Exquisite Partings

Pag-amin

2011-11-15T09:40:00.001+08:00

Bumabalong sa mga ating yapak ang buwan
nang kinuha mo sa aking kamay

ang isang bato, at ipinukol ito
sa karagatan. Tumagos ito sa banayad

na balat, naglikha ng panandaliang
sugat, na kagyat pinunan ng tubig gamit

ang sarili. Hindi natin namamalayan
itong paghilom, pagpuna,

habang dinadala sa atin
ang kung anu-anong nakaraang

hinahaplos ang tahimik na katawan
ng dalampasigan. Dinadala sa atin

ang mga buwang alaala lamang
ng mga ulap ang nilalaman, mga ulap

na mabagal na nilalakbay ang bawat araw,
ang buong umaalong pagitan ng ako

at ng kasalukuyan. Lumuloob ako sa tanglaw,
nailalantad ang akong nasa bingit

ng isang kapalaran. At kailangan kong
lumundag, kailangan kong lumundag. . .

at tinatalunan mo ang mga alon
nang walang alinlangan, tinatalunan

habang tumatawa habang tangay ako
sa kamay, upang sabayan ka,

pero tila ako ang iyong sinabayang
maglakbay lagpas sa karagatang

ako, sinabayan upang marating
ang isang banyagang dalampasigan

at mag-abang ng panibagong buwan.
Sa sandaling iyon, umiral ang isang tagpo.

The Crippled Girl, The Rose

2011-10-01T10:41:00.000+08:00

by David Ferry

It was as if a flower bloomed as if
Its muttering root and stem had suddenly spoken,

Uttering on the air a poem of summer,
The rose the utterance of its root and stem.

Thus her beautiful face, the crippled girl’s,
Was like the poem spoken by her body—

The richness of that face!—most generous
In what it keeps, giving in its having.

The rose reserves the sweetness that it yields,
Petal on petal, telling its own silence,

Her beauty saying from its thorny stalk
That what it is is kept as it is given.

Poem

2011-09-22T09:59:00.000+08:00

Today, I woke up thinking J. Alfred Prufrock was never really anyone. However, his "generosity," because I cannot find any other word for selfishness, or shame, is carried through Eliot's work consistently that one cannot but think of his persona as corporal. The work centers so much on Prufrock that the journey of his date with his Other (and Prufrock is his Other, Prufrock is probably everything in the work) that the peripheral is lost. I guess love, if it were called that, does that to anyone. But today, I woke up thinking of a work whose spirit is not love but history, a work whose point is catalogue, whose force is not implied through "Let us go then, you and I..." but rather "Today, I woke to the sound of the world viciously dreaming, their dreaming the sound of wheels thrusting smoke into the air for us breathe everywhere..." Unlike Prufrock, there would be no question, no expected moment. The point would be that there is no question, or that the question is lost under the sound of cars honking in the congested roads or beneath the sound of a city's footsteps. We find the expected moment, someone's dream, if we follow even one of those footsteps. But my focus is not following, only noting things down.

2011-09-08T21:00:00.002+08:00

Hindi ang nalaman mong bumagsak ka sa pinag-aaralan mong major ang pinakaayaw kong pakiramdam sa mundo. Hindi rin ang nalaman mong namatay ang isa sa mga minamahal mo sa buhay. Ang putanginang pinakaayaw kong pakiramdam sa buong putanginang mundo ay iyong nalaman mong may ibang gusto iyong babaeng nasisimulan mong magustuhan, iyong tipong malapit mo nang aaminin sa sarili na alaala pala niya ang isa sa mga pinakainiingatan mong bagay. Parang bumagsak ka na bago ka pa lang magsimula; parang pinatay ka na bago ka nabuhay.

Between Sleeps

2011-09-03T20:57:00.002+08:00

by Mark Anthony Cayanan

Turning to bed late one night, I find you
sleeping. As lightly as my tired
body allows it, I tug at the pillow you hold
close to your chest and crawl into
the space I have created for myself.

With a few stray strands of light uncoiled
from a bulb I've kept on, I can see
the contours of your face shadowed
by repose, stilled into position:
your mouth seems to have forgotten
what is about to be said. I incline
my head towards yours to chance upon
this secret speech. The low humming
from your throat, the occasional
moans divorced from silence by small
degrees, even the almost-sour breath:
they tell me how deep into dream you are.

By now, you might be in some place where color
has the full-bodied figure it wishes
to assume, where even the most peripheral
images slide into a center surrounding you,
crowding you even. I allow myself entry,
your inner spoon, and I know where I am:
I form the umbra of this mirror
image of a question mark; I am the shape
that, with you, mars the wave,
the gray of the bedspread. Where your mind
moves, however, I can only guess.

I can opt for hope, and give my dream
of your dream a countenance: mine.
Or I can admit that somewhere between
and inside you, there are phantoms:
present and future desires and dread,
whose vivid presences are unmasked only to you,
and are then gone.

Love, I shall fall into my own
sleep knowing of you only: your inert
body leaning, relaxing onto mine.
Your hand on my belly.
Chest against back.
Shoulder towards shoulder.
Your breath and my nape.

(mula sa Heights Tomo LI, Bilang 4, p. 4-5, 2004)

--

Natatakot ako kapag binabasa ito. Parang hindi ko kayang pasanin ang kalungkutang mararamdaman ko kung sakaling aaminin kong nais kitang mahalin. | Also, Sir Mark's first collection, "Narcissus," is out now from the Ateneo Press! Get one! http://www.ateneopress.org/detail_allbooks.asp?ID=356

In Praise of Shame

2011-08-25T10:39:00.001+08:00

by Lord Alfred Douglas

Last night unto my bed bethought there came
Our lady of strange dreams, and from an urn
She poured live fire, so that mine eyes did burn
At the sight of it. Anon the floating fame
Took many shapes, and one cried: "I am shame
That walks with Love, I am most wise to turn
Cold lips and limbs to fire; therefore discern
And see my loveliness, and praise my name."

And afterwords, in radiant garments dressed
With sound of flutes and laughing of glad lips,
A pomp of all the passions passed along
All the night through; till the white phantom ships
Of dawn sailed in. Whereat I said this song,
"Of all sweet passions Shame is the loveliest."

Project

2011-08-17T13:53:00.000+08:00

Studies on laughter. Keywords: break, affair, after, ever, then, from where. Essays on laughter, about that laugh laughing at a laugh.

2011-08-12T13:29:00.001+08:00

That night she whispered into his ear, and in the dream he heard something over the ocean, barely audible over the waves, tainting his body, the body of the shore.

2011-08-06T01:39:00.002+08:00

Nais kong ipaalam sa iyo ang nakatagong kasaysayan
ng isang halik, mga buwang pumapaimbulog

patungo nitong sandali, mula sa nakaraan
habang naglalaho ang mga patlang na nilalamanan

ng hininga, at sa huli, magluluwal ng salita.
Oo, nais kong ipaalam sa aking katawan

na muli akong masasaktan, pero hindi ngayon,
alam kong hindi iyon ngayon. Kay ligaya ng paglaho

ng mga espasyo upang umiral ang pagtagpo,
ang pagbalatkayo ang lahat ng tula, lahat ng gabi't lahat

ng pagkakataong natagpuan ko ang sariling nakatanga
sa mabagal na paglalakbay ng isang ulap,

o sa pag-imbay ng mga halaman sa hangin,
lahat nitong bumabalatkayo bilang balat, hininga, balat.

Reasons for Living

2011-07-05T22:23:00.001+08:00

by David Young

There aren’t that many, surely.
A tiny, crumpled list
you keep in purse or wallet.

Meanwhile, though,
think of your life as a bulky
present you were given
sometime around your first birthday.

You spend your years unwrapping it, perhaps.

Or you finish unwrapping, discover it’s a kit,
and spend your years assembling it.

The directions, if that is what they are,
are too confusing, with lots of gaps,
and there are way too many parts.

What you finally manage to put together
may or may not be what the kit intended,
but it’s yours, like a pet you never planned to own;
even if you run out of reasons to live,
it expects your care and maintenance.

*
From http://howapoemhappens.blogspot.com/2011/06/david-young-taught-for-many-years-at.html

Where

2011-06-25T21:41:00.002+08:00

That night, an old man called me.
I had fallen asleep by the porch
And saw the trees heavier
With moonlight. They extended
Their bodies over my own, asking
Young man, you know where to go
From here? I saw him under some pines
Pointing to the stars, pointing
A dim flashlight on my feet.
To where sir, I asked.

after David Ignatow

[Published in the latest issue of the Philippines Free Press]

For Tatay Sardo, who passed away on 3AM earlier today. Tay, gidala nako ang gihatag nimo nga puti nga sapatos adtong Mayo. Daghang salamat, Tay! I'll be using it sometimes throughout law school and even after. I'll try not to wear it out. But we both know it will eventually. Tay, what does the universe feel like?

*
I was awake at 3AM, studying. I noted this down for "A Sensible Life" before sleeping: [unedited] That day late at night I thought of love and read a lot of love poems. I woke to the sound of rain against the city’s roofs that early in the day. I went to the local fastfood chain not to eat but just to go out. I wanted to see how the world was in its lazy time. I wanted to see raindrops course through glass like the cheeks of a woman. I wanted to be the rain, the world at a silent time. I wanted to be with the world, see the world happening when the rain finally let up. The streets with so few cars and the occassional person on the overpass, I wanted the sight of these, and wanting these came not from the sheer desire to just go out, but the desire to go out of myself, the desire to transform and be transformed. I just wanted to go out into the world, see how it was when it was happening, when it was breathing after the almost continuous rain for the past two days, going on three.

