Tokyo: Leave to Remain

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by C.E.J. Simons

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At Sunshine Town, Tōyōchō, in heavy rain,
they turned my application down again.

 

Everything they had wanted to know
was written down too long ago

 

and lost now. I left. I’ll no more blame
those bureaucrats than this incessant rain.

 

I rode the emptying Tōzai Line
back to the hustle of this byzantine

 

city centre, back to my neighbourhood
where, it seems, I’d settled down for good

 

thinking this year will be the last—
thinking I could keep living in the past

 

like a ghost who doesn’t realise he’s dead.
I press my fingers against my forehead—

 

solid. I guess it’s time, then, to apply
for some kind of solidity—

 

but all the documents are lost,
or never were, and now, to count the cost

 

of realising we—
all being where we shouldn’t be—

 

are ‘permanent’ as a last resort
(becoming permanent without much effort),

 

I should do something to define
my edges. Now’s your time to shine,

 

my mother would say, a silhouette
against the electric oubliette

 

of her ambition. But I would burn
all record of me, if I could learn

 

how to make a solid outline
of a self I felt was mine.

 

We gotta shine, oh yeah, we gotta shine—
shine like a whitened skull and spine,

 

and shine more brightly each time we’re turned down
by the bureaucrats of Sunshine Town.