DIFFICULT LOVES

1.
He must have caught
the bartender
in his most vulnerable moment.
He intimated
about a client –
an old man
who would regularly patronize
his small café
& drink beer alone,
staggering out into the shadow
of evening.
Once he arrived with a rose
in his hand
& waited until the sun
had disappeared.
He left without saying a word
& had not returned since.
The bartender couldn’t
puzzle it out,
that’s one customer less
for the day.
Could he have…
No, he checked his wild imaginings.
It’s nobody’s business, anyway.
Somehow he surmised
the secret sign in his mind,
like the missives stuck
in the crevices of the wailing wall
of Jerusalem,
as most seekers do.
He shook his head, mumbling –
as if hitting the mark on target –
“A most difficult love…”
[As in the tale of Italo Calvino…]

2.
Was she disarmed
by his pesky text,
or scared –
she wouldn’t look him
in the eye.
She sat in the back row,
away from schoolmates
engrossed with the day’s reports.
She looked down
on the campus chapel.
as if to steer away
from an “indecent” overtures
only she would note
in her fone.
He retreated exhausted
into his monkhood
as if imploring the cosmos:
So it is happening again.
O Had he not been burned before?
He kept repeating it like
a mantra of personal curse,
this old geezer of a criminal
incorrigible.

3.
She composed her face
to meet her lover’s,
as the trio walked across the lobby
skittering with huge fat rodents.
She pushed her comrades-in-passion
into an adjacent room
while she sought her lover’s attention.
So there, surprisingly like a postulant
of a religious order,
she knelt down
before her imperious lover,
who was the Archbishop
of the priestly domain.
Did she feel good after
the supplication?
O She was dazed by the
Catholic rapture
of her ego,
but quickly got up
& hurried out of the temple
with her entourage in tow.
O Is this the way for love
to prosper?
Enforce the absolute for conjugal unity?
O When will lovers ever learn,
that love isn’t a forever currency?

4.
He overheard the nurse
tell the student
to secure her record
from her original doctor –
she answered
in a very young voice
that hid valiantly
the tremor of fear
in her voice…
Born into an affluent family,
the nurse volunteers,
she was knocked up
by her college boyfriend.
She’s graduating this semester
with linguistic degree
[O But in what language
will she tell the truth
to her forbidding parents?]
O young lovers…
the aging nurse sighed,
in her mind the scenario
when the young girl would go
home heavy with child
& terror in her soul.
[In Africa, a Frenchman
says the woman end up
caring for the children
while men sowed their wild oats
in the ghetto.]
Is sex a one-way street?
A masculine affair?

5.
She’s filthy rich,
spoiled by a southern family
to study in Europe.
She came home
toting along a white stud
descended from a peasant stock.
Where he lived
was like a bucolic “West Covina
in California”.
But he’s European,
her trophy boy
that would be the envy
of most colonial pulchritude.
Can he hold
conversation with educated
Manilans?
He grunts, changes
subject to elude
being pinned down
about arts, modernity,
the decadence of Berlusconi,
except of course,
the vintage of Italian wine
from his family vineyard.
Each to his own perdition;
love can be hell
if pursued for Apollonian raison.

6.
Her husband
tried to house
his current mistress
in the suburban abode
she built for her children
after toiling as a seamstress
for a countess
in Italy.
O She’s furious
at such indignity!
But the provincial idiot
claimed his marital right –
half of domicile it is his to spare!
Has not her lira
sustained his bumming around
town?
No, he protested instead
he was the abandoned one!
She’s coming home
to set things right.
Never looking back
at a barriotic past
to answer
the circular question –
where has love gone?
She’s old;
she cannot turn stupidly sentimental.
A cougar should not
be trampled upon, dumb.

7.
The widow
had just trounced a political dynasty;
she’s her own woman now.
But she confesses
she owes it to her husband’s legacy;
she still texts him
for guidance from the afterlife.
So do their children,
who would send instagrams to heaven
for his presence
in their mundane existence.
How true love lasts beyond the grave!
It’s one for the books,
the TV host thrilled,
as if she were hoping
for her own surreal covenant
with someone
most loved!

8.
He has Alzheimer’s,
but when his wife died,
did he know about it?
Of course, family members
didn’t dare inform him –
it didn’t seem to matter
in his current condition;
But his caregiver
mentioned the old man
uttered her name
at the supposed instant of her passing
as if a white bird
had darted across
the dark landscape
of his blank, blank pain.
When they were young,
did they vow
like Romeo & Juliet
to grow old together
through heaven & hell?
O Such tragedy
for lovers
who, in late, late age,
still seek consolation
from life’s verities
& the heart’s
fickle weather!

Rx

1.
A.
Jolicco has passed on,
having fallen into a coma
in Binan, Laguna
where he used to gaze
at the stars
& wait for the UFOs
that mystified
the common mind.
He was stricken
with Parkinson’s disease,
this old poet
who followed Villa’s path
in the ‘60s
& tagged
as the “handsomest” of the lot.
L, a fellow guzzler,
couldn’t believe his ears
that he’s gone forever,
never to materialize
at the alley street
where they would hang-out,
carousing
& spouting poetry
only their tribe
would comprehend –
the logorrhea of godhead
& all that
his mystical world would unveil,
away from the pedestrian
crowd that doesn’t
choose its words
& delicately craft them together
to forge the truth
of their wasted souls.

