TCP22 - Sakurajousui

A young lady, long straight perfect hair flowing over her shoulders, beautiful, comforting, and humble face, sits collapsed on the paved train station's platform, before her broken wheelchair. She holds the weight of her upper body off the ground with her sturdy, toned arms, her face illuminated with a smile of gratefulness and hope, as she gazes up to the kneeling station employee, fully focused, with the stare of an artist in creation, of a boxer in training, on repairing her wheelchair.

Your voice echoes

She wades through a sea of doubt and business people,
Clutching her briefcase from the ten years as a claims adjuster,
It’s been five months of these interviews with no luck,
Stepping through the revolving doors the air tastes like poison,
Starting the car she remembers her son waits for his ride home,
Thinking “How to get 20 min across town 10 min ago?”
She un-parallels her car, and is immediately cut off by her interviewer’s Bentley.

A twenty-two year-old on a flight from New York City flaunts an $1200.00 watch,
Talks about her happenstance trip to Aspen to meet her brothers’ fiancé,
“I just want be the supportive sister, y’know”, images of jellyfish float on the screens,
Three soldiers on leave from Afghanistan sit in coach mashing shoulders, one reads Ayn Rands' “We The Living”,
while a teenager complains about her private school’s misplaced philosophy that everyone is a winner.

“In life, there are winners, and there are losers”

TCP 21 - Meidaimae

The train comes to a stop, gently, precisely, the windows this train, headed into the city, and the windows of another train, escaping the city, meet, for a brief moment, creating various designs of visual passage; a cold wall of shining and bolt-ridden steel, a platform carrying the sleepy footsteps filtered through a conversation of businessmen.

Here the windows align leaving merely a sliver of passage, revealing a young woman, beautiful in her simplicity, framed perfectly as if a portrait of Renoir or Rembrandt, and nothing more. She is animated, cheerful and lively in a conversation she perhaps shares with a friend, perhaps her mother, perhaps a lover, perhaps a stranger. She smiles, laughs, nods affectionately, parts her hair away from her eyes, and the trains, headed in and out of the city, resume their respective courses, their engines creating a gradual synchronized crescendo, the sliver slowly closing off.

TCP 20 - Akihabara

Torn an distraught, yet somehow serene all alike, he stands, clad in filth and age, somewhere between a fallen angel and a sorcerer.

Guiding a hovering mountain of society's waste, so intricately constructed that one could only assume it to be a puzzle of the utmost difficulty miraculously pieced together with a magic touch of the highest caliber, he walks along the beat cosmopolitan street, indifferently, removed from his surroundings, as if his presence had been superimposed upon the current landscape of salarymen herded from work to feed and back. With an impeccably focused eye, sharing not a care with his surrounding critics, he surveys the ground for a treasure those peering eyes around him may not quite grasp.

He stops, kneels down, and procures a worn, contorted cylinder of hope from a shadow between a hideously fancy sports car and the curb. Extending his kneeling knees, he slowly rises upwards, taking a few slightly hunched steps back to his floating chariot, into which he carefully and precisely secures his booty, and continues on his way throughout the city's endless streets.

Tracker, Little Car

Beau Hagberry

TCP 19 - Akihabara

Automobiles pass along Showa Dori, sending their gnarling ruckus across, throughout, and beyond the nights stale backdrop. Drills of a nearby construction scream away, taking advantage of the night's calmness as their realm of creation. Footsteps of the tired, the beat, the drunk, the playful, pitter-patter across a bridge, the serenity of the below river amplifying the night's silence. Among the human percussive polyrhythms, a particular set of footsteps comes, not with a conquering force, but rather a sliding drear, marching to the audio foreground. He strolls, oblivious - whether intentionally or not, through this particular night's mayhem, tranquility, confusion, and methodology, his nose fastened to the pages of a manga. His thoughts surpass the moment, beyond the speeding cars and rippling lights upon the calmly flowing water, attaining, creating, destroying infinite worlds in synch with each and every step.

TCP 18 - Akihabara

The light, an ominous blue-green bearing a single white silhouette in its foreground, begins to flash between bursts of lightness and darkness, the eye filling in the interim with elegant trails of fading green. Cautious of the encompassing sea of automobiles, growling with impatience, she begins to run. The lights of each car she passes before produce rays of a somehow synthetic gold, sparkling with a filter of fluttering rain, which shine brilliantly upon her bare legs. Just before reaching the side of her desire, the dictating illumination above jolts to a vivid red. Her perfectly straight blonde hair and generously revealing clothing make her appear somehow lost, out of context in the surrounding flash flood of salarymen. Umrellaless, her high-heeled footsteps ease into a slower pace yet none the less bumping into perhaps every obstacle in her path, as her wallet, procured from a miniature Dior-esque handbag and held directly affront her perhaps rapturous eyes, serves as a shield, protecting her makeup from the now trickling rain.

TCP 17 - Approaching Meidaimae

He sits, wedged into a mass of business transients grasping for leverage and struggling for footing as the train rocks its way through the endless cityscape; a pawn shop of abandoned, coveted, forgotten, and unthought of architecture. 

The mob of beat hopefuls towering above him, he sleeps, folded into himself, hopelessly collapsed upon, over, and around his cheap briefcase; hiding in a contorted ball of self-loath, or perhaps of fear, or perhaps of disgust, or perhaps of longing, as if gravity had chosen to attack him and him alone, as if the city's endless sea of eyes had trampled him, over and over again.