Air-side in the Asian Café Bowl Bowl,
a mug of creamed coffee
and a madelaine for comfort for I am tired
and Tokyo’s mass-produced pastry is wonderful,
light as air this one, promising little but holding
fat almonds sweet as butter.

Asian Café Bowl Bowl is bland and crazy at the same time,
there are waitresses yelling orders
and tannoy announcements,
noisy folk drinking beer with their breakfast noodles.
The walls are the colour of rice,
steamed windows overlook parked aeroplanes
and terminal buildings.

There are trees behind the airport fence,
trees and a chimney and gas storage tanks
a dark green forest and it must be quiet over there.
The patient nature of the trees reminds me of my garden
and then another aeroplane lumbers away towards the horizon.

The tarmac apron, the little jeeps and the airport buses,
the dented luggage crates and aeroplanes:
I don’t own any of this,
all of it is just happening to me
and I must play my part
make my way across the earth.

Somewhere beyond that green forest is my home
and though I can’t see it
I am looking for it.
I am already on the move,
going home I am speaking my children’s names,
and they are getting closer.

But my children are not mine, not really
they are themselves,
they are like these planes at Narita
and I am their tarmac, their source of aviation fuel.
One day ideas will pick them up
and fly them away from me.
At least I hope that’s what happens.
They must go,
and one day they may come home.
If I could get my hands on a tannoy
that would be my announcement.