Note Taking

2011-06-17T08:18:00.000+08:00

An easy project while in law school: a collection entitled "A Sensible Life," whose inspiration is Chingbee Cruz's poems from elsewhere held and lingered. The working title of the collection is what the collection is about, ruminations of people fascinated with and immersed in life. The collection attempts to discourse what sensible means, how sensible is experienced and comes to be, and how a life can be called sensible. I've started jotting down notes for the collection (not being able to refine them due to school's workload), and jotting these reflections down probably the only consolation for me, at least being able to retain and enjoy the reflection of the raw experience. Saka na ang refinement kapag sembreak.

2011-06-06T08:20:00.002+08:00

Far into the night, I could hear our feet wading
through the stream, soft enough that we hear
crickets’ long drone, and the rustling of leaves.

Sometimes, I could feel something calling me
through the marsh. Far into the night,
I begin to believe it is my own voice:

It is me I am wanting to return. Or it is me
I am wanting to be found. It is fall,
and the leaves have begun settling

on the dirt paths that the new moon bathes.
And we have left thinking something is
going our way, who, like us, are trying

to be found, to settle down. The footsteps
marking these paths look like scars
which only sleep and the silence of an open space

can mend. Maybe that is what we are
trying to find: the ancient roots of a tree
to hide us, so we may hear nothing

but the beating of the earth, where we wait
for the wind to blanket us with snow
and dreams, where we wake, far

into life, still lost, but rested.

Fears

2011-06-05T00:55:00.000+08:00

This blog is like my little cave, my little hole-in-the-wall where I'm supposed to say what I want. But there are too many personal things I never say, even to people I have confidence in. As I'm writing this, I'm beginning to feel the therapeutic effect of blogging (a kind of catharsis, a purging of self, something I've last done in high school), sort of releasing everything into this entry, my quiet fears. My craft is failing. My art cannot keep up with the insights of my mind, and I cannot fashion what strikes me as beautiful into something beautiful. For the past few days, I've felt a falling out (with people, places, dreams, etc) which I fear may be permanent. What I have to say, and I'm saying this in confrontation with myself, is that I fear, during law school, or even after, that my writing will never return to me the way certain persons will never return to me. I am dying. I will die earlier than what is expected of me. I will not be remembered. Creative writing as a form of mitigating my neurosis, I fear, is being replaced with the power I can garner through law (when I know that the illusion of power does not erase the fact of death). Which leads me to confess: I write to be remembered. I do not believe in God. The universe is beautiful, but all I have are my words. There is nothing to see here, always nothing to see (and this I hope to change with writing; I hope to be seen; I'm a very stubborn person and you can't fucking change this about me.). Experience tells us there is no love, only angst, only revolution. Experience tells me that there is no more happily ever after because Satan has fallen out of grace. I will never be able to love again because I think too much (which is a fuckload better), and this is my only blessing. Thought is the salvation of the thinker/poet as well as his/her disorder. And poetry is the easiest and cheapest therapy there is.

i carry your heart with me

2011-06-03T19:41:00.004+08:00

by e.e. cummings

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

*
From http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/eecummings/11913

Project

2011-05-27T20:12:00.000+08:00

This last work of a collection I'm finishing is taking longer to form. I don't blame it, nor do I blame myself for its pace. It talks of biblical creation, and naming. The key term here is "archive fever," with Derrida's book, of the same title, this work's source. I'm still trying to work out the details. Why do we name? In naming, we are trying to archive, which is required of memory. So history is the vehicle of sadness in our species. In naming we remember yet we push what we name away from us; we name what we are not. And why do we archive? What do we not want to forget? Why do I choose not to forget?

Note

2011-05-25T11:37:00.000+08:00

I woke to the sound of engines this morning, which meant there were things in the world that did no longer exist: love, happiness, the word "sacred." Light poured onto my feet from a hole on the roof.

Free Writing and Note Taking

2011-05-24T17:03:00.003+08:00

transcribed from a half-lengthwise paper, unedited

Slaughterhouse

Memories have a way like wind or water; like a breeze it surges against you as you walk forward. Memories go against the walk, precisely that is what memories do. Like water, memories turn into clouds, as clouds make us remember how we have travelled. And as clouds memories taint the drying world with color and a deeper shade, as would leaves and shadows bearing the weight of rain.

Sometimes on a bus stop I find someone reading, and in making conversation, I ask for the author. In the heart of noon, I don’t think it matters anymore. Those are her words and mine, we are in the world, and everyone worries to go forward as much as they can, but what we are doing is memory work, all the books and poems and conversation, given after being written and somehow disowned, the work saying “This was my life and I am bare. I am going to die; I am already dead. Find me a home.” And in that instance, we, too, are bare. In that instance, it is we who need a home. But we are naked, alone, with this alien recollection, and we fold into each other make each other our home. That makes the author’s work our own, and memory our being. We are the home of the author’s work, the engine, its air being thinking, and life.

“The Midnight Meat Train,” how the city is a person, not a mechanism, a specific persona that we all have a part in shaping, that we shit on. How the city creates its own sorrows, violence, how it lets lovers meet and fall apart out of each other just so it would not die out [migration being horror, not the bloody murders, not the crime, not the cries like rain if all the sorrow were gathered and then thrown at a single space.], just so it would have its own history. Interesting how the city is placed over abandoned things e.g. railroad stations and former towns that we resound.

In the movie, I could see how the city slowly transformed, transforms into, the man, especially in the scene with him photographing his wife and her taking off her clothes. That scene was one of transformation (for one, of how the city goes beyond the flesh, how it is more than a place where people can be people and fuck. The city is not for man.), how blood needs to be shed in the city, flesh [though beyond it, the city is of the flesh], so that things may continue. Someone needs to die at times.

And it is not the city interests me but the formation of it, the formation of disease and pestilence, violence (though contestable), and crime. How the city means a neurosis, just as poetry.

How the city creates its own sadness and how we keep it alive, yet loving it more, thinking sadness is beauty.

Ang latak ng lungsod. Kung saan/kanino nahuhulog ang lungsod. Clive Barker’s “The Midnight Meat Train” is an attempt at history, the establishment of myth, and thus of a personal, rooted, experience of a culture. With the establishment of myth (stories you hear) is history, in its slivers, leaping forward the same manner of the “kuwentong-bayan.” With history is the history of creation, something which is primordial, but is never changing. Something which pervades, like the essence which is carried over into the vessel of form. That is also one root of the horror: that something which is there still lingers and is present, which defies life and logic. This is the beauty of horror, the defiance of death, and yet this scares so many people! Why? Horror is the salvation of literature because its effect in the irrefutable mortality and limitation of man: how man transmogrifies himself, how the city transmogrifies man, how garbage is sacred because it is the residue of the whole mechanism of change, garbage shows the whole history of man, “waste” shows the whole history of man.

And the city is man, the buildings and everything. And man is a city. There is a vision of the city in each one of us, the face of everyone there of the same beggar one the street. From the richest to the dead. The city falls into the way a man speaks, a paragraph, the way two people stare at each other before ending their relationship. The city withholds everyone within it some way or another. The city has its own ecology, which makes the people feel as though they dwell in it. Which is why the city contrasts with the province and nature. That is why there is a certain freedom one feels when one sees the sea and how sand accepts the waves that rush and recede under it. How the trees nearest the shore accept freely the wind from other worlds. There is no archive fever in the province, for there is no proliferation of signs, that which Baudrillard describes, a jungle of empty signs. [In nature, signs are not dead ends but are too difficult to make out, the obscurity of nature only matched by its beauty.] The memory of a kind of rootedness represents itself here. You are led to remember in the province, to write or tell a story. Deep into the heart of land, another body takes over the bodies of the people there, and, unlike the loneliness of the city weighing down on man, it is a loneliness which does not have any signs, only silence, under everything.

True Love

2011-05-20T18:18:00.001+08:00

by Robert Penn Warren

In silence the heart raves. It utters words
Meaningless, that never had
A meaning. I was ten, skinny, red-headed,

Freckled. In a big black Buick,
Driven by a big grown boy, with a necktie, she sat
In front of the drugstore, sipping something

Through a straw. There is nothing like
Beauty. It stops your heart. It
Thickens your blood. It stops your breath. It

Makes you feel dirty. You need a hot bath.
I leaned against a telephone pole, and watched.
I thought I would die if she saw me.

How could I exist in the same world with that brightness?
Two years later she smiled at me. She
Named my name. I thought I would wake up dead.

Her grown brothers walked with the bent-knee
Swagger of horsemen. They were slick-faced.
Told jokes in the barbershop. Did no work.

Their father was what is called a drunkard.
Whatever he was he stayed on the third floor
Of the big white farmhouse under the maples for twenty-five years.

He never came down. They brought everything up to him.
I did not know what a mortgage was.
His wife was a good, Christian woman, and prayed.

When the daughter got married, the old man came down wearing
An old tail coat, the pleated shirt yellowing.
The sons propped him. I saw the wedding. There were

Engraved invitations, it was so fashionable. I thought
I would cry. I lay in bed that night
And wondered if she would cry when something was done to her.

The mortgage was foreclosed. That last word was whispered.
She never came back. The family
Sort of drifted off. Nobody wears shiny boots like that now.

But I know she is beautiful forever, and lives
In a beautiful house, far away.
She called my name once. I didn't even know she knew it.

*
From http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15313

Autopsychography

2011-05-18T10:55:00.001+08:00

by Fernando Pessoa
Translated by Edouard Roditi

The poet is a man who feigns
And feigns so thoroughly, at last
He manages to feign as pain
The pain he really feels,

And those who read what once he wrote
Feel clearly, in the pain they read,
Neither of the pains he felt,
Only a pain they cannot sense.

And thus, around its jolting track
There runs, to keep our reason busy,
The circling clockwork train of ours
That men agree to call a heart.

