poem: lost in translation

I arrived in Tokyo very late there were no three-
pound bags of cherries being sold in summer sunshine under
twenty-third and second street so instead I ate convenience store food
with my hands under the haze and the lights dropped out the
other actor wouldn’t accommodate me so I turned inwards and looked
at myself under the three-track mp3 player and thought well between
this song I cannot speak or understand and 2 red house painter
tracks I should make something of this aging thing I am dragging
around; we filmed in the later hours and so the rest of the time
the Japanese boy called Kiro followed me took me to the good fish
market and shrine and licked up salted drinks he would not touch
me or tell me his mother’s name I took in stride being this type of
girl and showed him pictures of home he said that summer here
especially in the south where he was from in the poor areas was
much like the concrete-smell of the camera pictures and between
us there was shared glow of summer in long ago uglier
places where money kept creeping inward asking — not yet
and how long — until you have melted yourself into strange
shared concentrate; he took me to Akihabara and I bought three plastic
figures of girls with no faces and took them with me everywhere
and when I left Toyko may have dropped off the face of the
earth along with me but I was not there and so would not know