Akira Chinen

Akira Chinen Apr 2018

Death stops by to remind us
how beautifully fragile life is
and with her
you have gone away
and yet you are still here
in the quite moments
between my heart beat
and the silent space
between the tears falling
and I can still feel the warmth
of your laughter
and still hear the comfort
of your voice
I know not where you have gone
or if we will meet again
so what luck it was
what a privilege it has been
to have had you in it
my beautiful friend

Akira Chinen Apr 2018

a play of words and the death of love

It was a trick of the light
and a play on words
and the curtain call came late
and the actors forgot their throats
and the dancers could not find their feet

the mad men were taken by sanity
and the poets came down
with respectful writing jobs
and the stage was still a world
but the audience was bored

the earth was skipping
on a broken turntable
but the wax was lost
with the death of the bee

the milk of human kindness
oddly enough
didn’t taste as good
when not stolen from the cow
and I guess that should be expected
from a species that hoarded
the trademark of kindness
and then locked it behind bars
of fear and mistrust

don’t believe what you see
and don’t talk to people who are strange
and most importantly
just do as you are told
until you are dumb and deaf and old

a quite cog and silent spring
won’t wake the dead
keep all your dreaming monsters
inside your head

its all just for show
hush that little voice
and enjoy the ride
it’s a simple fact of life
why resist when we’re all
just going to die

actors in cages
pretending to live free
reciting our lines
there’s no place like home

if home is where the heart is
why does it sound like
our hearts are beating
from the palm of the devils hand

It was just a trick of words
as they played with our lives
and slit our throats
and bound our feet
dead marionettes strutting like Romeos
waiting to die by the suicide of our Juliets

romance is only beautiful
in the humor and satire of tragedy
its irony without iron
a bullet without a gun
a trick of the light
as we play with our words
and forget about love

Akira Chinen Apr 2018

to find and know love

You where there last night in a dream
laying down in a bed
made out of moonlight and stardust
and your lips painted the warm colors
of hope in the empty space below my ribs
and whispers murmured
from the faint beat of something alive
inside of something I thought was dead

you kept your name a secret
and stole mine
and gave it away to a bird

with black feathers

and black eyes

and a black beak

and it chewed and swallowed
every letter and every syllable
and I became a nameless prayer
on the tip of your tongue
and a helpless beggar
and fool on my knees
and you wrapped around me
like a snake squeezing the last breath
out of its next meal

your skin was a blanket
made out of the soft heat of the sun
and it covered and held together
all the broken and lost pieces
of all the things I had forgotten
use to be part of me

and your heart filled all the emptiness
that I had been carrying in my blood
and your eyes where painted
fields of flowers and flames
and you sang a song that had no words
that told all of the truths
of what it was to find and know love

Akira Chinen Apr 2018

where flowers dance

Come with me to the fields
where flowers dance like living flames
and we have no need for our human names
and we will stay until
eternity has gone and went
and we will keep the treasures
of all our love well spent

Akira Chinen Apr 2018

empty

Dead men have their grieving wives
and oceans have their graveyards
and all I have left is an empty sky
and time barking at my heels
and I wonder what happened
to the young man who once painted the night
with the stars from his dreams
as he slept upside down from the smile of the moon

I wonder if he’s dead

I wonder if I killed him

because he was better at imagining love
than I was at talking care of it
I wonder if I pushed him from a high cliff
and quickly retreated before his screams
became a flat thud of crushed bones

I wonder if I buried him under dirt and fear
under the obligations of failing to try
I wonder what could have been
if I had gone right instead of left
on one of those long cold nights
when the road was going nowhere

I look in the mirror
and nothing stares back at me
not even a ghost
just an empty world
inside an empty room
trapped inside empty eyes
that have lost their color

and I wonder if
he is still better at imagining love
than I am at taking care of it

Akira Chinen Apr 2018

life

Most people are blissfully unaware
of just how much we are all alone
one by one by ourself
drifting though the day to day
   just another night

            life

letting the world turn
into something disturbingly ******
as everything spins out of control
bullets fall from the sky
and we brush off the deaths they cause
as if it is just a light drizzle
no need for an umbrella or panic or change
everyone is breathing in and out

   in and out

      in and out

         in and out

******* without rhythm or reason
other than to pass the time
and pretend that we’re still human on some level
but no one stops to notice if there alive
or if their heart is still beating

as long as we make the right noises
it’s close enough to love
the abuse that is
anything to keep ourselves
from the appearance of being lonely

     life

our numbers keep growing
as the population only knows how to expand
death cannot keep pace
with the rate we procreate
and we will devour this earth
down to its core with our ignorance and greed
and then where will

        life

go without us....

                           it will go on and on and on

and it is hard to argue against
that it will most likely be better off without us