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“And in her eyes you see nothing…”
The Beatles
In what he thought was the last day
of the seasons of the world
in his heart,
it was raining the whole time & far into the night
but the sight of her a week ago had left him wondering:
no, it wasn’t that he was drowning in the sea of ions in the air
that left him depressed
but the cafe where he saw them – she of the sun rising over the hills
& he of the moon limning the fjord – seemed to be the right place
for seeing her for the last time on the last day
of all the seasons in the world, although that space
had stayed the same all the time he would be there
waiting at a table & drumming his fingers on the glass:
he had come minutes late, & they had been waiting,
waiting, waiting patiently.
& she to stop the clock perhaps, the endless ticking of the
clock had looked over the menu, ordering some snack,
meaning nothing at all, because
she was always, as she had always been, fidgeting with her phone
& keeping track of conversations as well,
as if she were wired interminably to the world…
Ennui would pass over her face like a shadow,
& hooking her bag up she would rise quickly…
& he would feel like a guy in a wheelchair, unable to stop her
because things were always like that on days that seemed
to be the last one of all the seasons of the world
in his heart.
Of course, I’ll commend him.
She rehearses the lines before the invisible crowd
inside her head,
repeating the words to make them real, authentic,
smooth like silk.
He’s my General. A smile breaks on her impassive face.
You can do your worse: I take it as a game.
The sudden burst of light through the thick clouds
dapples the room.
Something is rotten this side of the river?
Mine is a glass already full but the crimson crowd
keeps on chanting it’s empty!
Absurd, absurd.
This is a crime against reason; there is something demented
in their protestations.
Rain has started to fall: mist covers the stained-glass window;
she takes a deep breath as though to calm herself down.
The chessboard is clear: the Queen rules.
If she is trapped, everybody loses.
Heaven forbid! Pity the pawns who have labored
& suffered tactical ploys.
For falsehood & lies will not change the logic of the game.
A gust of wind slams against the windowpane.
Everyone moves according to his destiny, didn’t they know that?
Elementary, elementary.
Why should I not praise my knights?
Their brilliance is a knife in the heart of the opposition.
& you know how tough it is to stand down or fire.
There is much virtue here, so much valor there.
The phone rings.
Should I fall short of my legionnaires’ expectations?
They wait for my signal religiously.
Of course, I cut them some slack; they need to stay loose.
Even in the midst of murders & conspiracies
for such is the theater of statecraft.
Anyway, blood always spills on the streets.
Even the Israeli Army can’t help inflicting civilian casualties.
Collateral damage, I realize, is the reality of war.
But we shall not be deterred: my boys are resolute;
there should be peace in the land.
She lingers briefly before the mirror,
turning around to check something here & there,
then sighs. I am ready.
The rain has not stopped.
Tulad mo, ako’y isang ordinaryong tao lamang.
Kapag hindi ko sinalo ang problema ni Bos
daramputin din ako sa kangkungan. At bakit
hindi ko pangangatawanan ang aking simpleng trabaho:
halimbawa, ihihimutok sa aming tropa
na mainit sa taas, kailangang gumawa kami
ng paraan upang umayos ang buhay at kabuhayan.
Si Bos ang aming inahin na pinagyupyupan naming mga sisiw.
Dati-rati wala kaming ngalan, hindi kami pansin ng kakosa,
para kaming mga pusa na magbubungkal ng basura
sa mga otel at mall.
Hanggang ‘yon na nga: noong may magturo sa ‘king
magkasa ng kalibre .45. wika nga, at pasabugin
ang puso ng saging, nagbago ang lahat.
Dina ako tinitisudtisod kumbaga sa daan,
yumayanig ang bulungan sa kanto tuwing ako’y dumaraan.
Pero di ko ipinagyayabang ito. Tahimik akong trumabaho:
anumang ipinangangalandakan na kesyo ganito ako,
ganito siya ay pawang hakahaka lamang.
Malinis ang aking konsyensya.
