Night Light

A lens blinks
and captures a moment forever. At night
I return to the streets of Tokyo
alone with my camera, drawn
to the city’s electric tension and its glowing fluorescent windows aligned in checkerboards,
neon lit stars shining in a galaxy of steel and concrete computer chips, bodies crisscrossing
like moths flying around a lamppost.
Sometimes the light hits a person
at such an angle
or I catch a certain mannerism that reminds me of those I have left behind.

I hunt for the celluloid and Kashmir-coated panther
camouflaged in the back alley shadows and poised in the sharp angles of skyscrapers,
the monuments and nooks waiting at every step.
Aperture depth and focus aimed with a sniper’s precision at the ancient particles of light
reflected from the atoms, to my retina, through my lens, gleaning a new perspective
like molten gold to bypass laws of physics and circumvent the nervous system.
I want to sear my images into your soul
with thunderous reverberations.
Media, I suppose
is a form of telepathy. Since brutish men people scribbled on stone walls there has been
a yearning to transfer thoughts and words and that which can only be experienced, to be
seen, heard, felt, and understood long after our time has passed.
These thoughts bleed into my periphery as I see another row of cascaded bicycles,
their unchained, stainless chrome fenders bare and tempting like burlesque dancers high-
kicking in unison, frenzied human whirlwinds racing from subway cars and across parking-lot
sized intersections, the man sleeping between a bus stop in the loudest, brightest corner of the red
light district, a river lined with tugboats beneath a highway overpass.
A lens blinks again.
Another scene is frozen.
And I rub from the weariness from my eyes and swallow my hunger pangs and venture
deeper into the night, because once again
I am just a boy looking for salamanders beneath rocks.