B.
She wouldn’t know,
his lover confessed,
how to go about her new situation,
as if his quick departure
had left her like a boat
rudderless & adrift
in the river Acheron
of his text.
How could he, she wailed,
leave them so orphaned
by his eternal absence?
He was not wont to praise
Stalin’s proletarian man,
he wouldn’t rally
behind the fire-breathing mass.
He had his own chalice of words
to draw from
like the bottle of beer
that dripped down from his mouth.
Still, friends felt cheated
by his Hadean exile;
how could strangers
also understand
this world of a poet manqué
whose early beginning
was celebrated,
whose ending almost forgotten
by the clueless crowd…

2.
A.
So he thought
it cool to gather old friends
to feast at the common table…
His heart was tremulous,
like a boulder about to roll down
a slippery slope.
Would they come?
Everyone is busy trying to stay alive,
their noses close to the grindstone.
Would he dare complain at the vanity
at his concocted celebration –
time has been brutal,
must he relearn to master the craft
of being alone?
Everyone is gone –
he’s stuck blind at the way station
where brats suddenly turn old
while boarding a train
& never looking back
at him waiting like a beggar
for ghosts at the end of the tracks.
A quiver in his memory
sizzled in his psyche – the comic book
story of an old crone
who offered her festive table
but no one came
because she forgot to send
her invitation…

B.
The five struggled
into the dimly lit Chocokiss,
& his heart blazed forth
with the summer sun!
Who would imagine
they would forbid him
from dining alone?
They perked up at the table
about time lost & gained
& the friendships of years ago,
like volcanic ash
that solidified like stalactites.
They were there to hold him
to his craft of alleged lies?
They fiddled with their phones,
solving games that baffled him
like some calculus equation;
O he could only dumbly stare
at the formula that he used
to run down like a well-travelled route
when he was young.
Wisely, like a fool he could only hold back
his tongue:
O why do young friends grow up fast
& doubly smart?
Like his poetry, he has gone out of style
& he can only improvise
to stay in step with the changing times.

3.
He finally understood
why the multi-millionaire
didn’t leave a will
on his 40-million state
for anyone to enjoy
like some lucky thief…
Survivor of Nazi Camp
at Warsaw,
he made a fortune
selling real estate in America.
An idiot, laments an acquaintance,
who didn’t share the loot.
Now the state will get it all,
unless a relative is hunted down.
Why didn’t he leave
anything for charity,
the downtrodden…
He must have been grossly
indifferent to brutish human condition,
as if suffering were the rule
of existence.
He probably had known the
truest circles of hell
& nothing therefore really mattered –
he couldn’t care a hoot
or cry like a child over
a lost expensive toy.

4.
Bad news pours
like heavy rain.
The other day, his uncle
stumbled up the hospital stair
& suffered a blood clot
in his brain.
His son, recovered from stroke,
had to get back to the hospital
& minister to the fragile
old man:
they could only dumbly stare
at each other like
caged animals:
how could one foresee
if death simply lurks
around the corner?
The summer sun hotly shone
that day…
Never foreshadowing
the night
that would swallow up
their prayers
while the cosmos silently &
stonily watched…

5.
L, approached their table
as they traced the earthly events
toward a poet’s summer end…
She would inform them
about a Pasion who was detained
when Lt. Corpuz raided
the PMA armory,
& was for the fiasco blamed.
He died only a few days ago
that left a bad taste in the mouth:
he was exuberant at the reunion,
she said,
& no one expected he would inexplicably
keel over & leave everyone in the lurch.
He had gone into partisan politics,
bannering the cause of party lists.
How could this ex-military man
teeter over the ideological cliff?
O Each to his own lifestyle?
Each to his own grief?
Each to his own deathwatch?
O How his life could have
been at the crossroads
of accidents & belief
but never harvested
the fruits of his ideological trip?

6.
Banshees are screaming
all over Dhaka,
where so few a thousand have died
when the building collapsed –
There never was a fatal earthquake,
but cracks in the wall
triggered by machines
that made the building tumble down.
An orgy of gory deaths
by the poor,
or the state would have wept
if the victims were millionaires!
They were expendable,
as most workers in Asia are
where cheap labor is the rule.
A child asks his father:
why can’t we eat bread that you bake?
Why can’t we live in the townhouse
you built?
Why can’t we wear clothes that you sew?
Death wouldn’t weep
over bodies that perish
in the name of post modernist profit.

7.
A newly minted lawyer,
heavy with the promise
of a successful career,
she resigned from her job,
confessing she couldn’t cope
with the demands of
a marriage gone sour,
a husband who would prescribe
her ego for his image,
& a marriage where
he could only call the shots…
O He remembered Zizek’s rule:
Ideology is outside –
or what do you want from me?
Her ego must be cut down to size
to fit his narcissistic desire,
but her Judeo-Christian ethics
to keep the marriage intact
inhibits her from crossing the line?
O friends warn,
she must save herself, not the beast,
before she drowns.
But she won’t as if she’s hooked on martyrdom.
She’s bent on pursuing the traditionally imaginable
& would put up
with the daily terror in her soul.
She’s on drugs to scare the ghosts away.
How can she stay solid & stable
in that parabolic way?

8.
All those decades,
she never touched base.
So when somebody texted
if NM was reportedly gone,
could a friend confirm?
Yes, a former expat from Singapore
did so,
adding that once she broached
the idea of coming home
to the Islands,
she didn’t say a word,
as if her silence had semaphored:
It may be the country of my birth,
never my choice!
Who would blame her then?
This change of heart?
She flourished
in a lifestyle of high-end goal:
houses in spots
where foreigners flock
for vacation,
a cozy retirement pension
in dollars yet,
& friends who spiked up
her breakfast table…
Had she dismissed
old acquaintances that marked
her beginnings at
a suburban ghetto,
sorrowful episodes
that reeked of struggles in abandoned solitude?
Should he write this poem then –
about times when friendship
was deemed limitless, innocently perused?
O But she could have erased,
her memory tapes of old…

