of town 

where they still make candles by hand; 

brick Colonial filled with your favorite art; 

the canals running under the streets, 

where the Italians guide the gondolas to

the spiral staircase that leads to casinos.  

You have always been impressed more by what never was 

than what is, even before Tokyo Grey, 

staring out the window, as if there 

could be something more fascinating 

than a world where we no longer exist. 

This could be from too much television, 

a distant father or not enough medication, 

but really none of this matters as long as there is here.

Here you have been murdered, 

and flew over the Tokyo sea. Tonight you find a job 

as an usher in a black and white theatre in China town. 

But at some point, a light begins to break through the blue night 

sending you scattering back towards the past

into the bedroom where you woke into this world.  

You rummage through our luggage, for a plane ticket 

that has expired, and remember everything 

that I’ve been trying to tell you, 

about the apartment, the beaches, the job that isn’t the best 

but allows the comfort you seem to want.  

It isn’t until our mother says whatever you need, whatever 

you need that we finally wake, into a marine layer dawn, 

the coffee brewing, the cats stirring by the door, 

as if there was something magnificent outside 

they couldn’t wait another second to see.

Flash Issue 11