In Conclusion...

I started packing yesterday morning. It`s exactly two weeks before we board a train in Yanai Station to catch another train in Tokuyama, to catch another train in Tokyo, to catch our 4pm flight out of Narita International Airport.
But now, those trains aren`t our concern. The piles of our lives` artifacts strewn across our living room floor are our concern; these days anyway.
If there`s something inherently poetic about the literal act of packing your life neatly and safely into cardboard boxes, the sense is only heightened when you`re packing up parts of a life you hardly believe actually happened at all.
The act of taking all of these real things down off the shelves, from the drawers, out of the closets and neatly wrapping them up to be sent off to another land seems like we`re doing one of two things. We`re either making it possible to believe that none of this ever was real or trying to keep its reality alive in the new world that we`re about to rejoin.
It`s impossible to say which we`re hoping for most at this point.
Anyway, it must be poetic, because it`s quite unusual for me to write poetry. But when I got to work this morning, I opened up my notebook and this spilled out.

Costumes:

The pile lays on the floor

Before me

There was this

There in the land

Of the Free

We are stuck

On lines in a play

Bills to pay

The money we make

And we pile up

Definitions there like old laundry on the floor

Left from some unknown tomb

In remembrance to lives led before

We knew who we were