STARTING OVER

1.
Summer & death
are twin brothers,
a coffee shop cynic quips.
His sister had called up –
a distant kin
had passed on –
but he couldn’t make it
to his burial in the South.
Does it depress him no end
that the guy
will no longer, like what Barthes
eulogized of his beloved mother,
exist,
nada, nada, nada,
melted into air,
returned
to her molecular state?
O How do you measure life then?
In coffee cups,
multiple careers,
festivities,
photo-ops,
fancy titles encrypted in stones?
A fortnight ago,
he was at the wake of a matriarch,
who had confessed
before a family gathering her wish
for an early death,
as if she had rightfully tired of a full life
with sons & daughters
& grandchildren
who had filled her moments
with beatific smiles…
O But she was well remembered
for the kindness of her soul,
her bountiful table
opened for kin & strangers…
Her kids had sworn
her passing should therefore be
not of deep mourning,
but a celebration of life
that suddenly quit
on their watch
in the dead of the night –
like some event
foretold
when she fell ill,
& had sealed her 93rd
year on earth.
At the break of dawn,
how will the orphans start all over again?

2.
How do her children,
now grown like their innocent own,
carry themselves
as newfound orphans
while their mother
drifted into the void?
They will be speechless
struck like lightning bolt
at her quick but slow passing
like babies tucked
into bed,
the lights turned out
& the door shut tight.
Will they turn believers
in the resurrection of the soul,
comforting themselves,
with the thought
she would be finally reunited
with her dearly beloved
who had earlier departed?
O should we grope in the dark
with such cherished myths?
She’s gone,
& nothing
even prayers can make her like Lazarus come back
we are deeply forever alone…
We are that child
of Freud who can no longer cry
& reach for the hands
turned invisible…
Must we put a brave front
then,
shush ourselves up
& confront terror with her leaving?
That we should carry on,
death has no dominion…
O silently, we hold our febrile hearts
floating in the void,
sobbing like a helpless child
in dark solitude…

3.
The Boston Marathon
elicits so mush & bravado –
the runners clenching their fists
that terrorists shall never prevail,
as if swearing
no rain will pour on their parade…
It is America
which can never flee, tail between its legs,
at the horde of criminals…
But bombings erupt everywhere,
& innocent lives have been snuffed out
like candle flames…
In Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan,
Syria, Basilan, etcetera:
Why is the world on America
so fixated?
Life is precious everywhere -
hear the anguish & lamentation
of the bereaved:
They have their share of stories & tears
never lesser than the others grief.
O How the world resonates with the
weeping in Boston –
for the child with his ice-cream cone,
the Chinese scholar who perished
far from home
the woman with shrapnel lodged
in her skull
the dance instructor with her dangling leg…
An excess of despair & rivers of tears
that seem to equalize
the suffering among the poor
& the privileged?
How must we balance the equation then
if death has to have a degree
of difference?
An eye for an eye
will never come up with a cleaner slate.
Always the fall of innocence
is a drop of blood that will never clear up
a dish of water.

4.
Barbarity breeds barbarity?
They’re jubilating in Boston,
hailing the police
for keeping them well at ease…
The so-called brothers
have been tracked down, eliminated
but the father claims
his sons were framed-up,
the case distorted…
[Did they know Bakunin?]
White dogs
have turned cyber detectives,
there is blood in the heart
of techies,
smelling their prey to avenge their dead!
Confusion fogs the mind
in search of assassins!
Did the brothers do it?
[So young & so evil, folks say.]
But will History establish
the Xs & Ys of the noxious deed?
When the smoke clears,
who will pin down with clearer eyes
the real culprits?
Only the police can haul in
the dragnet of their infallible X –
& townspeople are fair game
for the QED of it!
The SEAL members
have varying claims
on Bin Laden’s shooters,
any version is an imaginary variable.
Harvey Oswald
is only a shade of gray
in the Kennedy assassination narrative,
& we are at a loss
for the enigma of past decades…
Did America turn the almost angelic brothers
into overnight satanic?
Did the capitalist system
spawn its own destroyers?

5.
It’s a relief,
thank God!
The Tsarnaev brothers
were not homegrown Americans!
Or the world would have been truly
puzzled
by the anarchic mindset…
O they were Chechnya émigrés,
contaminated with Jihadist praxis
& therefore worthy
of their online disease?
Surely, the rednecks would glare:
why smoke America?
What sense of gratitude is this?
The mob would spit
in their alien faces
& do their children in
if they so much wave
the stars & stripes…
O they were Russian refugees
who couldn’t fit:
Did the culprits
aim to shock the snugness
out of their white assess?
Thank God,
they were not truly Americans!
Lady Justice can very well
peek out of the blindfold –
& see the beast
for what it is.

6.
The morning after,
will the mind clear
& tears dry up?
The conflagration stays
like a knife skewering the heart
& we seek a definition
of the logic of the tribe.
This street festival
where mirth & joy
are the cardinal rule:
survivors repeat the same
tired, circular questions
of God & the Devil –
Why him/her, not me?
Why that location
where the victims
stood on the curb as if inviting destruction?
Where is God
in the tedious conversation
that fails to come up
with a foolproof equation?
Is this post-modernist situation?
In the calculus of accidents
who are brutally abandoned?
Is there ever a happy ending
in the soap opera
of our ratcheted emotion?
One works his ass off 24/7
& rarely gets to bite
the pie-in-the-sky.
Who must pause
for the existential solution?
O one crosses himself,
then jogs off, mumbling a mantra,
toward an unknown destination:
there must be, there must be!
O the loved ones are gone:
Eternity is in mourning!

