Tokyo, roundtrip by TS Hidalgo

Tokyo, roundtrip
by
TS Hidalgo

At Christmas it's cold and time:
in a dark alley, near Shinjuku,
betting my last yens
among interpreters of Russian roulette,
defiant before the theater of the infinite,
all questioning
for a thousandth of a second:
defiant too before all logic,
before all probability,
versus all mathematics,
which is this one time defeated
(exclusive currency, suicidal roulette:
five heads to just one tail
in singular random poetry).
I walk away unhurt
and after luck
my profit is sealed,
which I will quickly have to settle
in the form of successive contempt:
of the goddess Fortuna
(we'll continue to tempt her),
of my own metabolism
(why is the hotel's bar
filled with Godzillas?),
and of good habits,
scaffold, perdition, and desire
in prepay neighborhoods,
over going from sun to supporting
(desire to be Tim Duncan).
Through Ginza, Roppongi Hills, and Omotesando
I start raining in a thousand pieces,
and through streets of pain
in worn out Metropolis,
these my blindfolded eyes move,
to not see her,
to not place on them the reflection
of her eyes, her lips,
her little ass, her soul:
shattered tears.
On my way home,
Madrid exhales on me
its enduring breath,
intrusive, related,
the memory of a past,
she and I, both,
in common,
life like a limited sum
of experiences in present continuous:
among others
a summer screwing in Harvard,
blithe as beasts,
blithe as balls,
tante auguri a te,
there were also
hard discount times
(that is,
we admired Fassbinder's films
-Rainer Wender-
in parallel and ongoing;
sharing sweat and snails
we lived champagne and cramps,
and other times we let time flow
like those who admire Fassbinder).
Everything breaks...
...excepting, of course, eternity:
our last fifteen minutes together,
a scarce portion of human being:
a hospital in pluperfect
(that is, a kolkhoz in Venice).
After I asked
the philosophers' trade union conclave
about the meaning of life
and they redirected me to Wall Street
clearly distressed,
dying of laughter.

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