***
From http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/15983

2011-05-03T21:40:00.000+08:00

A cloud is tearing itself apart slowly.
There is a couple quarelling next door.
Their dog I’ve named Lyca tries to sleep
On my welcome mat, which says

“Come Together!” woven in cursive
With a single lace. A passing car below
Screeches into a halt. Then a woman,
Probably late in her life, steps down

Hysterical, saying I’m so sorry, I
Didn’t mean to. She keeps repeating
That, while the cat’s yowl next door
Grows audible, long, and unchanging,

And fades as light slowly gathers
To a few spots in the sky,
To the candle on the dining table.
That night, I heard Lyca faintly

From under my covers, her long drone
Making its way into a shady place
Under a cupboard, weaving itself
As a warm reply.

Unnamed Language

2011-04-15T18:11:00.001+08:00

by Ena Djordjevic

The sky changing color at night; something I notice
in Vinca, my body less than one short trail
from that eternal river. My mother once said
that when she met him, my father would swim across
from his country to hers, shaking his hair out when he reached her,
waiting by the river bank in Croatia.
There is some kind of violent purple in the distance
above centuries of trees. A wind carries the sound
of the dead language, exchanged by a couple
passing in the dark. Behind me, the house is full of relatives
I have met once, between us a faint path
of what should have happened, if. Had I known
the words would want me back I would have learned
to read this language. Now, it raises eyebrows in the markets.
I say bread and they shake their heads. I speak: tomorrow,
goodnight. Nothing. Gone. Coming back here
is like entering a house you know
through a basement window. Relearning speech,
I am waiting to see a path through trees
when I touch my grandmother’s arm. Soft.
Blood, my mother once said, is the way
we recognize each other, we don’t need to understand.
The river is not motionless, as it appears. The river
I am seeing is not the sky, the changing
of the light like a pendulum in one direction.
I am one short trail from the river.
One short trail from if. If is the violent country
I am living in when I speak. The river can’t cross,
bridge. The trees by the water, standing or uprooted,
are shadows sloping into the bank.

***
One of the best poems I've read in a while. A friend showed this to me lately, and so I searched for it online. The journal is in http://www.thesmokingpoet.net/id24.html

2011-04-08T22:42:00.001+08:00

The dog curled
between the gleam
of the lamppost

and our gate’s
shadow
does not know me

anymore.
I reach out
to know

what she
has become,
snap my fingers

as always. Far off,
her head rises
glinting. I know

something is being
changed, being
returned to.

But then
the gaze
snaps back unto

itself,
curling up
on its own

shade,
as if to resume
its previous course.

Life Entry

2011-03-31T00:15:00.004+08:00

   Today we cleaned out part of the garage. The wood planks placed there were needed (I don’t really know for what.) and we took everything out in the process of getting all the planks. So midmorning and its warmer than usual. That part of the garage was separated by two makeshift wooden tables where my father’s documents were placed, documents from his prosecutor days. The papers were very dusty and yellow: planners, magazines, court accounts and the like. We started pulling out the planks, grouping them by size. And my father’s carpenter, Lolo Tonio, as my father calls him, though he’s only in his late thirties, seems to know what kind of tree the plank is from based on sight alone: mango is thick and heavy, mahogany, and some other names I do not know and cannot spell.
   We started grouping them together, the short pieces, the long and wide with each other. The short pieces were things I recognized: small cabinet doors (still attached to the ornate knobs) that may have been part of our cabinets, and the small door to the stereo box that we have right now. We took out the planks one after another, having in mind to take out the wooden tables last. We did that for around an hour.
   And after we finished the first pile of planks and had gotten on to the second or last, we stumbled on my bikes. Bikes I used when I was small: the small bike, now rusty, with the little passenger seat, the small one with the training whells and the other one that was a blue cart, the two bigger ones and the most recent mountain bike. All rusty and flat. I kept thinking of how the past seems uncovered, the past that we chose to forget. And as I kept thinking that, the sun shone more harshly and there was no wind.
   How all these small parts lay at the back of our heads, somewhere there, lingering, and now it was its time to resurface. Not only as idea but as shape, as door cabinet, as toy, as rusty chain. I placed all of them under the shade of the mango tree, took a photo of them later on. I’ll post the photo here after a few days. And as we were about to finish, the planks became heavier. These thick, wide, black planks of mango we had to lift in pairs. We went to have lunch inside the house after we were done at around noon, watching a long, sad news.

2011-03-29T22:55:00.004+08:00

See how memory and sunlight make our bodies mortal, but beautiful.
_

I'm fascinated with distance and memory right now. I've always been. How distance is a falling away and memory a returning. How thinking is a lingering not over the object for which distance is, but rather lingering on distance itself. Not you but your walking away. Not love but its constitution: gaze, then years after, touch. Or its collapse: touch returning to gaze years after that.

Star

2011-03-28T20:03:00.000+08:00

by Adam Zagajewski

I returned to you years later,
gray and lovely city,
unchanging city
buried in the waters of the past.

I'm no longer the student
of philosophy, poetry, and curiosity,
I'm not the young poet who wrote
too many lines

and wandered in the maze
of narrow streets and illusions.
The sovereign of clocks and shadows
has touched my brow with my hand,

but still I'm guided by
a star by brightness
and only brightness
can undo or save me.

--
I'm home again. Found books by C.K. Williams, Archibald MacLeish, and Adam Zagajewski (one of the prime translators of Wislawa Syzmborska). Found 6 books, and cost only P290! More writing to come!

2011-03-18T13:49:00.007+08:00

Ipinagtagpo ng dasal ang karagatan at ang hangin
sa loob ng kaniyang katawan. Inihahabi ng bukang-liwayway
ang kaniyang buhok. Inihahabi ng bukang-liwayway
               pabalik
iniuuwi pabalik sa nakaraan. Ang mahahabang hibla
ng liwanag, palayo nang palayo hanggang sa bingit ng pagtanaw.
Kung saan nahuhulog ang mga barko —
                   At katawa’y
numinipis habang umuusad ang mga ulap: ang huling
hininga. Ang huling tula. Ang pinakahuling tinangay
ng mga kilapsaw pabalik
   sa madilim nitong sinapupunan. Ang huling pahayag.
Tumatagos ang liwanag
sa kaniyang loob at ginawang kaganapan ang kinasuklamang nagdaan, ang
pagkabigo. Ang mga mukhang panandaliang namumuo sa mabagal
                      na salita.
Mga along umuurong
             sa pagbuntong-hininga. Hiningang habi ng iba’t-ibang panaginip
na mabagal na iniiwan
ang kaniyang labi, na mabagal na naghuhubog-
                                      alaala
sa umiinit na umaga. Inihihila pabalik upang masulyapan
                    ang nakaraan,
subalit upang masulyapan lamang. Kita niya mula sa bangin ang paglahid
ang mga salita, kung paano nababasag
                ang wika sa dalampasigan, kung paano umuurong
ang mga alon sa paglalakbay, o ng paghahanap sa pagbaybay
ng isang alimasag sa bakas ng mga alon.

Pagkapagal sa kilapsaw na nababasag sa kay pinong kalawakan—

At sa paglaho ng laman nagtagpo ang karagatan at ang nakatagong kasaysayan.

Nasilaw siya. At nahuhulog siya. Patuloy siyang nahuhulog.

2011-02-27T22:05:00.000+08:00

Mermaids are the children of sadness, always stuck in the singing, always beneath the waves where slow songs are travelling, always singing.

Life Entry

2011-02-22T23:25:00.000+08:00

Great day. Awesome friends. And the shattering of the heart initiating the call to beauty. The urge to utter. The ghost of a relationship actually being a rite of passage into beauty: No, I am not beautiful. And the only vow to make here would be wonder, passion, and rigor everywhere I am. I'm currently editing two short stories in Filipino, finishing two poetry collections in Filipino and English, and thinking, thinking, thinking. I need to do more.

And I am loving more passionately. I am better, I am living. I am growing.

Again

2011-02-10T20:08:00.003+08:00

*
I am beginning to think that this sadness is a destiny, and that my only repose would be to write of its beauty.

From a Sequence

2011-02-09T22:33:00.000+08:00

Her ancient hands caress the sky sifting moonlight
praying with the wind, humming in the dim
For the roses that sway so slowly. Under the branches

Swinging so heavily blue slivers and the night
With her immaculate face—blue laces
Of clouds that have traveled generations

And generations ago, handing shadows to the leaves
which arc over their bodies in the dark, slowness swaying
chances and years apart. The frail lovers of the earth

They are swaying, and I remember the leaves several lives
before, their falling that children adore, tossing moonlight
In autumn hymns, leaves from which slow poems begin.

I have dreamt of leaves and Aquarius, and maybe prayers falling
To the ground. Their falling does not sound. In their repose no one sings
Except a child taken into song having traced in the sky

an angel’s wing.

Life Entry

2011-02-06T19:19:00.000+08:00

The world will not fall of death. Death is life, and life, before dying, leaves its print, its traces. Let us not blame death. Rather, the world will fall of history. Or maybe death, too. With each passing death, each moving on, each flame ended and renewed, slivers of memory stack up in the world, in the mind, on the sides of a novel's page as scribblings, ambling forward, or backward, whichever direction, when the mind steps into newer, more present, more uncertain times. It is that we do not know uncertain the past truly is; we leave it behind and yet embrace it in the end: eating ice cream, the face of our mother, our first kiss. We call it heritage but we place it in glass and do not move it. It stacks and becomes heavier, and one day history will be too heavy for us to bear. And our memories will crush us, like chests of artifacts. With the way things are going, I do not think there is such a thing as national memory. Archive fever, perhaps. But national memory? Schizophrenia, perhaps.