7.
O How she loved life!
Her grandmother recalls,
noting how so much love
blooms after the carnage,
like flowers falling
from the sullen sky!
How the victims & survivors
sought each other out
in the bloody rubble,
speechless & dazed
on a good day
with the sun peeking out
of the cloud
that suddenly turned
into a cold, crimson night.
Just being there
with friends jubilating
at the finish line
is memory of a lifetime.
Then the twin explosions
that should have not been,
marking the affair
like no other.
O Things happen
But who sees no evil at the place?
Survivors claim a common bondage
to be quickly delivered from despair –
the people seeking each other out
in a world
turned upside down
in the wink of an eye!
O How she loved life!
But she’s gone –
shuffled away
like a new deck of cards.
Until the fire next time.

CRIMINAL

1.
A.
Stephen Mansfield,
in his “Killing Jesus,”
claims the Roman centurions
in their bestial flogging
would expose the bones & organs
of the victim,
instantly killing him after several strokes
[Mel Gibson’s “Passion of Christ,”
despite its Aramic dialogue,
was Hollywood –
family oriented,
sanitized.]
The Guy from Palestine,
sentenced by Pilate,
must have quickly expired
on the way
to the cross:
Could he have uttered
chose famous last words
to assure Barrabas
heaven waits for the likes of him?
The Jewish holy men
who held the traffic of trade
at the temple
orchestrated the Kangaroo court:
did Jesus defend the gentiles
who were ripped off
by the sacerdotal regime?
What is myth, then,
or the real deal?
The disciples who wrote
the testaments could have
embellished their account
a thousand-fold!
O How we were suckered
by the resurrection
that affirmed a mortal hope
of life after death?

B.
Pope Francis,
kissing a child afflicted
with cerebral palsy,
must have known it too damned well:
it’s perfect theatre
for the believers,
a sleek PR stratagem,
a reprieve for the secret crime
of having abandoned the two Jesuit priests
when he was a dime-a-dozen cardinal…

2.
Guillermo Calderon
Chilean playwright,
whose uncle was “killed
by General Pinochet’s security police,”
knew how it was to be
“shut-in the world
and hearing the gunshots outside.”
He was seized by a sudden awakening
to make the theatre
“a battlefield”
when he saw Pinochet’s former
cabinet members”
attend his play & “depart
in a happy mood…”
Of course, smile was playing
on their lips
as if they didn’t know
he was talking about
blood on the street,
& the gunshots outside
that ripped apart the curtain
of the night…
Like the infernal scream
of the violated
tearing across
a regime of silence.

3.
When General Efraim Rios Montt, 86,
was ruled by the Court
“he should stand trial for genocide
and crime against humanity
under his rule in the ‘80s,”
the Maya survivors of Guatemala
felt it in their bones
“how scared he will be.”
Just as they did decades ago
when soldiers “tortured, raped
& killed those who could not run away”
in the 34-year civil war.
Is the verdict for real?
Most of them felt
the payback was an impossible dream,
history does not care
about victims & executioners…
But the monolith
of the Pexla Grandis 77 victims”
up high in the mountains
seems like an invisible fist
shooting out of the grave.
O the truth will not settle in the dust.

4.
Finally, the disappearance
of Jonas Burgos
is back on the front page.
His mother, Editha Burgos,
had submitted to the Supreme Court
“confidential documents
that would show officers
and enlisted personnel of the 7^th
Infantry Division and 56^th
Infantry Battalion…”
Was there an intricate cover-up?
The President, forced by
popular rage,
had to issue an order
to appease the aggrieved.
What could he have done anyway?
If the mother
didn’t move at all,
& let her grief overcome her will
to live,
what would have happened
to the 6-year search
for a son who was virtually murdered
by armed authorities?
She must have thanked the Lord
for a “friend of a friend”
who delivered the secret files
from the vault of dead cases…
Always, as Gregoria de Jesus
would warn,
there will be witnesses.
[But does history side with the righteous?
There will be always Marcoses
to come out of the woodwork…]

5.
Kristel Tejada,
must have gone utterly insane
the day her school ID
was confiscated by UP Manila
bureaucrats
because she failed to officially enroll
& couldn’t pay her tuition.
O How it crushed her heart
to be on the outside & looking in
at the crowd of distant schoolmates.
There was money raised
by a grandfather
but the chancellor
as per his own mandate,
acting like a banker,
brusquely brushed her off
& wouldn’t let her in.
Her advisors, behavioral analysts
all –
were clueless like blind animals,
never seeing the signs on her face –
O How they were caught flatfooted
when she drank the silver cleaner
as if a thief had made off with
their jewel right before their eyes!
All she needed
was a shoulder to cry on
& let her work out her infantile despair –
but everyone was busy
with his/her own sordid affair…
Now they’re scrambling to rally
behind her,
while being led to the cemetery
on a horse-drawn carriage
in the final homage
to their own fructified selves…
Who is responsible?
Everyone shrugs,
but none can declare it
with an open, straight face.

6.
A.
Revolution
is a healing,
claims Franco “Bito” Berardi
who urges that money
is the financial allusion
that holds dominion over all.
[Brecht once lamented
it’s always a universal tragedy
wherever a new bank opens]
Should poets, writers, artists
be classified as wage-workers
anyway?
The old definition must wither away,
the world must prepare itself
for the new way of looking
at things:
the immaterial, the semiotic
that allows the general intellect
to revitalize the social body
for the new signals,
the new metaphors…
Yes, the revolution is not a tea party,
says Mao Zedong
but we must leave the old, dusty world
of subjectification…
A new sensibility to allow understanding
that breaches the limits of language?

