Breather

Outside, we arranged ourselves
by the brand of cigarettes we loved
to play with our mouths, pushed
the thin smoke with our breaths,
watched them as they silkily rose
and vanished in congested city air -
hints of translucent white
we will never remember.

In between breaths, chatters -
how the call went, how slow
in the head the caller was, who's
going out with whom, who's not
out of the closet, how many
deductions we got from the last
monitoring, how come you hit
your conversion and i can't -
filled the certain spaces
we stood on like wafts
of mutterings and mumblings
ascending with volatile
indecisive patterns.

At the ground, I realized
time when we crushed the little
embers that burned with our chatter,
the sinless asphalt an unwary victim
of soles that twisted and murdered
some little fire that gamely lit
from the opposite edge,  unaware
of how little time it had
between our conversations.

PANTOUM: The Nativity

Too late for Christmas, hehehe
made some edits. 01/06/12, 3:15 pm



Over a stable, humble and small,
A choir of angels sang with the stars.
The little baby slept quiet as night
as shepherds and kings gathered from afar.

A choir of angels sang with the stars.
A mother welcomed the gathering crowd.
As shepherds and kings gathered from afar
The father hushed the giddy throng.

A mother welcomed a gathering crowd
under the light of the bright North Star.
The father hushed the giddy throng
while the wind whistled a happier song.

Under the light of the bright North Star
A little baby slept quiet as night
while the wind whistled a happier song
over a stable, humble and small.

Dead End

Here, I can relate to the blue
cushions of my cubicle, my blue mug,
blue purse scant of coins - that color
cool as mourning, resting on thick plywood
like some unwanted hue.

Out there, I would not understand blue
but a hot spread of sky,
thick iridescence of happiness -
infinite blanket of morning
covering the city.

So this is the event horizon of my future
staring at the throb of an electric eye,
leaving fingerprints or what can betray me
on the black keys, dusts of time swirling
from the beams of an old structure, collapsing
from within, and white is light from the ceiling
flickering in uncertainty.

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.

RANT: How Come Donald Sutherland Has Never Won An Oscar?

Video above is a scene from the film Little Murders

Canadian actor Donald Sutherland has been around the industry for, I think, half a century.  He has made significant acting contributions to films such as The Dirty Dozen (1967), MASH (1970), Klute (1971), The Day of the Locust (1975), Fellini's Casanova (1976), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), the Academy Award winning Ordinary People (1980), JFK (1991), Six Degrees of Separation (1993), and Pride and Prejudice (2005). 

In some of the films listed above he has been overlooked for Oscar nominations, and I wonder why. Just the scene above should merit the Oscar trophy.

After the fire

PHOTO taken from the Philippine Daily Inquirer, September 2, 2010. Caption reads "A GIRL looks at the charred remains of her house, one of at least 50 which were razed when a fire hit Agham Road in Quezon City."  Photo taken by Raffy Lerma.  

     As I was reading an issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer dated September 2, 2010, a photo from the Metro section caught my attention.  The photo had a girl standing under what was left of the door frame.  She stared further to the horizon,  subdued and forlorn.  In front of her was the carcass of what looked like the wooden beams of a room, or probably another house.  Remains of burnt slippers scattered along with some clothes and ashes.  I doubt she will be able to hug the stuff toy that looked as if it was tipped over in surrender.  I wondered what it was in the horizon that she was staring at.   Whatever it was, she will have to carry it along with her dreams.

    This picture reminded me of a poem I wrote two years ago. The inspiration happened in Malibay, September 12.  We attended a christening, and the day was deplete of sunlight.  Thick smoke rose at least 10 blocks away.  I did not ponder at the disaster because the day was reserved for celebrating a child's entry into Christianity.  It was only when we passed by the neighborhood four hours later when I was able to survey the extent of the fire.  Pails were left on the streets.  Neighbors tried to console themselves about certain things they might be able to scour.  Firefighters complained how hard it was to negotiate their fire engines through the cramped streets. A mother and her daughter sat at the sidewalk.  They stared further to the horizon, the same way the little girl on the picture did.

   I added lots of liberties in the poem, trying to make a picture of a scene that might have happened while the fire razed and that no camera was able to take.