From a Sequence

2011-02-05T00:53:00.003+08:00

Black trees in a lunar hymn.
The wind over their fragile bodies.
The tree over the wind. The leaves
Making circles while falling,
making circles of light,
marking circles on the earth
falling with the bodies’ sound.
‘Which shadow,’ she mumbles, ‘and which one
Is falling—’ Green hearts
stepping over the fragile earth, green darkness
and the melding of the vast blue
of our eyes. ‘What hymn’ when no birds sing.
What wishes then. They sustain their voices
giving color (‘What myth,’ he asks) and light
to the wind. Trees beginning to sway
their green. The moon beginning to smile blue.
Blue wind, white stars. The leaves leaving circles
Of light on their skin. The communing flowers and bees.
Slowly, she reaches and catches the moon
With her eye. He dreams.

Life Entry

2011-02-03T11:05:00.000+08:00

I came upon a book a couple of days ago. It has changed me. You know that scary feeling knowing such power lies within you? That control? I feel that all the time now, the heightened sense, and cerebral maneuvers, the subtext. And it's scary to know I can switch unconsciously between frames. Concentration, you need that. The world becomes beautiful, yet so calculated.

This is going to be so awesome. And no more need to lie about liking bad music.

2011-02-01T14:51:00.000+08:00

she had been carrying his heart in the darkness for days

the radiant wildflowers bowing under her feet, the distant river

he reflects her face slowly but she says it is water, it is moonlight

2011-01-27T21:19:00.000+08:00

It had died long ago, what the ribcage held together.
Breath, a set of poems (or places), or grandmother's name.
Or a story. Or secrets. The skull lacks the jawbone,
and grandmother, on the veranda,
Frail child of the war, is singing me my lullaby. "I
have been a passing breeze,"
she starts, "through your hammock. Dream,
and breathe me in the dawn."
And the hammock is bearing her body
Like my hands on the skeleton. Like many windy evenings.
What could have forced her to sing, sing every night,
What could have held her. Was it bone?

Man Carrying Thing

2011-01-23T08:34:00.000+08:00

by Wallace Stevens

The poem must resist the intelligence
Almost successfully. Illustration:

A brune figure in winter evening resists
Identity. The thing he carries resists

The most necessitous sense. Accept them, then,
As secondary (parts not quite perceived

Of the obvious whole, uncertain particles
Of the certain solid, the primary free from doubt,

Things floating like the first hundred flakes of snow
Out of a storm we must endure all night,

Out of a storm of secondary things),
A horror of thoughts that suddenly are real.

We must endure our thoughts all night, until
The bright obvious stands motionless in cold.

From a Sequence

2011-01-20T14:51:00.002+08:00

Noon arrives so slowly, bathing
the bread crumbs floating
on sky. Ghosts are passing by

idly with the leaves gently breaking
the sun shattering the world
disrupting everything from its yellow stain
on the park pond.

So slowly begins what we might call his days,
perched his heart perched on telephone poles
or on the roof of the public library, dwelling
lingering waiting for sunlight to leave
the crumbs. His heart stares

at the sky and it is frightening how
for a moment his blue eyes
turn black. The leaves with their falling
constructing his past their falling shadows
like letters, darkly penned he was waiting

for the noon light for the shadows of letters
in the lowest drawer of his room beckoning for light,
creating, with the years, within them, yellowish shades,
their own shadow of light. Yellow like noon

on the acacias. The sun falls on a leaf
falling unto the clouds reflected
and then shattered. We hear something, like the gust
of wings, or a poem talking of the change
of the heart and always feeling
for the stones before falling into the silence

of rivers. In the park, he is slowly rocking his chair.
Nothing is missing.

2011-01-07T07:13:00.001+08:00

the drowsy slow rice fields the wind bringing the sun to our lips, that ancient fervor prompting a forbidden kiss or perhaps starting a war.

The Word

2011-01-03T17:02:00.000+08:00

by Stefan Georg

Wonder or dream from distant land
I carried to my country’s stand

And waited till the twilit norn
Had found her name within her bourn—

Then I could grasp it close and strong
It blooms and shines now the front along…

Once I returned from happy sail,
I had a prize so rich and frail,

She sought for long and tidings told:
“No like of this these depths enfold.”

And straight it vanished from my hand,
The treasure never graced my land…

So I renounced and sadly see:
Where word breaks off no thing may be.

Ilang Sandali Matapos ang Simula

2010-12-28T09:41:00.004+08:00

Panandalian tayong magiging anino habang gumuguho
ang mga anghel. Katawan nati’y maglalaho
nang panandalian habang nagtatapat ang ating mata

sa kanilang sementong mata. Nginginig tayo
sa bawat pagliwanag ng langit. Habang gumuguho ang mata
ng bagyo, paisa-isang nababasag sa sahig ang mga dalisay

na mukha’t pakpak. Walang maiwiwikang dasal ang mga labi
nating nangangatal, habang sinisimulang buksan ng lupa
ang mga nakatagong sepulkro’t altar. Iniluluwal ng lupa

ang nakaraan. Wari isang uri ng pagsilang
ang paglanghap ng singaw, mata nating pumipikit,
mga palad nating tinatapat sa isa’t-isa. Yumuyukod tayo

sa ating mga anino, sa hubog nating walang-muwang sa malaon
nang nagaganap na pagguho ng mga sagisag. Tinititigan natin
ang ating mga yapak na waring hindi sariling atin. Waring

hindi atin ang sarili nating mga luha. Nagsisimula tayong umutal.
Sa isang langhap, sa sandaling nagsisimulang maluoy,
binagtas natin ang mga kalye kung saan nakatitig ang mga mata

ng ilaw-poste sa atin. Dinig natin ang laksa-laksang talampakan.
Walang mga ibon ang mga dinaraanang puno natin. Sa isang kanto,
nakaambang ang mga uwak habang iniaawit ng isang baliw

ang kaniyang nakaambang paglutang sa alangaang.
Pilit niyang inaabot, iniaabot ang sariling langit sa atin nang
gumuho ang nilililimang gusali. Kay tayog ng aking katawan,

pahayag niya, bago naglaho ang kaniyang anino.

Tanong

2010-12-20T14:19:00.001+08:00

Sinusulat ko ngayon ang huling akademikong sanaysay ko sa Pilosopiya, at nilalagom nito ang lahat ng pinag-aralan ko rito sa Ateneo. Tumambad sa akin ang isang napakagandang bagay, at pagguho ito. Ito ang tanong ko sa lahat ng nais maging manunulat, lalo na sa mga nais maging ang tinatawag nilang makata:

Paano ba gumuguho ang salita?

Ibig sabihin: naranasan mo na ba? O bakas lamang ng salita ang naranasan mo? Para sa akin, malapit na iyon, palapit at palapit na ako sa bingit ng pagguho ng salita. Nakakikilabot.

Song

2010-12-12T17:34:00.002+08:00

So silent among the leaves this song
so silently covering trees

in snow. So slow into our palms

it could rest. Sad because it can be held.
It moves through trees empty

of birds and ponds stuck

in the moon covering
our footsteps—it is a dream

there are angels falling from the sky
covering our bodies in a naked white.

The song waits among the many leaves, shy,

waiting for us to be clothed.
It waits among many small fallen things.

It waits, singing let go,
let go of the sky

embracing us singing

2010-12-08T12:56:00.000+08:00

I hate myself for seeing the inherent beauty in everything. In sadness. In loss. In this distance between us. In death.

Maligayang Kaarawan

2010-12-07T13:49:00.002+08:00

Happy birthday Mama. Hindi kita tutulaan. Hindi kita susugatan. Ngayong araw, hindi ko susugatan ang sarili ko. Hindi ako tutula ngayong araw. Hindi kita isasama sa kalungkutan ko. Subalit alam kong mas malugkot ka pa sa akin. At alam kong mas malalim ang mga sugat mo kaysa lahat ng sugat ko. 19 na taon nang naghihilom ang sugat mong ako, at sinusubok kong maging masaya upang may ngiti akong maibigay sa iyo. Patawad, Mama. Hindi ko pa kayang tumawa. Pero ngayon, hindi ako tutula.

San Antonio

2010-12-06T13:04:00.000+08:00

by N.S. Nye

Tonight I lingered over your name,
the delicate assembly of vowels
a voice inside my head.
You were sleeping when I arrived.
I stood by your bed
and watched the sheets rise gently.
I knew what slant of light
would make you turn over.
It was then I felt
the highways slide out of my hands.
I remembered the old men
in the west side cafe,
dealing dominoes like magical charms.
It was then I knew,
like a woman looking backward,
I could not leave you,
or find anyone I loved more.

2010-12-04T18:47:00.000+08:00

Cars passing streetlights
Moving around her like a shadow
She is lost

In the stars—
Beggars sadly chronicling
Her heartbeats

Receding
into the green green blankets
Green rain

Staining the trees—

Ode to a Nightingale

2010-12-03T05:50:00.000+08:00

by John Keats

1.

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
  My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
  One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
  But being too happy in thine happiness,—
   That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
   In some melodious plot
  Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
   Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

2.

O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
  Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
  Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
  Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
   With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
   And purple-stained mouth;
  That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
   And with thee fade away into the forest dim:

3.

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
  What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
  Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
  Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
   Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
   And leaden-eyed despairs,
  Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
   Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.

4.

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
  Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
  Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night,
  And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
   Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays;
   But here there is no light,
  Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
   Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

5.

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
  Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
  Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
  White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
   Fast fading violets cover'd up in leaves;
   And mid-May's eldest child,
  The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
   The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

6.

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
  I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
  To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
  To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
   While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
   In such an ecstasy!
  Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
   To thy high requiem become a sod.

7.

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
  No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
  In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
  Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
   She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
   The same that oft-times hath
  Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
   Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

8.

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
  To toil me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
  As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
  Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
   Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
   In the next valley-glades:
  Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
   Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?

Las Ruinas del Corazon

2010-11-25T23:20:00.000+08:00

by Eric Gamalinda

Juana the Mad married the handsomest man in Spain
and that was the end of it, because when you marry a man

more beautiful than you, they say you pretty much lost control
of the situation. Did she ever listen? No. When he was away

annexing more kingdoms, she had horrible dreams
of him being cut and blown away, or spread on the rack,

or sleeping with exotic women. She prayed to the twin guardians
of the Alhambra, Saint Ursula and Saint Susana, to send him home

and make him stay forever. And they answered her prayers,
and killed Philip the Handsome at twenty-eight.

