Landscape with Cypresses

Photo reference: Tuscany, Italy

For the background, a wide stroke
of undecipherable blue:
for the foreground, dabs of red poppies
dotting the quick brush strokes of grass.
The clouds, patches of bright white
and light grays, temperamental
over the layers of land that rolls
in different shades of green.
Mountains at the distance
can have the same color as the sky;
roofs of scattered meadow houses
can shimmer cloud white.
And the crowd of cypresses, darker
green - dark as secrets,
and tall as beehive hairs of queens
conferencing under the sun,
trading gossips.

Anticipating

My gaze traveled carefully at your profile - hunched, world-weary and heavy with sighs, the scrotum of your fantasies shriveled and dried. The shadow of your hand moved reluctantly from the table. The crushed apple bits crowded comfortably in your glass. Your fingers hugged the cold of the fruit juice while it lasted.

Then I imagined you reminding yourself of his ghost on the opposite chair.  He would've made a joke about the height of your newly-colored hair.  Your wrinkles would have laughed easily with the crescent of your smile.  He would have forked the silence from the table to his mouth.  How easy it would have been to hear
the boom of his laughter, the deep heavy breaths -- if only he was there.

I'd like to know how it felt - the hardness of his metal chair.  But you'll have none of it or any others - you'd rather have air.

Sino-Envy

Their customs are not ours
and you're barely fair-skinned
while I look more jihadist
than tycoon scion.
But we visit their temples,
wave  incense sticks
and pray to their ancestors
for guidance and luck.
You've never learned how
to write your name in calligraphy,
never learned how to thrust
the sword to the air
with a certain art,
have portions of your body
punctured strategically
with pore-thin needles,
nor speak in the lilting
staccatos of their varied
native languages.
I marvel at the nine eyes
around my wrist,
and the triple infinity, gold-plated,
keychain in my pocket.
Sometimes I wish I have
a necklace with a pendant
of an alligator's teeth
or an unused bullet
to gift you back.
One thing we agree on
are the noodles,
and February won't be the same
without mother's moon cakes
fried golden with battered eggs.
You prefer chopsticks
than the spoons and forks,
and at night our room
is drowned by the smell
of jasmine rising
above a candle flame.
And yes, you consult our futures
through I-chings and fortune books
and check compatibilities
by the animal years of our conception
and what elements differ us
but wood nurtures fire.
The small percent of my lineage
is an interesting discussion
since you're disappointed how bereft
your ancestry is of the oriental
men who sailed in junks
and bartered history, traded culture -
but then again, you're often
more Chinese than
my Chinese friends are.

"Fight"

The time I learned the word "fight",
my fists punched the air
not knowing where to hit.

The time I learned the meaning
of the word "fight",
I was 10 years behind my dreams
and the world cautiously moved on.

The time I learned to "fight",
my eyes lost their dangerous glints
and my wrists were more limp.

Then I fought.
A jab released won't refrain the pain;
Drips of blood won't crawl back the wound.

A decade of my timeline became a scar.

There is a lesson to learn here.

At The Marketplace

He stood in front of her
and the apples, the Granny Smiths
arranged in rows, pointing at the ones
that have more luster in the ancient heat
and asked the question as old
as human civilization - How much?
She shooed the flies with a sway of her arms
and let him stood in front of the apples
like some kind of thought that didn't register.

My Time

My time is when the world hushes,
when the moon parades herself
over the roofs that keep quiet
for their inhabitants.
When the street occasionally grumbles
along with the sick cough of an old engine.

My time is when the neighborhood dogs bark
caution in the shadows, at some quivering of leaves
no breeze has touched on a windless night,
at the stretch of a street as empty as my pocket.

My time sneaks like a cockroach on the floor,
studying the corners,  looking for holes
in the wall to crawl in,
or cracks in the window to scamper out.

My time is a cooler temperature, sweats rarely pearl
on my brown skin.

My time. It has served me  - graying my hair,
making my skin more paper thin.  
I've married it for 10 years,
aware of the repercussions, the sleeplessness,
the back and forth steps in the living room and kitchen.

It's a servile partner, supportive of my habit
of twiddling a thought, committing it on the page
into lines and noisy lines  that don't mean much.

The Other Continent

The sound. It is painful here.

The gray world turns ice to ice.

Rain from the sky fall hard as stones

and cluster over the ocean,

silvering with cold white.

The wind is never light -

its density pounds the land.

It eternally howls

about the zero

the negative

the never was

the naught.


The wind demands a mountain

to stop it from its path.

Not this emptiness

more vast than itself

Endlessly spreading

in the absence of desire.


September 20, 2005.  This one's older than this blog.

