Happy New Year

The air, quite cold, quite crisp, whispers around the old pillars that pushes upwards the dilapidated roof at the front of my mother's home.  Bursts of fireworks wash the night sky, their numbers more scant than last year's and the year before.  What didn't decrease in number are the loud popping sounds from rebintador and sinturon ni hudas. Beside me my nephew and niece complain how little the amount of fireworks we will be lighting to welcome 2012.  In a house filled with grown ups, we forgot there were kids.  

My brothers opted to welcome the new year in dreamland.  4 hours ago they gulped the bad memories this old year has brought with beer.  It's funny how the line of houses in our street are somber, their front lawns enveloped in the dark.   Years ago they had the habit of competing whose house had the best fireworks.  Now they're just -- well, sleeping.

Midnight strikes, and the whole sky is ablaze. Some of them come out to watch flowers of light exploding in the black, point at which one burned brighter, or which one bloomed with more color.  The blossoms of fire that sprout from faraway houses, a mall or two, is indeed a spectacle to watch for free. Are these the same people I knew for years?

Then the tipping point, when all those swirls and fantastic display will slowly die down. The seconds of burning, of release, will eventually cease.  Everyone comes back into their houses with the memory the sky has shared unselfishly.

And then I see the futility of why I'm trying to make sense out of this.  My neighborhood has changed, no point for me to rationalize what I missed. I bring the laptop inside the house, to the family who wasn't here last Christmas.  I tell myself a new year has come, and they are here.

They are here, and all will be well.

Poetry Exercise: Free Association

I don't know if I am doing this correctly, but I read somewhere that one of the exercises in learning how to write poetry is what they call "Free Association"  (please feel free to correct me as I'm not really sure what I'm talking about here).  I think the objective is to select some words or phrases and try to make a poem out of them.  I did one yesterday and  listed words I read from an article:

dust
cobwebs
white walls and floors
cabinets painted white
broom
gray clouds
return

I came up with this work --


Cleaning House


On your return I carefully swept
some yesterdays that you were gone 
out of the door, out
where the cobwebs of gray clouds spread on the sky
and sunlight caught like flies and dusts.
The broom scoured meticulously
the white walls and floors,
and the feather duster brushed as best as it can
the corners of cabinets painted white
to shoo away that insect solitude
crawling on all eights.

Shoot me some of your thoughts.  :-)

Happy Happy Holidays

There were so many "firsts" for me this Christmas:  first time I saw a champagne of fireworks burst out from the outlines of Rockwell Makati's skyscrapers; first time I wrapped sighs around presents for people who are islands and islands away;  first time I missed children mutilating Christmas carols; first time I tread glumly lit streets and marveled at windows of houses where the laughter of families shone out along with the blinking Christmas lights; first time I saw a mom cradling a kid with encephalitis waiting for Christmas eve in an overpass, her hands extended for alms to people who are rushing home; first time the city and I spent Christmas, and how it hummed its warmth to me while I silently answered with an inner hysteria.

Christmas is really about family, about getting together, isn't it?  Too bad I decided to celebrate it all by myself.  Me and my shadow didn't get along quite well.