Juana the Mad was beside herself with grief, and she wrapped
his body in oils and lavender, and laid him out in a casket of lead,

and built a marble effigy of the young monarch in sleep,
and beside it her own dead figure, so he would never think

he was alone. And she kept his body beside her, and every day
for the next twenty years, while pungent potions filled the rooms,

she peeked into his coffin like a chef peeks into his pot,
and memories of his young body woke her adamant desire.

She wanted to possess him entirely, and since not even death
may oppose the queen, she found a way to merge death and life

by eating a piece of him, slowly, lovingly, until he was entirely
in her being. She cut a finger and chewed the fragrant skin,

then sliced thick portions of his once ruddy cheeks. Then she ate
an ear, the side of a thigh, the solid muscles of the chest,

then lunged for an eye, a kidney, part of the large intestine.
Then she diced his penis and his pebble-like testicles

and washed everything down with sweet jerez.
Then she decided she was ready to die.

But before she did, she asked the poets to record these moments
in song, and the architects to carve the song in marble,

and the marble to be extracted from the most secret veins
of the earth and placed where no man could see it,

because that is the nature of love, because one walks alone
through the ruins of the heart, because the young must sleep

with their eyes open, because the angels tremble
from so much beauty, because memory moves in orbits

of absence, because she holds her hands out in the rain,
and rain remembers nothing, not even how it became itself.

2010-11-21T19:30:00.000+08:00

Pumalpak akong hagkan ang sandali. At ngayong yumao na ito, pumapalpak ako ngayon sa paglimot. Sana inilihim lamang sa aking mga mata ang pahayag, ang pahayag na lumilisan nga ang liwanag. Ngayon, bakas ng silahis ang ginugunita ko. Mas mahapdi iyon.

*
Hindi ako ang taong mahilig sa paglimot. Kaya ako nagmakata. Hindi ko kayang limutin ang sarili ko.

*
Pagkatha ng anino ang wika, anino ng kasalukuyan, silahis ng nakaraan. Silahis. Napakatalas na salita ang silahis na tila panaksak. Subalit hindi dugo ang papatak sa aking tahanan, kundi anino't hubog ng ating mga kamay.

*
Gumising akong binubulong ang pangalan mo. Ibig sabihin: gumising akong humihikbi. Tunog ang sagisag ng paggunita. At sa kawalan ng tunog nagsisimula ang paglimot.

*
May pahayag ang salita, at sinusubok kitang sambitin. Sinusubok kong mabuhay, masilayan ang hinahayagan ng dila. Silahis ang salita, silahis na hindi sumasapat. Kaya ako nagmakata: laging hindi sumasapat ang lumbay ng dila.

*
Pagod na akong tumingala

Days

2010-11-15T20:33:00.001+08:00

Wind avoids our dwelling.
Instead, time lets the fallen
leaves stain our streets brown. Shadows

of unswaying trees tell us not anymore
to ask whether our wishes for rain
will carry the leaves elsewhere

in this city. Yet still we mouth words
for rain in its magnitudes. We sleep
and again, we wake to the falling

of days, still and windless. Birds leaving
thinning branches tell us nothing
of longing, how leaves are like tears

countlessly turning in the air
in this afternoon light, dwelling finally
in our shadows, in the dark

of our eyes. Their leaving tells us nothing
of rain or wind; only the silence
of waiting, the sky the lightness of

falling, our speech the sadness of space.

2010-11-13T19:16:00.000+08:00

I.
Isang dapithapon, ibinulong ko sa isang bulaklak
ang iyong pangalan. Inabangan ang pagbubuklod
ng mga anino, ang nakaambang pagkahulog
ng bituin. Kinuyom ko ang mga tinik, dinanas
ang lamig na simula sa pagganap
ng hamog tuwing madaling-araw. Agad ang mundo’y
naging tula. Umalab sa loob ko ang tanong
kung buntonghininga’y sapat ba bilang salita
para sa pagdapo ng langit sa lupa. Kung bakit
mas mabilis ang pagdilim ng hubog ng mga talulot
at hindi malirip ang hangin. Kung bakit katahimikan
ang pumapagitan sa labi ko at ang hangin.
Isang dapithapon, tumungo ako sa wika
upang hanapin ka sa mga bulaklak doon.
Sinubok kitang sambitin.

II.
Doon, sa kaganapan ng gabi, habang lumilisan
ang sanlaksang pangamba. Sa pagtahan ng gunita
ng mga tula sa nangungulilang bakas ng mga anino.
Hinahanap kita roon, sa hanging hindi tinutugunan
maliban sa mga kuliglig, maliban sa mga wari pantig
ng paborito mong laruan, ang pangalan
ng matalik mong kaibigan noong kabataan
natin. Ang iniibig mo noon. Ang mga tulang gumuguho
habang sinasambit ng pangungulila. Dama ko
ang pagtikom ng aking labi, pagkuyom ng palad,
mga palad ko sa hangin, hangin sa mga siha.
Pagguho ang pagsambit ang sabi ko sa namumuong hubog
sa rilim, hubog ng kulay ng pagtuklas, o di kaya’y
paghahanap. Takot akong isama ka sa aking wika.
Kaya ko sasabihing nagkukubli ito sa himig
ng mga palad ng dahon, sa himig ng pagpatak
ng tubig sa iyong pisngi. Sa dumaraang bugso.
Papalisin ko ang mga pisngi ng mga namumulaklak.

III.
May tawag ako para sa mga sandaling ganito:
nilulumot kong mga kuwaderno, tinik ng bulaklak,
duguang kamao. O pito. Pitong taong hindi binubukas
sa mundo itong mga palad ko.

Kay hirap maghanap ng salita
para sa bakas ng mga iglap. Sinusubok ko, subalit
pangalan kong buntonghininga lamang ang maibibigay
at ang mangha sa mga nilulumot kong tula.
Mga tulang ipinamunas ko sa isang rebultong nilulumot.
O sa mga durungawan kong dinadapuan

ng abo. Sinusubok kong palitan ang salitang bakas,
Subalit hindi ako pinapayagan ng hangin.

IV.
Naglaho ang salita matapos naglaho sa rilim
ang labi. Naglaho na ang iyong pangalan
matapos dumaan ang hangin, matapos ang sigaw.

Ang dalagang niyayapos, ligalig ng kuliglig
ang mga labing niyayapos ng hangin.

Isasambit ko sa lupa, sa natatanaw kong mga bundok,
ang mga pangalan ng bulaklak.

Doodle

2010-11-07T07:37:00.000+08:00

Bangkay ang binubuksan ng salita, mga salitang kabagalan ang nilulunan. Sasambitin natin ang mga lihim ng iyong kabataan, mga hiling para sa pagbaybay ng iyong labi patungo sa Salita, katulad ng pagbaybay ng salita namin sa namumulta mong labi. Minsan, may linya tayong maririnig mula sa isang matagal nang patay na makata, mga salitang minsang nagkaroon ng sariling labi.

O, di naman maarok ang pagkakataong ito, ang paglisan ng liwanag sa iyong mata, ang liwanag na binabaybay ang iyong buhok. At ano pang kataga ang kinakanlong ng iyong dibdib?

-

Binubuksan ng salita ang panaginip.

-

At once light is clouded with memory, divining light
on the leaves, leaving them old and brown.

-

Memory clouds the noon light creating shadows
letting from the yellow light the shadows of leaves

-

Every word cracks the imperfection of "pa-hayag," and poetry is a beautiful de(con)struction, "pagguho." Poetry is the means of destroying light, tainting perfection and thus beauty in what is given.

-

Isa lamang ang gunita nating lahat.

Freewriting

2010-11-05T08:58:00.000+08:00

oh the birds straining in song
in the ache of the wind, your name
swaying the heads of moonflowers
bowing them under the swoon of
an old, old glow. I try to catch
the breeze, as children would
stretching wonder in lightness
feeling at their age the coldness
and the space between their fingers.
Tonight, I am the only child
of your moon, with lumbering clouds
passing into memory. And you whisper
through fallen leaves, lifting
them into the glow and I cannot
catch the shadows. I cannot give them
any name, only breath.

Sonambulismo

2010-10-25T17:37:00.000+08:00

Ikinukubli ang dalampasigan
sa mga alon ng karagatan. Maalwan
ang tanglaw ng buwan: kay layo

Kay layo ng nilakbay ng liwanag
upang iharaya sa aking katawan
ang isang buntonghininga.

At ngayong lumalahid ito
sa kaluluwa ko, ano pa ba
dapat ang nadarama

bukod sa pangungulila? Tahimik
ang himig ng pagkubli’t wari pag-uwi
ang inihihimig ng tanglaw:

tambog ng mga palad mo sa rabaw
ng tubig, tinig kong nangangatal,
mukha mong tumatanglaw

na binasag ng kilapsaw. May himig
ang gabi na ayaw kong malirip, at takot ako
dahil baka tunog ito ng pagtatampisaw

O di kaya’y himig ng pagbabalik-
tanaw. Ang napakalawak na bughaw
sa kawit ng natatanging buwan. At abong

hinog ang buhanging sinasalin
ng aking mga palad. Mahal, abot ba
ng liwanag ang alaala kung saan ka?

Sa Mga Huling Araw

2010-10-24T17:15:00.001+08:00

May pangamba sa ating pagtingala.
Sa umaga, tanaw natin ang mga tore
ng usok, itim sa malawak na bughaw.

Sa gabi, kumikintal ang kalawakan
sa ating mga mata, kung saan naglalaho
sa tanglaw ng ilaw-poste ang mga tala.

