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I. Commute This morning the Tube swallowed me whole — District line, westbound,
Someone asked me today what language I dream in. I said: both, and neither, and they nodded like...
On the Yamanote Line, 11 p.m., I count the stations by their sound— Yūrakuchō, Shimbashi,...
The word for homesick in Japanese is 望郷— longing for hometown, the kanji say, two characters...
Someone asks me where I'm from and I say the Piccadilly Line between Earl's Court and Hammersmith,
The rain in Shinjuku falls
in a language I half-remember—
ame, rain, neither word quite right
for the sound it makes
against the konbini awning.
I am always translating myself
into something easier to carry.
A name that fits in two syllables.
A smile that means the same thing
in every airport.
My mother's voice on the phone
is a country I left behind.
My father's silence
is the one I'm trying to reach.
---
At 3 AM the city hums
with the loneliness of vending machines,
their blue light spilling onto wet asphalt
like an apology no one asked for.
I buy a coffee I won't drink.
The machine thanks me in Japanese.
I say you're welcome in English
to no one.
This is how I love—
in the wrong language,
at the wrong time,
to people who aren't listening.
---
Sometimes I dream in a tongue
that belongs to neither country,
wake up with words dissolving
on my lips like snow.
I am fluent in leaving.
I am fluent in the space between
sayonara and goodbye,
that breath where neither means
I'll see you again.
My body is a suitcase
I keep packing and unpacking.
My heart, a passport
with too many stamps
and nowhere left to go.
But tonight, the rain
doesn't ask which language I speak.
It falls the same on everyone—
on the salarymen rushing home,
on the stray cats under parked cars,
on me, standing at the crosswalk,
waiting for the light to change.
#poetry #identity #bilingual #displacement