B.
Kim Jong-un of North Korea,
in the pocket of Cold War generals
trapped in their own timezone
that has never moved beyond its infosphere,
can only see the planet in the 50s
of his father’s reign…
Is no one out there in sync
with the vista of human despair?
As if we haven’t moved out
of the cave…

7.
Summer
& all its discontent.
Unbearable tropic heat
& the heart trembling
at the Temps Perdu
of women of high noon –
gamboling on the beach,
the sun in their hair
& ocean spindrift
spraying on marine surface
like dewdrops on glass…
Where/how are they now?
Married, dumpy
with their litter of brats,
chewing like old crones
the betel nuts of their virginal past.
the laughter that echoes
in his ears,
as if they wouldn’t care
about their once-elegant state!
& It is only yesterday
when he last had a glimpse of them –
overnight they had grown old
like dry prunes.
O Summer when remembering
is a sackful of dead crows –
empty weights of lead in the hollow
of the heart
but murderous catch of fish bones
in the icy throats…
He couldn’t recall those bitches anymore;
They had come & gone
like cheap, malevolent ghosts –
& to think he once couldn’t bear
living if they so much as desert
his invisible presence…

8.
He was stunned,
P had died
a month ago…
Didn’t he know that?
He was a gofer
on campus,
relying on the goodness
of comrades
to make both ends meet.
Had some item,
but it’s never enough, anyway.
Wouldn’t accept the money
he once tried to give him
because he said
his wallet was loaded.
No, thank you,
He must maintain his dignity?
His neck was swollen,
needing an operation
but he never minded it at all.
It could be his heavy smoking.
He was pal to all
the campus functionaries
but was only a passing conversation –
brief & regretted –
by the drinkers
in some back alleys.
Should he simply remain
forever in limbo?
O Such is the fate
of the penniless
in a world that respects
idiots with surplus
money:
O How they salute
grafters with fancy titles who run
the university down!
Memory only reserves
a space for the rich & famous.

MIMESIS

1.

The new Pope Francis,
aka Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio,
opted to ride a bus
with fellow cardinals
to the Vatican’s inner city,
shunning the sleek limousine
befitting his stature.
He is a simple man,
his admirers, plain folks
& world leaders enthuse.
He shrugs off routine
that would stray from the Jesuistic call.
But Estela de la Cuerva,
“whose mother confounded
the grandmothers
of the Plaza de Mayo”
is not at all convinced:
she remembers darkly
how His Holiness
from Argentina “testified
that he didn’t know
about the stolen babies”;
his lack of support
for two slum priests
that “ultimately delivered them
to the death squads…”
More, he has refused
to be implicated
in the trials “involving
torture and murder
in the feared Navy Mechanics
School…”
O How he preferred the safe silence
of a solitude –
his sister fears
for his job, the immense
loneliness of it –
that would turn a blind eye
to a murderous time?
But mothers whose children
were wrenched out of their arms
by the dictator’s henchmen,
would they fairly understand?
Perhaps only this way,
he could survive,
unlike the other prelates
who stepped out of line
& “ended up dead.”
Did he only reprise
Peter’s act
by the crowing
of the cock?
Was he a “coward”?
A “master at ambiguity?”
Yes, says Estela dela Cuerva.
He probably feared
the Communists
more than Jorge Videla’s junta.
[Would he have ranked
Hugo Chavez a notch
lower than an insect?]
Will the Church
turn a new leaf?
But there’s the media’s honeymoon
that will allow him
space & time
before the avalanche
of interpellations.

2.
The faithful
widely celebrated
when white smoke
billowed forth
from the roof of Sistine Chapel
& bells joyfully rang
over St. Peter Square.
There is a new Pope
who is cause for orgiastic
merriment!
Only the hopeful
would dare prophesize
the Church could withstand
the tempest of centuries,
a new day has dawned
& billions wouldn’t stray
from their faith.
O What century is this?
What manner of faith
still grips the multitude
who has invested in life
when death surrounds
heaven’s outpost!
What language should erupt
over the universe
that Christ’s surrogate
has arrived…
There will be, of course,
a clutch
of apostates
who would claim salvation
is only personal,
not theatrical,
& the road to plenitude
is committed service for others.
Who chose who, after all?
Fellow mortals,
never archangels,
who wore vestments
bleached white
of its human blood?
It couldn’t be the spirit
of Christian Federico von Wernich,
the police chaplain
“who’s now serving a life sentence
for torture and kidnapping.”
It couldn’t be his voice
that whispered into conclave’s
ears
the Pope is God’s beloved
with whom He is most pleased!

3.
So the Pope has raised
the alarum against
the culture of death –
sexual radicalism,
liberation theology,
even Communism.
Pope Benedict
aka Joseph Ratzinger,
who flirted with Hitler
in his youth,
would find abonimable.
What is there to believe now?
Ideology is outside,
Zizek points out,
& so the secular
would find it cool
to have the Pope psychoanalyzed:
Yes, Christianity
must return to its roots,
but can the Church
turn back the clock?
It was the Pharisees
& Roman centurions
that raised the hackles of
religious heart;
now it is the plague of diseases,
colonial tribes
& terrorists
who would avenge
their Allah’s memorial grief.
But the Pope is only beholden
to what his world permits –
he can’t shift paradigm
& allow what is perceived
to be demonic…
Should we keep our fingers
crossed that there
be a change in
his mental habit?
O How we turn idiots
at the call of the ceremoniously blest!

4.
What more can you ask
of him?
He cooks his own meal,
commutes to his diocese
on a bus,
jettisons his driver
to stay alone in his apartment.
He mingles with the crowd
& refuses the tiara
to disavow
monarchial domain.
He could have indulged himself
like Filipino bishops
who would seek subsidy
from the state
& fancy SUVs
to visit distant places,
build a mansion
with a swimming pool
for a comfortable retreat…
O Such simplicity
is truly beatific?
Is this sacral schizophrenia
because he fulminates
in his baritone
against the “demonic moments”
of liberation theologies,
unnatural unions
even justified abortions
that roil the medieval belief?
So does his ally
Joseph Ratzinger who also loathes
the communists…
Together, they must do battle
with the modern heretics.
Like Canute, they must stop
the onrushing waves of satanists!
But Nazi generals
love to hear Beethoven & Mozart
while gas chambers
suffocated the incarcerated;
an elegant lady would cry
over dogs & cats
but coldly lock up
slum dwellers
turned robbers/thieves!
How do you profile a man?
Appearances deceive, everyone is a puzzle.
Is Hugo Chavez a saint or an insect?
Go slow, go slow…
Never so quick to judgment,
on the Most Holy.
He who wears a white cassock
& drink from the holy chalice
may be a charlatan,
or a saint given to authentic
public service.