Sumusunod lang ako sa utos ni Bos.
Di ako nagbago, pare. Ke dyanitor ka o karpintero
o klerk o drayber, o mensahero, o propesor o manunulat
ginagawa natin ang ayon sa lohika ng ating sistema.
Halimbawa, bakit ka aangal kung ipalinis ang imburnal,
ipatype ang mga memo, itrangka ang gate
para di makapasok ang mga taong ipinagbabawal,
ipasulat ang SONA at idipensa ang all-out war ng Palasyo?
Susunod ka rin, hindi ba? Binabayaran ka.
Si Bos mo ay baleba’y bumubuhay sa ‘yo.
Kung ika’y pasaway, etsapwera ka. Ganun talaga.
Iisa ang hibla ng ating ordinaryong buhay.
Panahon pa ni Herodes, pare ko,
Pinapatay na ang mga bata. At bakit hindi?
Silang masamang damo, sabi ni Bos, na kapag lumago
ay ikalulunod, wika nga, ng lahat.
Ayaw kong mabugnot si Bos, kundi sa kanya
para akong asong tatanghod-tanghod sa mga restoran
– at sa mga nag-iinglis at nag-prapranses, kumbaga,
na hindi ko naman mawawaan.
Nakapapanting ng tenga talaga; nganingani kong
kalabitin ang gatilyo para pumarehas
Tutal, nakita ko na silang mangatog
at maiyak sa pagmamakaawa — sila na hindi ko kilala
at di makikilala kailanman – habang isinusubo ko
ang dulo ng baril sa bukana ng kanilang bibig.
Swertehan lang. Kung di sila, ako.
Malas lang kung mararatrat mula sa likod.
Ganun talaga ang mundo: Kanya-kanya
ang lahat, tulad ng gawi mo tuwing
pumapasok ka sa iyong marangal na upisina.
Noong i-text sa akin ng isang guro ang tungkol sa mga nawawalang estudyantel sa Bulacan, hindi ko malaman ang aking daramahin: araw-araw sandamukal na balita ang aking nababasa at napapakinggan, at itong mistulang desaparecidos sa ating panahon – luma na marahil sapagka’t mula’t mula pa sa rehimen ni Marcos ito’y ulit-ilit nang pinangangambahan – ay waring hindi na ito tumimo sa aking isipan. Sino sila? Bakit nga raw dinukot? Alam ko na rin naman ang sagot sa istoryang ito: tiyak na mga tao ng estado ang nagpasimuno, mga sintomas wika nga ng mga dapat ilihim at isiwalat sa publikong lipunan na gumagalaw sa kumpas ng iilan: iyong mga nakakotse’t sekretarya, kasunod ang mga hagad na escort at agresibong kumakaway, tabi! tabi! may lakad kami!
At sa telebisyon mo nga maririnig ang pakiusap ng isang ina: sana ay makita na ang aking anak, birthday nya sa makalawa, ang presidente ay isa ring ina, sana ay magawan ng paraan ito, sana…Ang tv screen ay babalik sa broadcaster, sa ibang dako naman…Luma na ang mga eksena: sa Arhentina ang mga naulila ay magpu-prusisyon upang ipaalala sa unti-unting lumilimot ang mga malagim na pangyayari, alalaumbaga’y pilit na binubuhay ang mga pangalan at mukha sa mga taong nakatulala, nakatingin, at humihinga ng malalim upang kagyat muling bumalik sa kanilang ginagawa: huntahan ng Eat Bulaga, mga tanong sa Deal or No Deal ni Kris Aquino o magkamot ng alipunga na nababad na naman sa baha.
Ang ingay ng ulan ay bubuhusan pa ng mga ingay ng mga radyo at tawanan sapagkat iyon ang napapala ng mga pakialamero yang mga erehe sa gobyerno o yung sobrang mag-isip kaya nakukursunadahan ng mga heneral na nagtatrabaho lamang upang panatilihin ang kapayapaan sa loob ng tahanan sa palengke sa kalsada sa ilang na pook sa buong kabayanan.
