Tokyo Drift: A Diptych

                   I

Tumbling between worlds

Alice of the white buds

speeds into the lights

death and rebirth

at a thousand frames a second

The city is vaping

solid as a whisper in the shell-like theatre of seduction

pixel magic madness

department store spiderman spinning his web

scaling the peaks of an urban massif

curves and gullies of a face turned skywards

harvesting the stars

We float over cabled streets

surfing the riptides of an electric ocean

And should the earth's axis tilt

colours would run and the streets dissolve

into rivers of buffering sentience

                   II

Sliding into stillness in Ginza

of time in-between

the city unplugged

falls away

I am a pavement voyeur

observing the grain and colour of duration

planes pass silently by

in the space between buildings

Cradled in a moment prised

from the urgency of purpose

I drift in the penetrating lightness

of an immanent sky

Waiting at the storefront

for shoppers to emerge

and the floating world

to carry me adrift once more

August 2017 / July 2019