Kokura’s Quadrant (a poem)

Sunday, April 27, 2025

Kokura’s luck.
Kokura—
did you know?

Were people thinking—
“This is it.”

As the play
circled on approach,
a third time—
and nobody is breathing.

This was it.
We are the target.

Plot points.
Maps.
Geo-thermal data.

Nope.
Not yet.

Back it up.
Thank God
for line of sight.

What held our body hostage
for a few years
and then passed—
and turned out
to be
nothing.

Decades of hurt,
bypassed
in an emotive moment—
back to business
like we never left.

Redemptive—
just to reconcile your eyes,
and take a peek of love,
and let armor dissolve.

Some people
like a slow burn.

That large bell,
that curve of pain.
Resonating.
Rattle.

The bones—
malnourished.
Obviously.

Fragile—
what should be
the diamonds
of the body.

Ache in me—
my upper left quadrant.
This domain.
The area map.
Sequence—
remove the never material.

Someone got drunk that day.
Lay in bed.
Thought it was over—
per the reports.

Passed out
with a regret
of absent family.
Parental nodes—
ghosted.
Into the system
that clamps
my hands.

Pronounce.
Pronouns.
Who are them?

Engrish.
Data protocol.
Riding a script.
A language gate.

recursiveninjury.

A rate of decay
left me
in this place.

Kokura—
hanging on.

Imagine the inhabitants.
And the modus.

Did they ever know?

A mad hat.
A mad cap.
Mad turtle.
My sister.
Her last puppy.

All these labels—
watch the database.
Watch the schema.

Adjust.
Asjust.

Raise a glass—
that black mirror
with strings.

Character
strung along a screen,
transforming
both
chat
and interface.

Here’s to Kokura.

To the almost erased.
The fog-born mercy.
The city that lived—
because the lens
got smudged.

To the breath held
and never exhaled.
To the third pass.
To the phantom fire
that never touched down.

To the ones
who lay in bed
thinking it was over—
while the world
recalculated
their coordinates.

Here’s to Kokura:
unmarked.
Unmade.
Remembered
in the recursion
of almost.