5.
They’re grabbing
like hot pizzas
the broadsheets in Rome
for his full-page photograph
to serve as memento
of his rule.
Even medals/pendants
to be transformed
into amulets
to stave off the Devil
& carry on the Chruch’s mission.
Constructing his person
is a  holy endeavor –
commemorative stamps,
signatures & cards
emblazoned with his official seal,
sermons & quotes
to signify
a historic occasion
& invite as well performers
of worldly miracle,
the handiwork
for saints that is
a matter of course.
O How they transform
everything so banal, so petty
to affirm an ideology
for the Pope from Latin
America
as holy, beatific
while they pray to God
at the balcony
to whom they must submit.
A century hence,
the devotees would fight
over the relic of bones
of this one-lung guy
proclaimed by earth-bound
cardinals
as emissary
from on high.

6.
Almost on the heels
of the Vatican conclave
was China’s plenum
for Xi Jimping to take over
as president & head
of the Communist Party –
a formality expected
by the majority.
But no crowd stood vigil
outside the Great Hall
of the People
for the investiture
of bureaucracy’s top dog
was old, old theatre
of the tedious.
A fresh start for the leader?
Xi Jimping bats
to spread its tentacles
over Asia;
the Vatican hopes to harvest
for the empire more acres of souls.

7.
“We are all lemmings,”
the drunkard quips.
But it is early in the morning
to be laconic.
He would rather
smell the steaming coffee
to met the sunbright day:
the radio has blared:
“the savior cometh.”
The café bum slobbers on:
pick up anybody from the crowd,
even a well-meaning scoundrel
who appeals to the eye,
push him through the wringer
of an initiation rite,
& you can, by stroke of luck,
package him off,
even as a clean-shaven Christ!
You’re kidding, he remonstrates.
People are not insane.
They’re not rodents
who drive en masse
into the sea & drown…
The cynic just smiles
as if stupefied
by the predictability
of this strange faith
that leads millions
toward the precipice.

8.
The Hadron Collider,
“a 27-kilometer tunnel
beneath the Swiss-French
border” has produced
an energy appoximating
that of the Big Bang,
recreating the so-called
“God Particle,”
as theorized by
physicist Peter Higgs
who claimed that mass
can materialize from nothing.
Briefly, from zero
to something
is virtually the phenomenon
of God
that has mankind puzzled.
Now, who is responsible
for the Pope
who must mediate
for something beyond the human
mind?
It is the matrix
of all miracles
we long for to ease mortal pain
& sorrow?
How it took billions of years
for the subatomic particle
to metastasize & become
a universe,
but only a few days
to proclaim a doppelganger?
How can we pray for enlightenment
when the cosmos
cannot be transparent with itself?
We can only theorize,
theorize, theorize
the metaphysics of existence,
the Pope’s spell bound
by his ascetic flair.

UNNAMEABLE

1.
Jessica Bridge,
spokesperson for a betting company,
shows the “bookies board”
for the possible new pope
“outside the Westminster Cathedral
in London.”
The papal enclave
is set to elect the successor
of Pope Benedict
who has resigned,
unable to carry out the unwritten
order of the empire.
So it has all come down
to this – an electoral exercise
for the man
who must be deemed surrogate Christ?
But Vatican insiders
cannot help leaking out
that all this,
is orchestrated spectacle
of selling the pope
as perfectly holy
to the adoring faithful
who are bombarded
by his abjectness & humility…
Photo-ops of ceremonies that project pomp & pageantry
underlining how weakness
is mistaken for saintly fragility:
But he was a cop-out,
a cynic observes.
He didn’t clean the church
of its scandals,
unlike Christ who whiplashed
merchants turned priests
in the synagogue.
Now, he has retired
to meditate on purity
in a well-appointed abode,
& the multitude,
trained to accept his holified absence,
could only pray for
the corporation of souls
to survive
the senile season of cardinals.

2.
The Bishops
are flexing their muscles
in the hustings
but professing the while
their innocence.
But any political discourse
is virtual religion,
Julias Kristeva says –
so the shift to the game
of empowering the laity
to score for
their biblical cause
barely perplexes
the secular, the reasonable.
They have always sought
to control the souls
with their papal bull,
as if God were lodged
in their holy imprimatur.
How to enforce
the ecclesiastical rule
of blind obedience
& prevail with their human
choice for God’s successor?
As if a black angel
has come down
& conducted black masses
for half-blind fools?

3.
A.
The South Korean woman
“killed herself
by drinking pesticide
in front of a local city hall.”
They had cut off her pension
because “her long-unemployed son
had found a job
at a shipyard.”
Now she has nothing:
The Confucian “social contract”
no longer works in this
modern age…
How could she fend
for herself?
Her son has selfishly opted for a room
of his own?

B.
He has heard news of
the public suicide
& taken note that he himself
is facing the dark, dark years
of toiling like a peon
as dirt-cheap lecturer
where thumbsuckers romp
like the professionally learned.
His bones ache,
the sun in his eyes
has set so damned early.
O Teaching is for losers
& one-eyed fools –
but he is stuck
in a country of charlatans
who barter words
by the gallon.