Ano ang kanilang kasalanan? Ilang talaan ba na ng nadisgrasya ang kaniyang natunghayan buhat nang siya’y magbinata sa Maynila at ngayo’y namumuti na ang buhok sa kaiisip ng pera sa pamantasan, ganito pa rin hanggang ngayon? Ilan na ba sa mga kakilala – malayo o malapit – ay di na nya nabalitaan pa at kung mabalitaan man ay may sukob ng lagim ang mga kwentong maririnig.
Ilan daang taon na bang nangyayari ito: ang bumalikwas na naliligo sa malamig na pawis kung may kakatok sa pinto sa oras na wala namang inaasahang darating o makakasalubong ang isang tao nananinipat ng tingin at ika’y kagyat na iiwas sa pagsulyap sapagkat baka isang peligrosong engkwentro ito.
Malaki na ang mga bata. Silang nalahian na rin ng takot ng matatanda ay bagkus ngayong tumatahak sa daang kanyang iniiwasan. Marahil sa kanilang panahon ito ngayon ang nararapat gawin. Marahil anuman ang mangyayari, inisip nilang baka pagsisihan sa dakong huli ang di pagsunod sa kutob at lohika ng nararapat sa mundo.
Ganun nga siguro. Ang kinabukasan ay nililigiran ng mga bangkay ng mga berdugo ng kapitalismo at mangingibig ng hustisya at karapatan.
I
It was daybreak, & there was a slight drizzle when
we drove to Talayan Village to bury our dear cat –
a family member for 14 years – who had a seizure
at the clinic 24 hours after I won a two-digit lotto prize
(as though he had sent the numbers for his medical bill).
The shower lasted briefly, & we
thought to ourselves: Did the heavens bless this
gentle creature of God? Dutifully. we dug a hole
in our cousin’s garden which was a virtual cat
cemetery; the spirits that congregate on that sacred ground,
we felt, were angelic companions for Bugsy, a tabby,
who endured surgery when he was young.
I had thought of texting some friends, but decided
against it – they would have probably smiled at the
ceremony, & at the small wake in our garage the night before,
with MB & La silently taking turns in watching over
his small, chubby body wrapped in Ba’s pink shawl
& lying inside a corrugated box while a solitary
candle burned like a palace sentinel.
Word was hardly passed among the mourners.
Memory was too fresh to be retold.
Kayenne, his brother, probably had an idea of
things: He simply observed the ritual from the
solace of his basket.
Bugsy was ours, had made life bearable
in this country of dead & dying loves by being
simply himself, pure spirit of universal goodness
in a time of savages & criminals.
Verily, the death of a cat rarely makes news.
The few who knew him were equally crestfallen.
The others, of course, would shrug it off as though
it was as natural as day that cats die. Would
the universe truly bother with such a trifling event?
How explain then – silliness & all- the tears
that dribbled from our eyes, as though the earth opened
beneath us, swallowing us into its dark, infernal belly?
II
You pass by his cage – his virtual house to insulate him
from the territorial imperiousness of Kayenne – &
realize he is forever gone, his absence heavier than
the molten lava on your mind, & the sight of his empty abode
shocks you like a slap in the face. In such fashion,
summer gets to you in all its resplendent terror: So
many had gone ahead of him (my father who had flown
into the light; Lola Pacing, who, at her deathbed, would
gasp, “kapayapaan, kapayapaan…”; Elbert, who never knew
in his crippled mind he had lived at all; friends
whose departure was sudden & intolerably puzzling),
as though the four horsemen had galloped back,
striking us down – speechless, inconsolably stupid.
Time was when we would text his Ba for his
feline c/d in Singapore; & she would turn supermarkets
inside out for his prescription diet. He grew fat that way.
But why would we not fuss over him?
Middleclass ethics demands that we assure him
of a painless existence: & after all, unlike those pestiferous
state bureaucrats, his integrity was beyond question.