Courting

The wrinkle around your eye is quite unreadable -
how it forms without a twitch on your face, confounds.
Is it the temperature? 34 degrees hot
slapped on your cheeks by a disturbed wind?
Did an ant crawl unnoticeable on your skin?
Is it something I said? Which word
in a parade of adjectives meant to woo
comes off insincere?
The table is like an endless sea between us.
I lost the sail that directs my trail of thoughts.
How drops of seconds feel like oceans of years
while you sit like a moon on a divan of clouds
throwing off beams of hints that may be as glum as no
or radiant as an affirming reciprocation.

RANT: Something I have always noticed...

Some artefacts veiled with dust
on a decade-old cabinet:
a bowl of goldfish
full of stones and air;
lamp clocks with hands
rendered still;
shell with a palmful of dead
batteries, hair clips;
pictures of babies
now grown, suffering
distances and absence;
and a face mirror where
the cheeks of a man turned
dangerously edged, stares back
puzzled with his position.

Cris Hugo

Some unfortunate news you read
on a small column in a tabloid :
three columns in width, ten lines of phrases
impressed together, tells
the final story of his mortality.
You want to be more familiar of him,
sketch his face as it stares back
from the page: want to understand
how his eyes smile like an old friend's;
want to know this stranger more
scribbling his mouth, what dreams it could tell;
want to hear with his hand-drawn ears
what he heard, how the bullet spinned
and splayed him on the pavement.
You'd switch ink from time to time,
black to red, red to black, wondering why
a world promises then quickly takes
a hopeful glow to guide us in the dark.
Your hands become heavier,  the strokes thicker,
the lines of his profile more chaotic
and confused, you forgot when you started
and why you can never stop.

Everett Ruess

                                     - Where I go, I leave no trace.



I followed the narrative to Escalante
where the Earth shimmered brighter colors
and stones have stories, none of which told where
you last left clues of your final presence.
Now we go about acquiesce to the toil,
the rhythm of days, rest of our lives pushing
cities further upwards to the sky,
something marvelous you didn't envision
because the wilderness, a constant Muse,
has always been most beautiful, sui generis.
Now I wonder the fragments of bones
that can have your name, the spot of canyon
where I can make pilgrimage - mysteries
not even the old wind can answer
even if he frequents himself  here
in the other hemisphere.

Afunakwa

i.


Nights I can't sleep, I let you
disturb me, one more time
in the room, haunt me
in my sleepless disposition,
let your formless self whisper
a lullabye in the dark
some old folklore:
a father sojourning further
the edge of the island;
an orphan crying his name.
I wonder that name,
which syllable lilted
to comfort the little boy
or some child I keep
hidden in my heart.


ii.

Your music rose ambient
like flood in every corner
had me grasping to put
a face to your voice
which the decades hid
like a mystery unsolved,
nothing visual to cling on
but an aging record
whose hiss before the end
becomes more profound
because it precedes the silence
that is more silent
than the hush of your sound.

Mosquito

If you must bother his night, make haste -
hands can be indecisive.  They murder in vile.
Sopor is a luxury he wants uninterrupted
coming off from grinding days wide awake.
He knows there are more of your scuttlebutt kind
buzzing from the corners, crowding the dark.
Be careful tempting an unpresuming colossus
from whose blood you thrive.

Fly

Fly crawls over the page
of a planner full of schedules,
desolate of plans. Nothing comes
out of it.  Nothing (let me name it
air, and it sits still) rests smugly
and stares back nonchalant.

Fly misses feeding on the ink
of names and numbers scribbled hastily.
Boxes of supplements clamor
departure from their cabinets.
Bank accounts require more zeroes
to follow a prime.
Air sits still, probably smiles.

Fly remains, pressing its legs on paper.
I follow my trail of thought into the dark.
Sometimes a page tells a story
so clear by remaining blank,
or a phone tells more information
keeping calm.

changed title, 01/16/2012.  

PANTOUM: Easter Bunny

Something to read to my niece and nephew when Easter Sunday comes :-)




There in her kitchen, painting eggs
in every colors of the rainbow,
the Easter Bunny would dab her brush
on the hard and white but fragile shell.

In every colors of the rainbow
she'd paint some triangles, circles, and squares
on the hard and white but fragile shell.
The colors burst in wonderful shapes.

She'd paint some triangles, circles, and squares -
patterns of stripes and curls and swirls.
The colors burst in  wonderful shapes:
blue diamonds for boys; pink hearts for girls.

Patterns of stripes and curls and swirls;
little figures of animals, shapes of clouds;
blue diamonds for boys; pink hearts for girls;
oh what magic she does with lots of love!

Little figures of animals, shapes of clouds,
the Easter Bunny would dab her brush.
Oh what magic she does with lots of love
there in her kitchen, painting eggs.

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.  :-)