Day In and Day Out

This one...I don't even know what happened. Somehow I got from coffee to the 2011 Japanese earthquake, and back. Wrote this on a napkin...part one of possibly more similar ones, since this was concocted from only the first line.
Tell me how you are,
and if this makes any sense at all.
[I'm rather proud of it!]



4/6/12

I'm sitting in a café
drinking coffee like it's whiskey
and learning Japanese from the tourists
behind me.
Their accents remind me of a bowl of soy noodles:
long, thin, delicate syllables
rolling into each other;
just onelongstringofsound.
I lean back and listen,
and something in me wants to laugh
at those terracing moras [ante-penultimate, phonetic]
until I decipher the words:

    meltdowns, and Richter scales, and empty boots floating to western shores.
      It's amazing how beautiful death can be when spoken in different tongues;
      how magnificent magnitudes of destruction become
      when wrapped up in seaweed casings of Kanji and Katakana.

As I sit and stare out the window
at the pounding rain,
the world seems to unfurl
like a fortune.
All the power-lines buzz
  and
     shift
        vertical
as reflected in the oil-spill puddles;
distorted and distilled by raindrops falling like
ink from a quill.
All the people
(all those bodies)
warp and turn into caricatures--
characters;
each and every backbone a delicate line
fluttering down the page,
arms and legs and hair flowing and flickering out:
as beautiful as the written word
seeping through sheets of paper.

In the end, I realize that
we are all just language;
just sounds waiting to be uttered,
to be brought into a mouth
and turned over, tasted on the tongue,
given a breath of life:
gushing outwards,
limbs unfolding at the creases
like the delicate wings of paper-cranes.

    (Wear your fingerprints down
    hanging 1000 from the star-dappled sky,
    and the spirits dangling in lanterns outside
    your window will grant you one wish.
Whisper it
with paper-cut lips.)

Say your saving grace in
any language,
and I will scribble it in English
on the back of your napkin;
all the words torn
and running.
   Running
like whiskey spilled on your jeans
as I sit and sip my coffee.