Pinipigil natin ang ating hininga
kapag sumasambulat sa gabi ang
sanlaksang ibong tinatabunan

panandalian ang ating mga anino.
Tinatapat sa ating mga mata ang
maitim nilang hubog, ang marahan

nilang salimbay. Tanaw natin
ang kanilang paglaho sa malamang hita
ng ulap na unti-unting nababahiran

ng abo. At sa sandali ng pagyao nila
sa ating gunita, mararamdaman natin
ang bagal ng ating hininga’t pagkuyom

ng marurumi nating mga kamay.

Whisper

2010-10-21T08:10:00.000+08:00

"I wish 'twas plainer, Loo, the anguish in this world. I wish one could be sure the suffering had a loving side." - Emily Dickinson.

It has been very difficult for me the past few days, not hearing anything from you. I ask myself at nights when I cannot sleep if this is all worth it, and the world says this is not. I disagree. I'm always hoping the best for you, and this no longer needs to be said, because whether you know it or not, I'm always trying to smile knowing smiling is out of place. I love you more than ever is what I mean. Let me rephrase this: I hope my letters delight you. For even your reading them means so much to me. For even the shortest messages you give I keep. Do you deserve this much? No, no, everyone would say. They will say only I have been reaching out, and they could be right. I do feel neglected. Yet I cannot force you to change this, as it can only come from you. On a lighter tone, maybe that is why I'm here: to suffer everything and make you realize this change. I understand the need for space, and understanding and bearing this has become more difficult over the days. Times have never been harder. Then again, times have never been so much beautiful and meaningful. Do you deserve this much? No, everything tells me. And, again, I disagree. Am I deserving of you? I am hoping that I am, though chances are close to nil. I am hoping this suffering has a loving side, no matter how bleak.

I miss you. I'm doing okay.

2010-10-18T15:46:00.000+08:00

Hindi ko inakalang ganito kahirap pala ito. Parang unti-unti kang niluluno ng mga araw. Hindi ko rin inakalang ganito kaganda't magiging ganito kaligaya ako. Parang unti-unti kang niluluno dahil sumisibol ka. Kay ganda, kay ganda ng aking unti-unting pagguho, at mula sa aking mga abo ako'y babangon. Ang iyong tinig ang magiging una kong pintig, at pangalan mo ang magiging wika ko.

Kuwento

2010-09-12T10:39:00.000+08:00

Itay, dumaan kami sa may pantala't napahikbi.

Auschwitz-II

2010-08-24T22:08:00.000+08:00

Ang mga linyang nangingibabaw sa usok,
Sumasamo sa langit upang ihiraya

Ang hiningang lalagutin sa katawan.
Mga daliri ang mga linyang nangingibabaw

sa usok inihahandog ang isang umuuhang sanggol
Sa langit, nanginginig. Nitong silid, kubkob ang bitig

Ng mga palad, kasama sa sukal at libag. sa durungawan
Tumatagpas ang ilang sinag ng araw,

Humuhuni. Kahapon, nang idinuwal mula sa silid
Ang hinga ng mga Hudyo, mga pananalanging

Hininga, walang gumitla nang binuksan
Ang yungib ng kasaysayan. Walang gumitla

Sa kumakapal na banil o sa mga diwang
Nakahandusay. Sa estasyon, tila tanong ang isang alulong:

Pang-ilan—sa tarangkahan, palihim na umaalimuom

I Am Not Yours

2010-08-09T10:25:00.001+08:00

by Sara Teasdale

I am not yours, not lost in you,
Not lost, although I long to be
Lost as a candle lit at noon,
Lost as a snowflake in the sea.

You love me, and I find you still
A spirit beautiful and bright,
Yet I am I, who long to be
Lost as a light is lost in light.

Oh plunge me deep in love—put out
My senses, leave me deaf and blind,
Swept by the tempest of your love,
A taper in a rushing wind.

Pagtanggap

2010-07-22T23:05:00.000+08:00

Kuyom niya ang basang lupa.
Mata’y minamasdan ang sinasandalang
akasya, mga sangang umaaho't humihinga
sa ulang lumalakas. Marahan,

dumadaloy ang mga salita
sa pisngi, sa bába, pumapatak
sa lupa. Sinusubok niyang limutin
ang lahat, itakwil ang katawan.

Subalit walang alinlangang nagpapahampas
ang mga talbos. At patuloy sa pagparaya
sa mga ulap ang mga sangang yumuyukod.
Kahit mga kuliglig na sinusuklian ng kulog

ang pagbulong ng bugtong.
”Hanggang dito nalang,” palahaw ng isip.
Subalit mata’y kumakapit sa matayog
na katawan ng punong sinasalo ang ula’t

kinakanlong ang kalungkutan,
mga pisngi ng daho’y nalalahiran
ng mithi. Wala siyang ibang mailanghap
kundi alaala. Naalimpungatan

sa salita, pinalis niya ang lupa’t
iniangat ang mga kamay
sa langit, hinayaang likumin
ng mga gusgusing palad

ang mga luha ng nunong mundo.

Patak

2010-07-18T18:41:00.000+08:00

"Hamog"

Bumalong ang gunita
sa namumulang pisngi
ng isang gumamela.

"Sa Malayo"

Ang kinakalap
na luha'y alaala:
puso ko'y ulap.

Never seriously am I taken (o Ang Huling Post tungkol Nitong Putanginang Drama)

2010-06-29T22:56:00.000+08:00

Hindi ko namalayan na nakatulog ako nang hindi nakabihis. Basang basa pa sa ulan ang sinuot ko. Wala kasi akong payong. Noong bumangon ako, hindi ko magalaw ang mga kamay ko. Hindi pala ako nananghalian. Ultimo pinto ng banyo, hindi ko mabuksan. "Okay lang, ganito talaga," isip ko. Ganito naman talaga. Hanggang dito lang naman talaga ako. Makalipas ng ilang minuto, nabuksan ko ang pinto ng banyo't tumitig sa salamin. Di na masyadong pula ang mata. Matatawa na sana ako, pero pinigil ko. Habang nanghihilamos, kumulog nang malakas. "Sana ako nalang ang natamaan." Sana. Gusto kong sigawan ang langit, mapanginig ito't kikidlatin ako. Alam kong hindi ako ang nakabitin sa puso niya, o kahit sino man. Hindi ako mahalaga. Hayaan mo akong magsalita. Gusto kong sigawan ang langit, makikidlat. Subalit hindi ito mangyayari.

Ayaw ko nang mabigo. Ayaw ko nang gumising nang nakatingala.

Tatapusin ko ang lahat ngayong gabi.

Paglisan

2010-06-26T16:41:00.001+08:00

Unti-unting gumagaan ang aking mga hakbang.

At sa Inaasahan

2010-06-25T21:01:00.001+08:00

Gusto ko lang umiyak. Ngunit wala akong oras.

At sa Inaasahan

2010-06-22T23:27:00.000+08:00

Dapat laging intro ko sa tao:

"Hi, I'm Monching. I'm unrequited."

He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

2010-06-14T18:40:00.000+08:00

ni William Butler Yeats

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Bugtong

2010-06-06T19:15:00.000+08:00

May dala akong rosas noon, naglalakad patungo sa inyo. Naka superhard gel ako't Rayban na shades na hiniram ko pa sa pinsan kong umuwi mula Saudi. Pulang-pula ang mundo, kumbaga. ”Parang nasa Maxx commercial a,” sabi ng utol ko, bago ako lumabas sa bahay. ”Brip mo ba pula? Baka magtaka siyang fenk yan a,” sabi niya, tinatakpan ang bibig na tatawa na. ”Di. Sabihin ko carnation para sosyal,” pabiro kong sagot. Habang naglalakad sa highway papunta sa daan ninyo, tatlong pulang jeep ang dumaan, at may tag-iisang taong nakapula sa bawat jeep na dumaan: Isang baklang sumisigaw ng “Salad o! Salad o!” nang makita niyang nakaporma ako. ”Init pa!” sambat ko sabay nginig. Isang chickababes na nakamini-skirt, kayakap ng drayber. ”Salad o! Init pa!” sigaw ko sabay sipol. At isang matandang nakapulang bestida. Nang nasa daan na ninyo ako, naglalagas ang mga pulang talulot ng punongkahoy ng kapitbahay ninyo’t napabagal ako ng lakad, minamasdan ang paglutang nila pababa sa aspalto. Nang biglang may umiba sa tinatapakan ko. At oo, may bahid ng dugo. ”Shet mehn,” halahak ng mga tambay sa katapat na tindahan. ”Putangina!” ngatngat ko nang palihim, pinapahid ang da-shet na landmine sa damuhan sa gilid ng daan. ”The shet!” talaga ang naging dasal ko nang daglian, bago bumalik ako sa pag-usal ng pananalanging matatanggap mo itong mga rosas kong dala. The shet! talaga, bago ”Lord, sana matanggap niya ’to.” Nang nasa tarangkahan ako ng bahay ninyo, nasilip nga kita sa gilid. Totoo pala ang tsismis, double trouble ka pala. Salad o! Hinihimay-himay pa niya ang kung anong nasa loob ng palda mo, habang inilalamuyot mo ang mga kukong pula mo sa ulong niyang nakajejecap. Nagtago ako sa katapat na talahiban noon, tumulala’t nilalagom ng takipsilim. Naghihintay. Maka-ilang oras, nang lumabas na siya sa bahay mo’t nasa may isang eskinita na, doon ko na siya tinawag. ”Salad o!” sabi ko, nangingiyak, tumatawa. ”Salad o,” nang humahalakhak. Naaalala kong naging napakalutong ng ”Putangina” ko, bago siya lumingo’t naglaho sa pula ang luha’t dilim.

II.

