Sensei-Sama

Arigatou, sensei-sama, for giving me to knowledge,  
for teaching me the way of the Buddha  
and for soothing the flame of my ambitions  
so now it burns softer not suppressing the logic of mind.  
 
In sensei-sama’s kyoushitsu under the engineered timeless domestic suns,  
ideologies danced balletically into my ears  
and rode the rhythms of neuron receptors  
until the memory web was fastened tight.  
 
Falling sakura of virgin pink—  
the new things you’d present before my archaic winter eyes.  
Bring me back to the dimension where my fathers live forever in social science  
in the land of the rising sun.  
 
Everything then was poetry.  
The earth was our mother.  
Our country was josei kirei, pretty woman,  
and we’d love her, and she’d cover us with her outstretched arms  
and pull us into her temperate round bosom.  
 
Falling sakura of pink virgin thought—  
sensei-sama, you stopped the blizzard of ignorance that forces fresh seed into dormancy  
and taught me to love my psychology when naïve bliss melted away into the spring.  
 
Sensei-sama, causing the wines of our mouths to ferment  
and speak strange sophisticated language,  
pollinating the engorged stigma of the neocortex  
like a pure white kimono if lavished with red flowery design  
and worn by our mothers in the hour of sensual presentation.  
 
Maybe just for fancy’s discussion of the self, I’ll say what it is that I long to say.  
My brain is no more a virgin brain.  
The virginity of consciousness must be the first to go.  
Heightened self-awareness increases the potency of my every sensation  
today as I am frisked for perseverance by the westerly winds of life  
 
for it is stress to desire something,  
but it is bliss to acquire it  
to embody a buildup of distressing lust  
and to have it seep from your body all in one instant.  
 
You facilitated my experience, sensei-sama,  
with your stern noble eyes  
and your nevertheless vulnerable demeanor  
and keen attentiveness.  
Being a person of many years,  
you allowed me to mix  my experience with yours, one experience, one wisdom.  
 
The clean kimonos of our mothers are renovated by your new red seams  
like reality with a dash of dream in it.  
I feel the innovation in my belly growing into a lively manifestation.  
I want to thank you for bringing the future into me.  
 
You say the pay won’t make you stay.  
You need to be there for your family,  
and you are a person with goals and with wishes  
as well.  
“Goodbye,” you say to curricular affair  
and scholastic inhibitions.  
But sensei-sama,  
watashi wa aishitemasu,  
aishiteru,  
and when I am in the heavy mist  
consummating my bond with grasped desires,  
I’ll remember when you taught me how to do so  
when I was still dumb and virgin,  
but I am a virgin no more.  
The falling petals of cherry blossoms adorn the ground  
and a woman in a white kimono drinks the scenery.  
Matane,  
sensei-sama.