Malibay, September 12


The day a lit cigar consumed their house
the sky was purple and heavy with clouds.
The pails were flying. The water was wasted.
The fire engine was two miles away and stuck in traffic.
Her mother held on to some salvaged photos.
Her father was drinking somewhere with the neighbors.
She tried to burst what the others cannot hold back
as their memories danced away with the embers.
And finally, someone began to pray
and wished everything would still be well.
The wind grew colder, and the thunder threatened,
but that day the rain did not fell.

CHANT: Poems about the Typhoon

Typhoon Juan (international code name Megi) flattened the northern parts of Luzon with sustained winds of up to 260 km/h (if I remember the reports well) or probably 230 km/h (as per information from wikipedia.org as of October 24, 2010).  We felt its presence here in Manila with the sudden darkness that enveloped the entire city, and the strong rain that flooded the street in front of our apartment.  Prior to its arrival and during its stay it made me write two poems.  Enjoy!


TYPHOON

We thought it would never come:

the dark clouds,
the rumble of an orange
world turning purple,
the slaps of light flashing
over the wet roofs and streets.

It opened its allegro
with drizzles, light gusts,
and the birds
sketching circles with their wings
slicing the serene
with piercing solos.

It compelled the birds to exit
towards the line of light
at the south and let
the symphony rise
muscular
from the orchestra of clouds.

It took the cicadas by surprise -
their choruses hovered
sudden from the trees,
the notes stuck
from the restless palms of leaves.

How it armed its way
through the city
with the unpredictable
drumbeats of rain.
How it bullied the tranquil
trebles of a sunset.
How it put us
 in our proper places -
spaces of surrender
echoing the sound
of our breaths
waiting for the music to end.



JUAN

In the higher floors you pull the horizon
closer to your heart
and watch the movement of the restless panorama - 
how the storm whirls the tails of clouds
to touch skyscrapers' scalps.

Sometimes its raindrops are the size of your fingers.
Sometimes its beastly wind tries to pull
the rusted roofs from their houses. 
Sometimes it howls, temperamental monster that it is,
you pray the grumbling walls won't fall.

Sometimes you pierce the air a sharp whistle -
a needle-pointed sound might calm it down.

But it swirls on, and you look farther
in the further gray and tributaries of lightning
hoping you were where the sky is so silent
and the world hums.

NOTE: I changed the title of the first poem, from "Symphony" to "Typhoon".  I think the new title is more appropriate.
Revised Juan, 5/9/2012. 

The Former National Bird

The Maya bird: an oriole, a finch, or a sparrow?
Above picture: a tree sparrow. (source: wikipilipinas.org)

The bird that perched on the sill

chirped a few notes with the creek

sang with the hum of the sun

and flew with the whistle of wind.

That bird, tiny and brown

as dried leaves feathering the huts

had a name so familiar

so common as grass,

I kept forgetting what it was.

PANT: How a vending machine tells you to get your drink from the water cooler

A vending machine discharges a can of soda from its square anus as long as you feed it four pieces of 5 peso coins, or a used 20 peso bill.  It has two mouths to devour the money, and an eye the size of a grown man's finger flashing digits that tell you if it's satisfied with the amount you have fed it or if it wants more because the numbers don't add up.  If fed well it immediately excretes the fecal metal.  Your hands embrace the chill and the sweat of the tin can shit, where you pull the tab off its aluminum scalp and drink more of the shit.

Like humans, a vending machine can also experience stress. When it does, it becomes constipated.  When it becomes constipated, you have a problem.

Sometimes we bully the vending machine to give us our shit.  If giving it a shake our human strength can muster doesn't work, kicking it at the side might force it to crap. Sometimes we wish we could claw the damn soda crap from inside through the dispensing slot. 

If the vending machine and the universe has conspired against our desire for a carbonated gulp and belch, we surrender our names and the amount of money we lost to the security guard's ledger, filled with the scribbles of other disappointed individuals.  You can almost see their disappointment from the weight of the strokes of their cursives on thin paper.

Finally, you get your drink from the water cooler, and you experience a certain enlightment about water: how it is so much better, just by being its own usual water.

Bauhaus Punk

Bauhaus is a German school that popularized the design approach of radically simplifying the form for a more rational and functional look.  The idea applied to architecture, sculpture, visual arts and other art forms.