Naglakad ako kasi wala akong pera. Putaragis, sa lahat ng dapat dalhin sa isang date, pera ang hindi ko pa nadala. Lumampas ako sa bahay namin, patungo sa kung saan. Basta malayo. Marahil gising pa ang mga tao sa daan namin. Makikita pa ang mga kamay kong duguan sa tinik ng mga rosas. Tago ang mukha ko sa mga dumaraang sasakyan. Pagdating sa siyudad (at bakit dun pa ako pumunta?), mga lagpas kalahating gabi na iyon. Malayo pala ang barangay natin, ano? Pumasok ako sa gusaling may signboard na ”Cooking ni Ina Mo!” Subalit umakyat pa ako sa huling palapag, kung saan may nakapaskil na ”Male boarder wanted.” Ewan ko ba kung bakit napapunta ako doon. Baka dahil wala akong pera. Baka dahil namumula pa rin ako. ”Tanginang mundong ito,” bulong ko sa bombilyang kumukurap sa kwartong binigay sa akin ng matandang landlady. ”Bukas mo itong bayarin, kundi ipapapatay kita ha,” biro ng ale. ”Oo naman po, ako pa mismo papatay sa sarili ko,” ngumingiti kong sinambit sa kaniya. Naroon ako, tumitingala sa kunwari wishing star na second-hand, paandap-andap, nagpapaasa ng hiling. Nagpapaasa. Naroon ako sa kuwartong dilaw ang unan, luntain ang kumot, at maputi ang mga tabing. Tanging ang pintong papunta ng bubong ang pula. Ang pintong bumubukas rin sa fire exit ng gusali. Ang putanginang pula. Ang putanginang pulang pumikit na sa kaliwang gilid ng t-shirt ko. Buti nga nang di napansin ng ale. Nang binuksan ko ang pintong pula, umalingawngaw ang buong siyudad sa daan-bulwagan ng palapag. Sa kabilang dulo ng marilim na palapag, nahagilap ko ang isang pantig ng pangalan mo, ibinulong ng mundo sa lahat ng nangungupa sa palapag na iyon, naglalaho sabay sa ungol ng aircon at electric fan.

III.

Nasa bingit pa lang ng pagbubukang-liwayway ang araw nang magising ako. Nang bumangon ako, agad kumirot ang likod ko. Magaspang ang sahig ng bubong na nagsisilbi ring sampayan ng ilang mga umuupa. Tanstang kong pulang-pula nga ang mga mata ko habang nandidilat ako. Timing nga, may limang pulang panty ang nakasampay. ”Isa bawat araw,” biro ko sa hangin. Palitan lang iyan. Linisin mo lang pagkatapos, at oks na oks na upang gamitin. Dumungaw ako sa ibaba, at walang sasakyang bumibiyahe. Walang jeep na namamasada. Sa sandali, wari humihimlay ang lahat, habang tumatagos ang araw sa ilang ulap. Nalahiran ng sepia ang mga namumula kong palad, ang naalikabukang damit ko’t pawisan kong mukha. Matapos palisin ang dumi sa suot, muli akong tumingala sa isang ulap. Humihiwa ang araw sa diwa nito. ”Buhay ka pa ba?” pangungusap ko nang mahimbing. ”Saan ka ba tumutungo?” ”Lumilisan ka rin ba?” Malay akong hindi ito kailanman sasagot, pagkat mayroon din akong hindi masasagot at hindi nais sagutin. ”Putangina!” haluyhoy ko. ”Hindi ako tulad mong pwede nalang lumayag!” ”Hindi pa ako kaluluwa,” hikbi ko. Lantad na ang bukang-liwayway noon, habang tumititig ako sa mga palad kong pinaghaluan ng alikabok, dahon, dugo, luha, pangarap. ”Hindi ako pwedeng bumalik nalang,” ngatal ko sabay kuyom. Nagulantang ako sa pagserbato ng isang jeep. Nagsisimula na’ng gumalaw ang mundo. ”Pakshet.” Muli akong sumamo sa ulap, subalit wala itong maibibigay. Wala kailanman. Walang sagot. Umaakyat na noon ang araw, at umaalingawngaw na ang mga sasakyan ng siyudad. Kinakailangang ko ring sumagot: ninanais ko ring lumayag, lumayas, lumaya.

IV.

—

If There Is Something to Desire, 9, 17, 18

2010-06-01T22:39:00.000+08:00

by Vera Pavlova

9

I broke your heart.
Now barefoot I tread
on shards.

17

Why is the word yes so brief?
It should be
the longest,
the hardest,
so that you could not decide in an instant to say it,
so that upon reflection you could stop
in the middle of saying it.

18

—Sing me The Song of Songs.
—Don't know the words.
—Then sing the notes.
—Don't know the notes.
—Then simply hum.
—Forgot the tune.
—Then press my ear
to your ear
and sing what you hear.

Sundays

2010-05-30T18:36:00.001+08:00

We kiss. In this dark, early morning, birds chirping manic across the air, the world wakes from its dewy slumber. We are barefoot on the lawn. The grass begin to sway in the breeze, and at once we are by the sea, waves coming to us by the shore, one by one. Our feet face each other, slightly. My arms enfold softly your chest, as my hands run through the smooth of your back, along your wavy hair. A tear runs through your cheek. It’s Sunday, you whisper, the sun lazily skimming through the façade of your house, tainting sepia its white and blue. Come, you say, holding my hands, I’ve breakfast for two.

kahapon, sa tondo

2010-05-22T23:47:00.000+08:00

lumagapak sa aspalto

ang ulo,

palalo. Humiwa sa mukha

ang biyak. "Hayaan mo na," sambit ng ale

"Malayo naman 'yan

sa bituka."

buntong-hininga

2010-05-22T12:28:00.000+08:00

inilahad ko

sa langit ang ngalan mo,

at naging ulap.

Flight

2010-05-17T22:34:00.000+08:00

Farewell, he whispers.

Mutely, hushes fall
over a damp floor.

The hallway echoes departure.

Above the sea, her words
wander lonely.

Liham

2010-05-09T23:22:00.000+08:00

Mahal, patawad, kung iniwan ako
ng salita. Walang katagang lumalaya
sa aking labì, o hikbing bumabalong

sa sahig. Walang iniluluwal
mula sa taludtod, kundi mahinang huni
ng puso. Patawad, at hindi kumukuyom

ang mga sandaling humayo na sa ala-ala’t
nanalaytay sa aking mga ugat, sa mga silat
ng aking mga pangarap. Mahirap

magmahal, kanilang bulong. Di ako makausad
sa mga saknong, pagkat sasayad ako sa rabaw
ng sakit. Di ako sanay sa dilim. Walang umaalalay

sa aking tinig maliban sa buntong-
hininga. Maliban sa paglanghap ng hangin,
tumatangay ng salita, habang iniuuwi sa panaginip

ang mga tinik. Sumasalangit
sabay sa alipato ng kandilang tumatanglaw
sa pagitan nitong mga kataga. Mahal,

paumanhin kung mangmang ako
sa mga pinting ng nakaraang umaahon
sa mata, bilang mumunting luha’t uha.

Tanaga't Dalit

2010-05-07T20:39:00.000+08:00

1. Tanaga (Tudlikan)

Noong ako'y nahuling
Nakainom ng basi,
Bibig ko'y humuhuni:
Puso ika'y magmuni!

*

Ang Diyos, natutuwa
Sa ganda. Sa salitang
Dalisay kung lumikha
At sa pagparam, handa.

2. Dalit (Pantigan)

Humulagpos sa salita
Ang liwanag. At napigta,
Sa hiwaga nitong dagta,
Aking isip. Lumilinta.

*

Kung ika'y magpabakuna
Buhay ay maipamana.
Pagkat katawa'y nauna
Sa puso. O, h'wag lang sana!

Surface

2010-05-06T00:57:00.001+08:00

I am greatly appalled by the people I am with.

Todos Los Santos, 1968

2010-04-30T20:30:00.000+08:00

ni Rio Alma

Di na iyon ang dating todos los santos.
Lalo na sa tubong-San Miguel - lumaki't
Nakasaksi ng maraming gayong araw
Sa San Miguel. Naro'n pa rin ang simbolo
Ng kandila, ngunit ngayon bawat luha'y
Naaagad na dalangin sa gusgusing
Palad ng mga nag-aagawang musmos.
Ayos na rin bawat puntod at lapida
(Kahit minsan sa santaon, masasabing
Ang naiwa'y di lumimot sa yumao.)
Karnabal ng mga ngiti at batian;
Karosa ng mga damit at sapatos.
Ito ba'y timpalak? Oras ng ligaya?
Tanga'y sandwits o kaya'y Pepsi, biruin
At k'wentuhan ang balana - magkaka-gang,
Magkaklase, o magkamag-anak na di
Nagkitang matagal. Ang tao ay agos,
May ponda sa daan, parang pistang-bayan.
At pagsilim, sa paghulaw ng ingay at
Alikabok, huling luha ng kandila
Ay namuo at lumamig sa paanan
Ng anghel na marmol. Kapagkuwan, araw
Ay lumisang kasaliw ng kiming usal.

Kay Atty. Jude Bontol. Pumayapa nawa.

Sa Damuhan

2010-04-22T23:19:00.000+08:00

yumapos niyang sulo
ang liglig, mga tulo'y
bumalong parang dugo:
sinta, 'to ba'y pagguho?

Quarters

2010-04-21T22:50:00.000+08:00

Here, where bed is. Photos line, as there

A blanket; here. Bed marks wither cotton

Into ground seams: You, [you.] When I sleep

Here lingering, a frame here where bed

Is a photo: Lela jolting from a supermarket

Door, your red hat tassels, just having let

Go. My thumb on your sleeve; my shivers

Fresh against (where) your marks as they are

A blanket. Here. Where fabric lingers. Now,

As they you, waiting. It is where our bed

Is: where there, you are: where supposed

Torpe

2010-04-20T20:59:00.000+08:00

sa laging may pasubali
si Tadhana'y nakangiwi--
sa parating nasasawi
nang 'di nagbakasakali.