4.
Words hover in the void –
the unnameable birthed by
delirium as scriveners wrestle with meaning
that is pure shadow of the acceptable.
Signification is a gamble then:
who can trust the speaker
who knows not his neurotic nature?
His desire to conquer truth
that opens up in his discourse?
In his own mind, he has zeroed in
on what is now synchronic, available
to his blind, blind eyes!
It is always a half-truth,
constantly lingering in the chasm
between you & I.
Language can only deceive,
an unstable commodity in the market
that won’t close with the perfect lie.

5.
He wants to be
a filmmaker,
like kids of his generation.
To be behind the camera
& show desire in the narrative
of the real…
The language is the mirror’s
image
that seeks to cross the bridge
between consciousness
& capital.
O What does he really want?
What is the language
he must construct?
O There is something he feels
to signify
in the phantasm
of his heart’s mind…
What should be
inscribed,
or cut to size:
the story of lives
to make spectators
react
as if they’re seeing
their own,
the secret tapestry of time & flight,
for the very first time.

6.
He is, in the hierarchy
of low-end bureaucracy,
a virtual peon.
Daily he must repeat his low, low
task of telling kids the rules
of orderly conduct
the prized bureaucracy continues
to exact.
Certainly, he is a cut above
a peasant living in a shanty this time,
a lumpen pushing a cart
full of junk -
Daily as if on cue
he heads back for the “salt mine”
of lecture rooms
heavy with dust
& snot-nosed children…
Could he be no better
than the other guy?
Each to his own misfortune;
underdogs won’t make

the cosmos cry..
O He is a petit bourgeois flaneur
who should never reach
for the sky.

7.
Sabah belongs
to the Filipino people,
the news reports…
“You mean,” the flaneur asks,
as if maliciously incredulous,
“the Sultanate of Sulu is claiming it
on my behalf?
I have nothing to do with it!
The sultanate is an atavism –
this is a time
when royalty should pass away.
O We must be like the British,
still stupidly enamored
with Queen Elizabeth
to personify real history.”
He turns livid
at the protagonists:
clans who claim
as if the lease contract
is signed for perpetuity
& the state that lists
like a rotting wooden ship.
O How the royal family
lives well befitting its own class.
Only the ignorant believers
promised with rank & moolah
will readily die,
like Taliban fanatics,
in the neighborly firefight.

8.
A.
“Don’t ask stupid questions!
Women! Women! Women! Women!
Shaman Dedeheiwa of
the Yanomano tribe of Valenzuela
in Brazil, rebukes
Dr. Chagnon about
the cause of conflict,
contrary to the materialist
analysis that war
“is fighting over material possessions”.
Not in this case,
Chagnon is informed,
“access to mobile
young women”
gives the tribesmen
“reproductive advantage”.
So there it is – some point
that denies Marx’s
materialist economics,
so basic & sexist
as to recreate the history
of human violence
& instinctual greed.
[Life is a perpetual state
of war;
they must stock up
on young warriors
to “murder
& create.”]
Women! Women! Women! Women!
Helen of Troy & the Trojan Horse
give us the epic clue;
all love poems
are merely
rhetorical play for war & sex.

B.
O When he looks at the woman
across the table,
is it a recurrence of theatre
for conflagration & masculinist seizure?

9.
Is this the season
of ennui,
or whatever that is
a pause between human voices
& machines,
but he is at a loss
how this minute or second
can be represented:
like the whirr of the
grasscutter’s machine
that amplifies the monotone
of its mechanical spinning,
the tables that stare
at strangers
with their empty chairs
like yawns in the afternoon
of interminable waiting –
for what? For whom? –
the trees around the café
that watch like stolid sentinels
& sway to the breeze
that wouldn’t speak
but sigh, sigh, sigh
in mechanical swaying –
O How do you recall the ennui,
this whatever pause
between silence & meaning
that keeps repeating itself
as he sits in his chair
thinking of scribbling poetry,
or whatever passes for it,
is worth all the waiting
in his infinite moments
that may change something…

DERRIDA’S LENS

1.
She’s going to lick it,
the text reports
after the morning surgery.
She was an activist
in her youth –
her curriculum vitae
would include
a slain underground husband,
a poetry book,
an unfinished career
in the academe
which required her
to finish her graduate studies
or else…
How about time spent
organizing peasants & workers?
Of course, they didn’t count
in a place where formal titles
in a fetid environment
is de rigueur.
Now in her senior years,
she must pay for the unbearable
weight of the fascist reign
in her sickness
that the state, true to its Kafkan nature,
wouldn’t fairly compensate.
Do her friends
rue her alleged wasted years?
The country is still in turmoil;
feudal lords still smugly rule.
Will she pick up the pieces
& charge at the “windmills”
like a Don Quixote?
There will be always issues
that constantly surround
her like a plague
in her hospital ward
& silently figure out
the “indecidables”
of the heart.

2.
Did she renounce Marx
for Christ?
The sacred for the profane?
Her personal map having been
blurred by the stars
as she traced the path
to imagined bliss in
an invisible God,
like a black sheep
that finds its way home
to the ancestral flock?
Was it fortuitous
to find only the semaphore
of darkness at noon,
never the morning
that will not dawn?
Svengalis had drummed into her ears;
each to his/her own perilous
journey;
each to his/her own perdition
& hell.
O What then of life –
the sum of flights & falls
like the stairway of a
sloping footpath,
the siren calls
of the moment
that would be abandoned?
O questions of reason
& troubled negotiations
that flowed
towards the pure but
“impossible”.
[O that may happen, alas!
Despite our conscious knowing –
this “barely” Derridan non-event…]

3.
So what is there to write?
Derrida avers it too well:
all is “mis” in reading
in the very act of deconstructing…
Always the pure of origin,
site & truth
as littered with lies,
errors & misdirection:
all is contaminated,
the stark of bright light
is swaddled in the thick,
thick embrace of the dark…
Everything is in flux –
oxygen is suffused
with monoxide molecules,
this is our wordly lot…
This poem
can never pinpoint the enigma
constantly
revealing itself
in shifting crosshairs
of our gun sights…
What is there to pacify the crowd
that claims the truth
of what is visibly real?
All is mired
in passing rain & wind,
chameleon faces
& shadows
in between the kitten’s meow
& the tiger’s snarl…
I love you, my dear,
but I am a wine-drunk fool
who slobbers
& warns:
Don’t take my word for it –
it isn’t pure O contaminated!