Punk rock is a music genre that burst out in the mid 70's  to challenge the perceived excessiveness of mainstream music. Punk rock has a do-it-yourself approach, and in the words of The Ramones drummer Tony Ramone, is "pure, stripped down, no bullshit rock and roll."

Bauhaus Punk is an animation concept I'm working with that maintains the minimal, stripped down ideology of both Bauhaus and Punk rock. Wish me luck.

Poem: Fruit

Tasting the fruit is like tasting the place
the faraway rustic region that made it real -
hints of its wind, scent of the earth,
sweet juice of the rain that nurtured it.
I wonder the tree that brought it forth
or the name of the land that fed that tree.
I wonder the landscape, the arboreal clumps,
the dust of the road that wraps it in summer.
A way I can learn is how my tongue
reads the taste of its watery flesh.
Bits of itself might tell me its world
different than the giant trees of stone
and glass of my world, where fruits grow
inside, have opposable thumbs, learn
to walk upright, dream of other places
and write, and taste each other's fruits.
The world of the fruit I have in my hand
must have a fog that crawled from the mountains,
a fog that was once the fruit of the sky
called cloud, plucked by the wind, and silently
made its way to the orchard, dispersing
as it passes those tiny fruits of water
called dew, each having a memory
of the sumptuous troposphere where they came.
Tasting the fruit is like tasting the peel
of atmosphere that surrounds the earth
which is like the fruit of a tree called Sun,
gravity rooted in the wide universe.

Poem: The Fool

The fool cocoons himself
letting the moulting decide his fate.

In the garden, others
clink their glasses and lightly
laugh with the wind.
Butterflies of different colors, they spar
their loftiness under the sun.
Temperament weather, it hovers
like a cautious calamity over everyone.

I know why I'm seeing this, why
I'm here, but I'm not with them
like the fool, oblivious, blessedly
a fool. Or probably it pained him
to learn how late it has been
to understand the atmosphere,
he weaves himself a veritable coffin
spun with strands of decisions
and indecisions, compacted
by sticky filaments of miscalculations -
big words, all his, genuinely
his, nobody else's.

I try nudging him to wake, tell
the iridiscent things i caught
from the flaps of their dresses
and coattails, but he doesn't slip
from the pattern of stars bursting
brightly in his dreams.

I know why I'm seeing this. I'm awake
and resolved to the fate of seeing
others rescued by what they have known.
Or probably it pains me more not having
another fool to be with, while around
the branches, nibbling the greens
and some little specks of sun,
my dream still crawls.

RANT: Yet another poem

I remember writing this out of memory. It happened before I graduated. I recalled the image of that day and tried to stay true to it. The things that happened afterwards, well that's the story i'm sharing to make me less bitter :-)


Breakwaters - March, 1999

The time we tried to escape the world
for water and endless skies,
I stood behind the knee-high wall
by the city's side.

You were by the bay's. "Come over here
near the waves. We came to feel the splash,"
you reminded behind your courage.
What I did not understand held my feet.
The seafoams laughed at the few inches
my face could have felt the spray.

Years later, I got a mail from where
your chasing the horizon has brought you,
the blue ink telling me about the lonely
golden spruce you saw glowing
in the middle of a forest,
or that the rainbows were different
than the ones here at home, wish I was there.
We came to feel the splash, you remind me again
handwritten on powdery-white paper.

Tell me how are our lives now different?
How does light flow in your part of the world?
Is it glum, a subdued white, and flickering
like mine's - deplete of vibrance, struggling
to be relevant before it is swallowed
entirely by the dark?
The seafoams are laughing again
from a flash of memory snapped by my mind.
I can still taste what I did not taste -
the salts of their infinite fingers.

Beetles

leftover tracks of bark beetles, from wikipedia.org

They know their lumber very well
in the forest, they leave trails of themselves.
Some other days, you're sure they were there
carrying specks of light their wings can bear.
What you're not sure is where they are now:
little friends of your polaroid and introspection.
Creatures of this earth, conspicuous and minute,
have a way of moving under the sky.
You're lucky if you know their secrets.
Being left alone - some of them want it.
Hiding is a game they play with a watchful sun.
Wondering where they are sprout like mushrooms
from time to time, in your mind.

Three Poems: Water, Water, and Water

These past few months I was able to write poems with a water theme. The first one is about things people find at sea. The second one is about the lack of it. The third is about a certain insecurity. Enjoy!