Ngumingiti na naman siya sa salamin

2010-04-19T21:49:00.000+08:00

Ngumingiti na naman siya sa salamin. Bahagyang lihis ang pisngi, habang sumasapat sa mga mata ang mahapding balat. Kailangan kitang makausap, bulong niya. Kahapon,

noong dumudungaw na ang buwan sa kapatagan, hindi humuhuni ang lalang. Isang malimlim na katahimikan lamang ang yumapos sa malimlim na dilim. Nagsisimulang inanino ang mga tanglaw ng kalawakan sa lusak. Inaambunan ng liwanag ang talahiban. Nagsasayawan ang damong cogon. Doon

namin itinanim ang mga bituing umaalalay sa amin. Na sana’y sa pagtingala, siya’y makikita, at sa pagdungaw sa mundo, hindi palay, ngunit bituin. Maliliwanagan daw ang tahimik na mundo.

Subalit nakagigitla ang katahimikan. Tunog-daluhong ang mga buntong-hininga. Iniluluwal ang mga salita. Pikit-mata, niwika niya: Mahal, nasaan ka ba?

Retrato

2010-04-18T20:12:00.000+08:00

Umiindak ang isang bato
                           sa rabaw. Humihina

sa bawat

          lukso. Simbilog ng bakas
               ang maalwang

    buwan. Matapos

malunod, umiwan
      sa ilog

ang maputlang alulos.

It is warm as I leave my country

2010-04-17T19:57:00.000+08:00

It is warm as I leave my country. Where the sea greets
a beach beaten with heat, footsteps mark. Slowly,
waves heave its traces back into its body,
groove through the water scintillating
across earth, concealing

secrets. Where once you and I strolled across
the shore, remnants linger densely
amid a breeze from another shore
of another place. Here, we dwell, our words
enfolding in their space the sun

cutting through sandcastles. Past
you say, pointing where we were
when we first kissed. There slowly, a castle
succumbs to the sea, the wooing leading
its chambers somewhere in the ocean

floor, slowly sinking from the surface. Warm
as I leave my country, I think. Outside
the rush of air through the plane as we pass away
from a pack of clouds. Past, recalling
you. Sun piercing through

the windows of a sandcastle. The canticle of your eyes;
How, as the sea, we hymn how once we were still, past
the present we elude. How presently we are gripped
by the past. How we recall once we were

not ourselves. It is warm as I leave,
cold as the engine’s whirr that stills
breath, space loosened only
by whispers. How cold outside
the clouds. How, in every, you are veiled,

peeking, your tears suddenly falling from
the sky as I leave where the sea greets
our traces lonely. It is as though we are
lightly on the sand, crumbling
as waves trace us back to the sea, cradling

our past, warmed as though enfolded
in a blanket. I look at the sea and think
of sadness. Not in the stars,
yet blanketing the earth, flowing
though from my cheek. Below,

the ocean grooves lonely to our hymn.

Sa Bukid

2010-04-17T00:48:00.000+08:00

Sumasayad sa lupa ang laylayan ng langit.

Mula sa kanbundukan,
dumudungaw ang mga bituing

inaanino ang kislap
sa lusak.

Nananalamin sa daigdig
ang bulang sagwang

kasinghimbing at alwan
sa nagsasayawang palay.

Sa kapatagan, wari bituin ang itinanim.

Lumutang mula sa palad

2010-04-15T19:40:00.000+08:00

Lumutang mula sa palad
Ang uli-uling buhangin.

Bumabaybay sa aplaya
Tangay ng hanging malamig.

Dadapo ang mga butil
Sa mahimbing na parang at

Mangingislig sa panahon
Bilang daang umaalimuom.

Sa Aplaya

2010-04-14T22:33:00.000+08:00

Naghahabulan tayo sa aplaya habang bahagyang natatabunan ang araw ng mga ulap, nang makita kong isang pawikang napadpad sa dalampasigan. Sa buhanging kumikindat, sinkislap ng plastik sa kaniyang leeg ang gintong kuwintas mo. Kasing lalim ng kaniyang mga mata ang umaalong karagatan. Noong yumuko ka

upang kumilatis, tumingala ito sa iyo at nagkasalubong ang iyong mga mata. Biglang bumugso mula sa karagatan, at sa iyong pagkahumaling sa lawak, sa ginhawa ng hangin, pilit mong inalis ang supot ng McDo sa kaniyang paa. Nang tiningnan mo ang loob ng supot, tumambad

ang isang batang maliit: maalwan, lukot na lukot at tumititig sa sariling sinapupunan. Hindi tumitingala. Kadalasan, hindi ko inaalala ang sumunod: lumalabas ang likidong itim sa barusong balat, kinukumot ang dalampasigan. Bituin, hiyaw mo. Paano nga ba

makahuhulagpos sa paglaho, isip ko noon, sabay tingin sa pawikang bumabalik sa umaalong karimlan, habang, mula sa bibig, narurungisan ng samu’t saring bahagi ng kaluluwa ko ang buhangin, kung maglalaho na tayo bago pa man lamang makahuhulagpos?

I am trying to write a poem for you,

2010-04-13T21:32:00.000+08:00

I am trying to write a poem for you,
Of flowers and meadows that spring
From this page, into your heart
Where I bow heavily
As the fruits that humbly carry
Their weight, brought by a farmer's
Toiling. I write meadow, yet
What spurns from my mind
Is the breadth of a road
Cars piled as would the heads
Of maize during a summer day.
River, I write over. I am straining
To hear the birds, but instead I brave
The lyrics of a song I used to sway to
When I was a child: Love brings back
Old heartaches. A radio blasts across
The street, so I cannot hear the hymns
Of branches rubbing against the sharp
Rays of the sun. Here, in my study,
I cannot bear to give you
This drabble melding
With the heat of the streets. You
With the grace I pray for. This,
For there would be no other means
Of writing you, Other
than saying Here I am
Writing a poem for you,

plagued by blindness, i skim

2010-04-09T09:06:00.000+08:00

plagued by blindness, i skim
the hem of your dress, find that
where once your nape lay smooth

against the soft rays of the sun
a harshness grows, a having to
hide what brings me to you. No,

not there, you say, so from
the smooth of your hem, I feel
your wrist, a fat watch arching

your arm like a cuff. Cold,
I say under my breath. Beautiful
you mumble to my ear. Love

where once we touched and rooted,
here in the softness of the sun
here lingers on my lips I ask:

Where are you?

In the Airport

2010-04-01T22:57:00.001+08:00

He takes her hand.

Below her nape, hushes
sink at a gate.

The hallway mutes for departure.

Over the sea, their whispers
wander lonely.

Sipol

2010-03-25T16:37:00.001+08:00

ang simoy

na nagpapatingkad

sa saya

ng iyong

ngiti, ang puyong

humihigop

sa aking

kaluluwa,

patungo

sa saya

mong pula Ay

(sapak)

ang bango

pala

Note

2010-03-18T09:29:00.000+08:00

I am remembering how often my mother would say: "Smile--"
How we ache for our worlds.

A London Thoroughfare. 2 A.M.

2010-03-13T09:59:00.000+08:00

by Amy Lowell

They have watered the street,
It shines in the glare of lamps,
Cold, white lamps,
And lies
Like a slow-moving river,
Barred with silver and black.
Cabs go down it,
One,
And then another,
Between them I hear the shuffling of feet.
Tramps doze on the window-ledges,
Night-walkers pass along the sidewalks.
The city is squalid and sinister,
With the silver-barred street in the midst,
Slow-moving,
A river leading nowhere.

Opposite my window,
The moon cuts,
Clear and round,
Through the plum-coloured night.
She cannot light the city:
It is too bright.
It has white lamps,
And glitters coldly.

I stand in the window and watch the
moon.
She is thin and lustreless,
But I love her.
I know the moon,
And this is an alien city.

Note

2010-03-04T19:10:00.000+08:00

I am beginning to dislike couplets.

Rolyo

2010-02-24T21:55:00.000+08:00

Flor, your neck, as it is, gashed for, you, lain down, a tree

Withering, I, these blotches, skim, elegy, & plight, for you

There, rising, as mist, sojourning, ghostly, lingering, Flor

Into, this film, this, heat, blotched, severed, they, marvel,

Note

2010-02-20T17:47:00.001+08:00

I leave you.

On the bridge, my letter falls.
Our prayer unfolds

And blesses your feet
As the river rushes. Silently

Contrition marks a street.

Supplication

2010-02-17T22:28:00.000+08:00

This, to you, urgently. Somewhere there is a man who tried
    to stop a truck with flowers. Mario was his name. Merry was he.
    Somewhere a skull

    paints the town red as a flower kisses
    the skull of a tank.

How else can this we remedy? What to do?

I, for you,
    this, as elsewhere a flower falls
    from the nozzle of a rifle, as fireworks graze
                               a hot noon—There

its petals streak the earth,
    a short spree
        between the rosary palm which
              lays a wilting rose against the sun

    and his friends laying it on stone.

2010-02-13T11:27:00.000+08:00

Bibitawan kata paglublob kata sa alangaag.

Sunday Mornings in the Shade

2010-02-13T11:14:00.001+08:00

feather,my,strand,of
    ,white,hair

,leaf,mine,body,of
    ,a,blanket

,Lying.And,you,are,
    green;white(on)flesh

.Feelsyour
    ,body:

    shade.I’m
dancing,Beautiful—

lingering

2010-02-13T11:06:00.001+08:00

i am staring into the window
until our mango tree becomes two. a little faded
but visibly, fruit bows and weighs
twice, as texture crosses my breathing. (i am

staring into our interior space, and twice i
see you hanging off a branch as though ripeness
were heavier. a little hoarse my call—as

again a ripe yellow collides
with murky brown) Suddenly,

lonely is our tree, as twice over
liquid becomes my gaze—