1.01.2012
I'm Sorry Lover, You're Always Playing The Hero Anyway posted at 1/01/2012 07:16:00 PM
"I'm Sorry Lover, You're Always Playing The Hero Anyway" blacked out/edited from Richard Siken's "'Litany in Which Certain things are Crossed Out"
Bored and decided to have fun with a poem. It feels eerie and strange to me.Labels: poetry, pointless
12.07.2011
&c. posted at 12/07/2011 10:23:00 PM
nevada wind
i’m twenty-two and in love with you.
every week the doctor wonders why i
stick, why i’m sick—“i love him, that’s what”
i want to tell the shrink with the bravado of steeled
kids who grew up way too early, sneaking
out and sneaking pills, drinking wine in their beds
while their parents sleep.
no such luck.
the doctor knows i wake up in the morning
feeling like i gambled my last quarter
in the hopes of winning yahtzee, knows
i stir my coffee with the dejection
of a man slumped outside a vegas curb.
i feel your resentment kicking up
my chin like nevada dust. i wail
to the wind, imploring, “i love you,
i love you—” and dust devil
that you are, you
fly close, stinging
like warm tears on the edge
of a defiant eye, scratches
from too tight hugs. you walk by
with an indifference reserved only
for dust storms during my soft sadnesses;
the kerplunk of the last coin shot
into the hopeless coin slot reverberating.
times like these, i remember:
the native americans, how badly
they wished to be like the wind.
(crossposted from my poetry journal)
****
It's 10 in the evening and I'm waiting with bated breath. I finally finished this poem from last month, and I've decided to complete a collection of poetry about doctors, hospitals, tragedies and shrinks. It must be ten poems. Let's see if the IYAS workshop in Bacolod will take this one--it's the last I have to take to complete the national workshops, so it'll be a blast. Hopefully I become good enough for a Palanca.
I still miss my partner, why does his work have to be so retarded about time--but anyway I'm wondering if I should distract myself with writing a piece about a heroine addict. It's been in my head all day, but I'm just wary that if I start writing it, I'll be annoyed because I won't make much progress, or I'll miss the time when I'm supposed to be fetching my partner.
And hey, I'd rather be doing that than writing a sad sob story.
Labels: poetry, pointless, writing
& on feelings posted at 12/07/2011 04:16:00 PM
Dissolver of Sugar
Rumi
Dissolver of sugar, dissolve me,
if this is the time.
Do it gently with a touch of a hand, or a look.
Every morning I wait at dawn. That's when it's happened before. Or do it suddenly
like an execution. How else
can I get ready for death?
You breathe without a body like a spark.
You grieve, and I begin to feel lighter.
You keep me away with your arm,
but the keeping away is pulling me in.
Pale sunlight,
pale the wall.
Love moves away.
The light changes.
I need more grace
than I thought.
****
Rumi has always held a soft spot in my heart, despite Islamic scholars saying that, "no, it isn't about homosexual love," and it's so easy to ignore those facts because Rumi writes in a very non-gendered way, and it's love in it's purest form.
I first encountered Rumi in class, and ignored his poetry in favor of a Sylvia Plath one, after the class, I re-read him and wondered if he was Middle Eastern. Months later, I broke up with my college boyfriend, and in the middle of pulling me out of running myself into a wreck, my mentor, Ricci, pulls out a thick volume of Rumi from her carpet bag randomly. In the middle of our conversation she says, "Babe, I really want you to read this. I want you to read and understand Rumi the way you have to understand Neruda--with painstaking slowness, detail, each word scrutinised and felt."
I asked her why, and she said, "I think you'll understand what I mean when you read him." I returned the volume to her after glancing at it, and when I got home I started looking for a complete volume of Rumi's poetry--and slowly, painfully, I got a glimpse of understanding.
These days, Rumi always comforts me, calms me down. He understands the kind of love that wishes to give but cannot.
Labels: love, poetry, sad
the boy who blocked his own shot posted at 12/07/2011 03:41:00 PM
So call it quits, or get a grip.
