GREEN STEAM

Into your antechambers and train compartments

Green steam pours. (Points change, sidings, terminus)

Zhou began to wonder if it was only by chance

He was still in our darkened world still invisible

Amongst the living. The star catalogue, cloud of

Most pleasant rain, when the lift passes from

The floor above, green steam flowing, cool

Lemonade being poured, working on people,

A ray out of a bottle. But Zhou saw before him

Barren and dangerous skies stretched over

An empty plain for several thousand li. The

Intensification of brilliance keeping the angles

Sharp as the stripes composed of green steam, paradise

Days and the crimson lotus of the summer pond.

MANY PATHS

Hermes in the park; now she´s thinking about that again.

Change of place and alteration of bright colour;

Yves Klein blue hot shoots out of this tube brightly

 

Blowing down the atmospheres, desert a negative.

There´s no such thing as a safe place. They live in a cold fashion

They are not listening clearly to the thrum

 

From the ruined cities in deserts, and dry lakes

Along the way. Excuse me, it´s Agemaki. Would I

Mistake you for Sukeroku. Even in the dark?

 

He said: A city will never be built on this spot, alive

With radiation. No pillars towers trees gates jugs of

Wine or windows. Or fountains statues groves.

 

Just the gorgeous music boxes and the longing

For the latchless close of refrigerator doors.

IMPERIUM

There´s a man waiting outside for you,
I´ve already heard; in the light and heat
And rain. Smoke and day.

No, nothing. Why do you say that again?
War is always in the background; a substitute
Word. Later on you can perhaps imagine

The gradual obliteration of well-made
Roads; the political agent leaning out
Of the window of the northern port

Towards the common world;
La force publique burning noble
Works, still, in the night´s edge.

Really, a more imperial caprice
You can hardly imagine.

POLICE STATE

Looking through the trees at the green blue fading scene

Beyond accompanied by slight giddiness at the beauty

Of the mechanism under musical fountains and

Artificial skinny silver songbirds wrapped in their cloudy

Heaven of mother-of-pearl,  he saw all kinds of war then.

I, myself, could not imagine the manifestation of this trompe l´oeil.

Haggard with watching, he said it was like being

In a bar full of violent prostitutes killing with impunity,

Sunset´s elusive viridian ray sprouting in the sky.

Well I was quite wrong about him after all. Not a hero

But a hospital case. They took care to ensure his facial

Expression revealed nothing, as a spy, or just as observer:

Everything that should have been laid out was simply presupposed

In the Edo evening. I have no memory of this: riding always invisible.

DILETTANTE

In the yellow night; in that Edo night and he with pipe,

Yellow and blue bath robe, between the fingers;

Through the window behind him

The painting of the girl hanging

On the wall like a rifle, glints.

And also this moment and I myself.

The yellow sun rises on an age of gold,

Now the mad moon baying like an old crone,

The golden sun sets behind the hill

Beyond the streets, the leaf of the mulberry

Becomes satin in time. Dreaming of night rain

In the Ba Mountains I sweep it all up,

Things related and not. Lightning, flint lights up

These well-kept passable false paths.