Mitsouro

This samurai was careless,
lost his toes and thumbs last year to cold
and now, his boots packed out
with cotton waste,
tiny, yellow and alone
he walks on water again.

This is not Tokyo
This is High Arctic winter
we mumble to each other
as he dons a mask
to keep his face intact
not filter out pollution,
a spray can of pepper
in his frosted bib
to deter the hungry bears.

They take him in a helicopter
and leave him on a frozen sea
he has free will we say
and eastern inscrutability

and then
no news

Some years later a Japanese whaler finds
fragments of a bloodstained feather jacket
embedded in multi-year ice
there are pieces of human gut and organ
a sponsor’s logo from a bank
and a rusty unopened aerosol
in a pocket.

They say the old men of Japan
are leaving Scotch for Karaoke
the middleaged leave love for Mitsubishi
and the young all gone to Hare Kiri
lacking purpose and hope

A disembowelled youth is useless,
makes a mess
Mitsouro knew this,
but walked on water
and died nevertheless.

What  are those things he stands on?

Wide ungreek pillars with sculpted organicist

knees figured straight as he dies figuratively

in bolstered peltplacing puckering situations.

There is a man with a family somewhere in there

behind those veins

wrapped in pan-applied cordura and canvas,

greased and pummelled with sports supports

for his boneburdened overdevelopment.

We have the slightly flaky thrusts

of his shovels in a bucket of white powder,

a smear on each shoulder

a whisper over the tousled

tough head broken many times

and healed like a tree’s bark

takes itself in welds of comfort

growing into a flow of hard flesh like lava.

Home-made bombs reverberate in the hush

that is his obscurely whiteskinned

ancient Central Asian walk

to the bar

to the bells

to the tense guttural mutter

instantly translated into American

of asking

for 227  Kilos!

227 Kilos!

Thats many maunds

of grist to the mill,

about  a day’s supply

lifted by one back to the wall

one nose to the grindstone

one sniff

one snort

one sudden silence

one blood clenched quiver

and a primaeval moan

as the leadlined torture gear

tears at the lines

in his loins

trying to bust his bullied gut,

he loses it

from the pasted

paleolithic shoulder,

it crashes

and he thunders aside

his curly,

suddenly aging head thrust down

into huge breasts.

He made gold in ’88

a cold war funded him

when there was still iron in his curtain,

then he worked a mill 8 years,

got a nation

and lost it

somewhere in the middle of everything

there ever was.

His name was Anatoly

and he was almost rolypoly

but at least

The Kazakhstani got silver.

What have you got?

The Greek came on with a strangely Kazakh sounding name,

must have picked it up in some Alexandrian scourge

across the plain plains of the old flatworld.

He was all massed thigh, welded at the top

to a terylene sheen where his sex lurks

in black hairs and brows

beetling over into benign

corporal, bloody and invasive  punishment.

He had a younger, better cared for, urbane countenance

with a 2 o’clock shadow on the sallow

straight from the gym skin.

The heart of the floor shook fee fi fo fum

(pity the waif of Pyrraeus giving birth to him

Athenian grit and large forceps needed)

and The Greek on another  daunting  pair of pins

casually asked for 235 Kilos!

235 Kilos!

Forget Asian wheat mountains,

plain loads of grain

that’s 6 bags of brown Anatolian coal,

(sorry to add fuel to an inflammation),

3 sacks in each hand

and a bird in his bushel

he raised it and held it in a drunken 10 second

stagger of sweat

then dropped it as if nothing

and strutted a ring

of world supremacy.

He is truly something

of a Sisyphus practising

with his new balls!

The Kazakhstani had a vodka

(though of course he shouldn’t)

and sloped home

with his slightly suspect silver.

Melted down at the old state foundry

in Almaty

it’ll fetch

2000 tenges..