Calatagan

The tide receded with the sun
and revealed the navel of the shore
where we found the scraps of dreams
our childhood had been looking for.

I took a liking to the waves
surrendering further to the pull
of a faint full moon in a late afternoon,
dragging the fishnets perilously
to deeper waters. Their laughter,
drowning but never painful, something
i as a child would have wallowed in -
alone in the ebb, unafraid of the taunts,
comprehending what the waves say to the sands
in a language only they can understand.

Isabel squirmed at the sea slugs
thrusting through the seaweeds.
We feigned not noticing her hands
cautiously fan out between her thighs.
Light piercing through clear water,
her reflection fragmented into puddles,
she quietly gathers the dead
starfishes where they have scattered.
Nobody but the sea can remind her
what she doesn't want to remember.

You finally saw the line of glimmer
glowing with seawater on the scallop skins
throwing you back at the time your fingers
fit the holes of bullet shells.
The shimmer that you wanted then
made itself ready for your hands
spanning wider, much bigger, more
voracious, grasping memories
like rainbows marooned in the sky
after the rain: there but never there.



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 sunloved 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.




Pictures of Fishes

Here's what I snapped
discreetly from the pond:

a koi
tattooed from birth
with what looks like
a citrus orange
map of China
accidentally spilt
on its silver skin.

Here's what you caught
with a white flash:

the name
of a flowerhorn
painted as if
with horsehair brush
permanently on its blood
-red scales.

You tell me your desire
to compare skies
and horizons in different
parts of the world;

I tell you my disillusions
of having people
not know my name.

Let's trade.

You're taking too long to realize

Buboy. My main protagonist. One year of conceptualizing the story arc. One year of inputting characters and writing character sketches. One year of visualizing the different settings. A lifetime of putting it on paper. Here we go!

Poem

I wrote this in the office when we were not allowed to bring notebooks and pens - things you can do while you glance sideways to see if someone's going to catch you using forbidden materials :-)


Pantoum: Shirt

My shirt dances at the clothesline
to the hum of the warm wind.
The smell of detergent wafts
with the whiff of tropical flowers.

To the hum of the warm wind,
the scent travels farther
with the whiff of tropical flowers
while its thin fabric flaps.

The scent travels farther
over fields and summer plains.
While its thin fabric flaps,
the aroma of wilderness clings.

Over fields and summer plains
my shirt dances at the clothesline.
The aroma of wilderness clings.
The scent of detergent wafts.

RANT: the election is this coming monday, and i lost my registration slip

I remember the registration line in the municipal hall as if it was, well, something that happened recently while I drowned myself in a 450-page compilation book: twenty rows of chairs, an aisle in the middle dividing the rows into two columns, twenty chairs each; the procession of people worming around the hall like an impatient serpent; babies crying every now and then; chatters of strangers asking whom they can lend money from for the holidays; eight computers located near the foot of the stage of the auditorium; two tables surrounded by five verifiers each, one of whom is wearing a headscarf which she eventually turned into a neck scarf to look more fashionable; and reminders that echo from all the four corners of the large hall on where to fall in line, where not to fall in line, who should fall in line, why are we falling in line, where the hell is the line.

I got my registration slip after 5 hours of waiting, and was quite disappointed at the piece of paper. It looked more like a scratch with one of the edges torn carelessly from the rest of its long sheet. The number scribbled by the floor supervisor was done impatiently, her affixed signature was signed as if she was practicing how to perfect it. My Mini-Stop receipts looked more presentable.

I cannot blame myself that I lost it since it looked inconsequential. I did try not to remove it from my wallet, but when my wallet bulged with too much unnecessary papers and receipts I must have stashed it somewhere where unnecessary papers and receipts are kept, which are eventually thrown in the trash bag hanging from the doorknob of my room.

Now I'm worried that if I show up in the precinct and I won't be able to produce that paper, I will not be allowed to vote - no indelible ink on my forefinger to show to the office as proof that I had to get the unpaid time off to exercise suffrage. I will go home feeling disenfranchised by my carelessness (a word i'm using liberally for the people who thought of the idea of just giving out a paper strip as proof that one can vote 9 eternal months after registration, and for my stupidity).

 Maybe if I make a scene, like bawl like an eight-year old who dropped his ice cream, they may let me vote :-)