The Love Hotel

One after the other, they enter the love hotel:

An old man with a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl,

Ready for a quick commercial exchange;

A middle-aged couple darting inside, guiltily hiding their faces;

A teenage couple sauntering in as if it were a fast food restaurant.

Every illusion is doubled in the rational society,

Hallucination of capital and form.

Is this the “floating world”? Or just a reference in a book?

City-collage, metropolis of scattered symbols,

We go through the kata,

Medieval futurists and conservative anarchists,

Looking for strongpoints to be.

I am a backstreets man,

Making knight’s moves to swerve into other dimensions,

Drifting with aleatory pleasure,

Negotiating convoluted entrances and exits.

The street slows and focuses

As the maze leads you in

To the Shinto shrine,the moated castle,

Through decisions and dilemmas

Of pleasure and prayer.

Out here is the edge,

An infinity of edges,

And whatever paths you find around them.

This is my riverbank,my trading post,my graveyard,

Asylum for a vagrant soul,

Exploring its own rituals and forces.

Confusion is my district:

Mapping it is my profession.

Choose your room and enter:

The forbidden chamber of fairytales,

A fantasy, but no happy-ever-after,

A sense of incompletion, not closure.

Now you will play and masquerade

For secret deities, as if to ease unease

And neutralise dread.

Please pay close attention to the instructions

As to correct use of toys and equipment,;

And vacate the room at the allotted time,

So as to allow the professional cleaning team

To prepare it for the next customers.