New Year's Eve

New year's eve.
The drizzle
has filled up
the gutters.
Firecrackers
are all wet
for bursting,
no sparkles
to garden
our front lawn.

The kitchen
is in great
dire state of
disrepair.
The worn sink
is molding
where the white
dry cement
used to fill.
We do with
the measly
morsels we
preciously
have cooked for
our pleasure.

In his room,
Papa's cough
is our sole
noisemaker
in the house
to ward off
the past year's
odious ghosts.
He tries hard
to be man
of the house
one more time
with what's left
of spaces
in his lungs,
energy
to heave from
his belly
all his last
convincing,
fatherly
final boom.

Jom and Mei
keep themselves
in the room
recalling
past new years
were better
than this one.

My brothers,
we blow out
those trumpets,
wake what new
tales will come
breezing through
our small house,
but our house
tells us now
that it's tired,
waiting which
old stories
are ready
to be shelved.
It has lost
some hopeful
perspectives
this first step
of the year
while the sky
is keeping
behind deep
mats of clouds
all its stars.

Drought

The water turned itself to heat
leaving the land flaking to dust.
He wonders how the crops will grow
emerald and robust
when the brown color of burning
has crawled its way from the tips
of leaves down to the stem,
the demarcation of struggling
to survive has become smaller
and smaller as summer progresses.

Resolute he will never be
broken and seeking refuge
in an onomatopeic, scalding city
subjugated to a career
having the sun-loved backs of his palms
parallel to the ground.
He prays for something biblical
to redirect a river's flow
and quench the acres of dried
desertifying land.

But the river itself is thirsty
having lost its being a river -
So he ponders displacing to somewhere
water is still water.
Then again, there's nowhere to go
when the heat, cloudless and unyielding,
burning slowly whatever it touches,
bearing the heavy belly of its air
over the earth, borderless as the wind,
smugly blows around his archipelago.



San Pablo, Laguna
March 12, 2010