From Mantis 4

JOHN MATEER

INDUSTRY: TWO KINDS

In a Public Park

Hammering. Dull hammering on a weekday morning.

The sound of early industry in Ueno Park.

The tourists ignore them, the employed have their own destinations,

while they, the homuresu, are already hard at work

pounding with mallets or half-bricks their store of recyclable cans.

A post-industrial metalwork, an unforging that begins with being placeless,

with life under a blue tarpaulin on public land that was once a battlefield,

that begins with the civilization of the hammer up-raised,

with each falling blow of that Iron Age tool, that icon of the proletariat,

that ends and begins mechanically in the morning light

here under a leafless cherry tree where a surplus

— an airy paragon of strength, the aluminum can—

is being repeatedly battered down, hammered flat

in hopes it will become a coin, a unit of exchange, a simple fact.

In the Pleasure Quarter

Being foreign is the democracy that allows the Nigerian,

in all the accoutrements of a gangsta, to address me as brother

and offer a special discount to a nice place where the girls are all foreign

— Russian, Brazilian, Australian—and all speak English.

We are, perversely, brothers: of the same continent,

slave and master, ear and mouth,

in the weird dialectic of Shinjuku, this thoroughfare

where crowds blur into clouds.

What tradewinds brought him here? and those girls? and me?

Our common tongue is illusory, necessary, a kind of coin

minted by being stamped on.

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