& when his eyes caught yours, you knew it
could have been the other way around: us behind
bars; & him problematizing us, humans whose kind
has made animals suffer hell, so that
we could live well, & justly.
III
As for the mourners, if they say the customary words
loss, gone, whatever, what do they really feel?
Are these utterances sufficient to tell all?
Will this meaning of pain duplicate itself
among those who only hear of this minor disaster?
Can we reserve the right of truth only for the sufferers?
Some testify there will always be kindred souls
who share that which compassionate hearts lament.
But is this true? Or an imaginary hand
that softly touches our back?
Loss is beyond words. You then keep yourself busy:
Drive the car as though pursued
by some ancestral demons, cut your hair to give order
to the day, go on a shopping binge to recover
what was forever lost…Refocus your heart to deny
the returning moments of Bugsy “living inside your head”
because there is no end to the terror of being alone.
The act of everyday living is the language
of those whose animal silence is the very innocence itself.
IV
& I, who have always been inclined to write
an avalanche of sad poems as though life were a monochrome,
dare say a last word?
Nothing & everything. It would seem that in
keeping with the symbolic correlations of the world,
Bugsy’s life would come to an end in summer,
at the very cusp of the changing seasons,
when rain starts to fall on distant towns.
& I cannot be any wiser.
We know, anyway, that every ticking of the clock
is a beginning & an end, every murmur of the wind
a hello & a goodbye, every sound of footsteps
a coming & a going. I see the flow of memory
but I’ll never know why things ain’t so.
Most have gone to their separate peace –
losers & lovers, princes & paupers, prophets & profiteers,
heroes & hacks. & every absence leaves that proverbial
lump in the throat, tightening of the chest,
shaking of the head, because the cosmos can only answer us
in a language we’ll never understand.
Asked for his bio by the encoder, Edel E. Garcellano, could only text that he lives with his family in Quezon City, along with Kayenne their cat who recently lost his brother Bugsy. His preface completes whatever is worth knowing about his authorship.
PREFACE
So there, the book “Fashionable Nonsense”, by Sokal & Bricmont who cracked the academic joke that post-modern intellectuals have ignorantly abused scientific theories, turning everything into narratives. It is like a cadaver on his table, & waiting to be opened while his mind races toward his useless anger that having only one subject to teach so far this semester would mean technically having a capuccino once a year! That’s a major disaster for any bourgeois pedant, haha! He still begs for crumbs from the establishment while his former students are fucking around in cosmo style, raking in moolah, & worse, taking up creative writing courses because they think, they type, they shit, & therefore they have something to say?
It was summers ago when they – the future of his past – hoved into view but as quickly dissolved among the waves. He thought what madness was that but he felt idiotically theatrical. Anyway, he is now looking at a fiery red horizon where voices from the distant bank echo & as suddenly as the sounds mute into sheer sighs, the faces at the end of the ocean melt into dots, slowly beading into one rugged line of cloudy shadows. The moon quickly rises, & its soft stream of light turns everything into apparition.
Something he knows has been irretrievably lost: What is it he can’t put his finger on?
Is it sadness? Everyone is in the business of it. Is it despair? It’s just a jive if you ain’t got the money.
But isn’t he deep into the professorial crap of “connecting with the young?”
The young turks have aged, but somewhat contaminated by the very ways of First World living. Worse, he has known some die at the hands of fascists who keep multiplying & keep coming back like those Hollywood zombies. Everything is a hassle game, it seems, where bogeymen become bigshots & licensed texters of the muse: This is the fashion these days. A Ph. D. in poetry? The poem itself is the final arbiter that makes & unmakes poets.
& so this blog.
The answer, my friend,
is blowing in the wind…
–Bob Dylan
He wakes up in the wee small hours of the morning—
much like what Sinatra croons, anyway—
feeling so tired, as though he were a boy
who had the night before cried himself to sleep,
But he is quick to remember—Zorba redux—
like Andromache after days of grieving
to stir back from the bed, heat up the pot
& drop a teabag, The body, after all, must carry on.