Say you wanted a solution, you just wanted to be missed.
Everything turbulent and fearsome makes more sense when placed in the compartments of a rational mind, and so the enumeration.
1. Yesterday I discovered more of his ghosts--ones he never told me about, forgotten, or perhaps wished to forget. For a moment there was a sense of entitlement and then it bothered me that I had a sense of entitlement to his feelings, no less. As much as we want to own people, as much as a beloved announces their betrothal to us, as much as they say "I am yours," I remember that I must take this with a pinch of salt. It's a wonder what googling can do and the names that pop up, what asking a few people here and there can unearth from the past. Of course I won't mention a single word of this to him--it's his past, I dug around, and I'm covering my tracks.
I'm aware he's made the same promises before, so what remains to be seen is if he will go through with this.
I'm just going to think that I know nothing. I know though, I've always learned how to read between the lines.
2. When I remember the people I learned from, I realized we all had one point where we came from--we understood leaving, farewells, goodbyes, that last poignant note.
Ricci and I felt that with each other, and with Ophelia Dimalanta's legacy, we all learned that from her. It pains me to realize that my poetry holds such a huge sway on the way I will handle those I love, and that I rebel against myself because I do want to keep what I have now together, until that terrible word: forever.
In Ramil Digal Gulle's tribute poem regarding the death of Ophelia Alcantara-Dimalanta, "Ophelia's Water-Method to Ecstacy," he points this concept of leaving out of love so very well:
Now I can tell you’re done: small feet padding
across the bathroom carpet, hand against baby-
blue tile, wet black coils set to spring from
under the towel, an alert nakedness beneath
the bathrobe. But this time, I have the mind to leave
because leaving’s the only way for me to stay.
To depart, as you might wish, with a love for love’s
contradictions: something to have but never keep.
You mastered this last, most lasting trick: leave
everything to the beloved—dreams, books, apartment,
coffee, clothes—everything, except ourselves.
And now it scares me to understand what I have always been capable of. Even when being left behind I have managed to leave a mark on the people who have hurt me--despite me not being there. Modesty aside, I attribute this quality to the poetry I write and the poetry I was raised with.
It's very frightening.
3. This is very important. I have found the ability to leave, and cannot will it away once more. If I do, I will definitely be unable to stand on my own, and as it is I do not think I can lean on anyone completely, at all.
There seems to be no one who can give me that privilege.
You are calm and reposed, let your beauty unfold,
pale white like the skin stretched over your bones.
Spring keeps you ever close.
You are second hand smoke,
you are so fragile and thin, standing trial for your sins;
holding onto yourself the best you can--
You are the smell before the rain,
You are the blood in my veins.
Brand New's The boy who lost his shot.
Labels: poetry, pointless, sad
12.05.2011
i just had to take a moment to not cry today. posted at 12/05/2011 05:02:00 PM
27
Nerisa Del Carmen Guevara
And by the time I reach 80
I would have fallen in love with
An entire city.
All the people on the streets
Would follow me down with
A knowing.
All hate gone. All sorrow.
The word absence would not
make sense.
The dinosaurs are still underground;
All the species the eco-warriors were not able to save
Have walked without regret to wastelands they haven’t found yet;
Most of the people we love, walking or dead,
Are sometimes in the dust we sweep out on Sundays.
The trees always leave an instant mix,
Just add water
And we are still
Here
Remembering even what we try to forget.
The once loved, the once loving,
The kept, the abandoned,
Finally making sense of it all.
****
I miss my mentor a lot--Nerisa, or as I used to call her, Ricci, was a woman who gave so much wisdom and constantly helped pull me out of my desperate sea. But actions taken are never ones that can be undone, only forgiven and even then not forgotten.
Today, I think I need that wisdom more these days. I contemplated sending her a hello message, and tell her that I missed being her son in poetry, and realized that it might not come out of fruition anyway. I just miss the wisdom and comradeship.
Labels: feelings, poetry, sad
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