Without a Job

I don't have a job. I was smoking a lot, walking to the edge of the retaining wall above the beauty parlor with a coffee and the cigarette, watching people in cars. I wrote songs there, quite sure I didn't want a job.

Slowly my nerves all softened and I fell further out of step with everyone who was dressed for success. I didn't look at them the same way, if at all.

Apathy has swallowed me. When I saw some nipple-shaped, light-pink gummy candies in the 7-11, I went ahead and mentioned to the cashier that they reminded me of nipples. He scowled and took my money.

Differences not loved

A guy and a girl were noiselessly feeling each other up and down at a cafe table next to which my student and I were having a lesson when the shoe slid off my foot.

The student told me a hot girl shouldn't wear a sock with a hole in it. I told him he shouldn't wear a suit and tie if he liked so much the feeling of freedom he gets from taking a shit in the woods, something he'd been going on and on about earlier. If only I could smack some sense into him.

Passively, I poured the remains of my tea onto the table, planning to slurp it up. He poured the rest of his latte into mine and the liquids mixed. He acted as though he found it sexy that they were mixing. I gagged silently. He put his fingers into the mixture and then licked them.

He said he wasn't sure if he'd have time for a lesson next week. I said OK.

Clairvoyant Kotaro

When Kotaro told me his Bose speakers used to talk to him late at night, I knew our friendship would last.

"Kotaro, what are you doing?" the speakers would say.

"I'm just making curry," he would reply to them.

He is pale and thin but always knows which cafes serve good desserts. He used to order two, then eat them both himself.

Tokyo is my dearest friend. She is nameless in street and sliding in door. She screams without speaking and will for ever more.

Love

I had entire solar systems in my head today, spinning stale pincushions and mistaken tomatoes skirted with rings of grinding notebook paper revolving around me, a solar fetus, when I stopped to notice that there were millions of copies of me everywhere, all of us quietly heaving in black. I imagined the untold horrors and ecstasies that soared through the galactic spaces inside each of us. How we pass lithely by one another and exist quietly together while straining to hold up the ever-heavier worlds inside our beings. I watched all of us, carrying on in infinite combinations of what were the same notes played in varying hues on different instruments and barely perceptibly, I squeaked and I droned.

And lustily sighing I worshiped whatever was swirling primordially around me wearing black headphones and blinking like paintings, or standing stoically in long black coats reading soft-cover books curled back upon themselves.

I don't mean to say that any of them have anything in common with me. I am a foreigner.

I only mean that it's easy for me to feel an all-awakening, metal clanging on a thousand flag poles, wind sweeping across golden prairies, jump off a cliff because Jenny did LOVE for quiet strangers.

I regret that I never went with you to South Dakota.

Chandeliers

Erection エレクション and Election 選挙

On the other side of the world, we were stark and austere as ever, our socks pulled up higher and higher still. There had been a monumental erection back home, and we knew we were missing something good.

We went out searching for it in an overtrumped Parisian nightclub. The winner of the erection (waving) and the loser of it (coughing) were coloring the walls as projections. We got ready to feel free and brave.

But who are you? Near the bar, a bully from New York was squinting out at me from behind all the white skin that puffed forward around his eyes. His mouth was moving quickly and it asked me who I was again and then mimicked my name, smiling hugely like something was funny. In his paw was a mobile phone containing a photo he'd just taken of David Hasselhoff.

David's left the club, they said. Too many people had been fighting over a chance to take his picture.

I went outside and saw him standing on the blue overpass with his chin on the railing, looking down at the river of cars passing under him.

When I got home my roommates were watching the tea pot boil. It was starting to make ticking noises but the water wasn't moving yet.

We're all the results of elections.

How to be Rich / How to Act Like a Bear

Eat something that is still twitching.

Grateful for the experience, humbled by my host's profound material wealth, I thought I was going to throw up as the still-dying body of a shrimp spasmed its way around my teeth. Dodging for a safe escape it burrowed its way into my esophagus and into the pit of my stomach where I've been pregnant with it ever since.

Elaborate Plate 女体盛り

Are her breasts real? Minnesota Ryan asks hypothetically.

Don't question it, I reply, they're performing beautifully! Pointing upward and multiplying in tongue-colored fleshes of various market-fresh animals, the breasts have supplied us with a party's worth of conversation as well as dinner.

In a glimmer of Midwestern friendliness, I try to feed a piece to the girl to whom we owe this bounty but she politely refuses. Right, that would be strange. I go back to talking to Ryan, who has just dripped soy sauce onto her wrist.

This is incredible, we marvel, Her children are going to grow up eating like this every day.

What were you raised on? I ask my countryman.

Spam hot dish. You know, with the macaroni?

Yeah, I know. Did you ever have an Eat-Spam-Hot-Dish-Off-A-Naked-Woman's-Body party?

Naw.

Me neither.

We share a smile, a common story. A heritage.

Ping Pong

I'm catching ping pong balls all day and throwing them back with check marks and teardrops on them, both going unnoticed when a little stone [a boulder] hurtles in from the unknown and, shredding through the waistband of my stupid skirt and tights, manages to scrape the base of my lungs and leave a gasping crater the size of a young man's fiery cranium in the middle of me. Where my intestines used to be, I could say, but that's not the worst of it: I am reduced to pulmonary ash on the very week that I'm scheduled to give blood.