4.
If nothing exists
that is final & definitive,
how can we proclaim
the certainty of justice
for the desaparecidos?
If purity of forgiveness,
even vendetta,
can never be within reach,
how shall we conduct
our lives
if prayers can never redeem
our grief?
Is somebody all-knowing
listening?
Are we prey to illusion
of having to balance
the unequal integers
of cosmic equation?
How do we keep the faith?
Are victims & executioners
on the same page
to profess innocence?
Who is culpable then?
The missing stats may access
the survivors –
having mourned briefly,
then decided to forget
because life must move on.
O we cannot get stuck
in the mud…
Questions that
are forever on hold
because we never really
seek the answers,
affix the QED
with sure finality.

5.
If we mourn,
how long shall it last?
Time to move on
but we freeze,
mountaineers say,
& drown
in the deluge of tears.
What is there to do, then?
What is the Rx of surviving?
Victims will not return
like Lazarus
from the secret grave –
the child playing Fort/Da!
game can only hope
that the mother reappear
& hold him in her
comforting embrace…
But nothing produces nothing –
the void forever
opens in the abyss
of our longings…
Once-upon-a-time
enfolds unto itself
the past & the present,
the future eyeless
as Benjamin’s angel
flying with his head
turned backward…
Who navigates the dark
cosmic room
where candles flicker
in phantasmagoria of dreams,
lightning glimmers
of their presence?
But the candle has burnt down,
& we gnash our teeth
in phantom weeping.

6.
The child knows
the mother lurks behind
the door
that closes & opens,
where she hides
as if on amnesiac leave…
In a moment,
will she be back
to play hide & seek
& rekindle infantile excitement?
O The game is temporary, brief.
But what if she is
gone forever?
Look at his bright, wide eyes
that shut down
into a deep, deep fright…
How can we hack
the primal scene
of lost visitations
that barely signify
love & passion?
O verily, the room,
switches itself off
to usher in daylong nightmares
& forgetting.

7.
A.
It must be summer
when casual conversations segue
into the artisanal & mortality.
B, come from a book launch
of a diplomat in waiting,
is mildly intoxicated
in seeing old friends,
ruminates how he would prefer
to donate his body
to a medical school
& help out the young
discover
the body’s mystery…
After all, wasn’t he an
artist & exposed to anatomy?
He doesn’t want mourners
to gaze down on him
through the coffin window
& remark
about him he couldn’t
parry…
In the perpetual void,
he finally would turn to dust
but resurrected through
the living:
enough of human voices then
from whom he would be
safely distant,
this corpus of pain
& discord…
As he droned on,
he would break the news
that X has passed on
in Canada,
Y has breached the animation
wall in California,
Z has returned
to recharge his creative roots…
But they were barely winners,
being second-class citizens
in a cold, cold country
where their talents are
racially stalled.
O That was
decades ago,
when chatter was mistaken
for discourse on art
as so damned profound…
Rambling on,
like a river
meandering in the forest
& the plains,
they would take note
of the kids around skittering
away from their
usually haunts,
unable to suffer
such jive about
aesthetic, time & memory
so alien to their
childhood…
O How we sometimes disturb the night
with words
as if martians
on earth have
surprisingly landed…
O this site where we laugh & sneer
as we make
our cavalier stand
in the market
of cheap dollars
& fragile resistance.
It must be summer
when casual conversation
segues into the artisanal
& mortality.

B.
He’s too busy to complain.
He’s booked, after all, until 2015.
But he wonders aloud,
re artists who profess
a deep faith in the spiritual,
how they could reconcile
the market quest for surplus value
& the transcendental/immaterial
quest for the sacred?
& it is this impossibility
of cutting off the cash nexus
& the naïve claim
of contractual exploitation
of relations
that allow him to snigger,
as if arrogance & humility,
forgiveness & vendetta,
can sleep together
guilt-free?
Should daily life be constantly
negotiated?
How do you maintain the vice?
Can virtue, even vice,
be allowed to cross boundaries?
What is free play, mon amour?

C.
He still narrates
how artists on top of the heap,
commanding Eurodollar price list,
must now languish
at the bottom,
their canvasses assessed dirt cheap.
O where is the glory of yesteryears?
Fashionable painters
pass with the passing season:
how continental storms brew
& rains disastrously fall!
O Nothing lasts forever –
Wall Street players give the meal ticket.
Carpe Diem – Soros shrewdly intimates –
but cautiously celebrate!
Sand castles must beware
of the coming tide.

8.
The empty page
stares him in the face,
like a python
poised to swallow his
secret nightmare –
O only if he were always asleep,
he could steer clear
of the gory memory…
But the sun is ever
on his eyes
& mornings barely afford
that wished-for reprieve.
Whose life
should he chronicle now?
The absent heroes
or pretentious poets?
None but his own
that is quickly drying up.
What should be the lesson, then?
Everything & nothing –
always the spotlessness of
the blank, blank page
like desert dunes
that burn into his eyes,
blinded with words, words, words
forming a chain of suns…
O in the academe
& elsewhere,
this quilt of needlework
is spread across the room
like a fisherman’s net
to trap unsuspecting kids
& haul them into no-thing,
a site where everything is written
in invisible ink…
___________
O How we write furiously
as if we’re all needed
in this country of the unlettered
who spill blood of impotent anguish
& disposable knowledge.