Did he have to text? What if he didn’t?
At the end of the day on planet earth, which would have
been wiser? sadder?
How did he lose his cool? The mind rules
but was she the storm that blew his head off?
It was ha-ha! a no-win situation.
In the heart’s interim—that skip in the beat;
the guitar & bongo of all black sounds—
a spectral snake tears into his guts,
each bite sending him to reach for book & booze,
which resolves nothing, leaves him nothing anyway.
Is he the man in his silly parable?
When he smiled at her
playing in the garden, the young princess shrieked in fear,
scooting back into the armory, for she thought
she had seen a werewolf bare its white-hot fangs…
Struggling into the forest, the mangy peasant
would clasp his head in an act of theatrical despair,
moaning. Was he a bloodied fox? But he
would break into an idiotic smile,chuckling
as though to lick an ancient wound—
God had again pulled a fast one on him.
Time & circumstance. & the
ghosts that solidify from air. Everything comes
too early or too late. The season turns in
helter-skelter way. Is he the minotaur
in the labyrinth preparing for his death?
He is alone. Or so he thinks. But the
empirical facts of his personnel file don’t bear this out.
His friends are quick to enfold him in their arms,
swaddling him from the icy air
that embraces like a blanket of bees.
He is, after all, somewhat provided for.
He manages to eat, now & then, like a king.
His countenance bears the compassion of strangers.
On occasions, they would celebrate his highs,
pull him out of himself. Verily, we could say
he is a bearable member of the community of
kindred hearts. What is he gnashing his teeth for?
His solitude is a bohemian pose,
an existential claim that had seen better days,
a petty-b brinkmanship that has been discarded
like junk mail,
for the country is in flames,
the flags are unfurled & he must help pass
the ammunition.
Of course, the nights have been mercilessly chilling.
But her voice, her eyes keep his memory in an iron vise.
He does not know, or pretends not to know,
how to breathe without suffering that imaginary stone
that presses on his chest. Ah, but that is bad poetry.
The heart, after all, has its own semiotics.
It rushes in where slobbering angels fear to tread.
Is it a game, after all? The cunning of the hunter,
the innocence of the prey? Is it because time
has been running out?
True, the council of elders nods,
but he has never felt like it in a long, long time.
This blast of light that pierces his ice-cold skin,
makes him move lest he freeze.
But words are cheap, so bloody cheap these days.
Like beer or gin in a two-penny store of easy loves
& drunken men.
Everything he said had already been said.
Nothing [on a metaphysical mode]
is the only signifier that signifies itself.
Going the way of Hemingway? Genes, god & nada?
Nada, nada, nada! As if the
world has been floating on nada, turning on nada—
that leaf, that stone, that beat of aging hearts,
that brush of soft cheeks, that flowering smile
That rush of young blood in virginal veins—
all turning into nada of his nada in the nada
of his nada memory.
& when everything has passed, will he still
remember her? She him? [Of course, She won’t.]
Who does not forget?
Yup, yup, everybody moves on.
(Yesterday, last I saw him, he was in pain. But
according to a news bulletin, doctors didn’t think so.
It’s all in the head, they said, the while laughing
to themselves as they issued him some prescription—
to make him ease up, feel good.
After all, in the vast panorama of human grief
his case, experts say, is a petty crime
of impossible passion & forgettable despair.)
From Voices of Violence, 1971
Again, again & again
“Its Saturday white & dry…”
Surviving line of a juvenilia at 18
whose corpus like the Basement Café
blazes no more in my eye’s cartography
Remembrance is easy: after all, haven’t I lived
like a dog trained by habit to bark & whine
A drunken boxer who couldn’t duck the uppercut
& – puzzled – kept falling, falling, falling down
the Joker’s floor that looked like up, up, up
Is she coming back who stole away the sun
Have the old gypsies folded up their tents
because the signs repeat the same old lies
Are we all meteors hurtling in the cosmos
Of imagined pain like some cheap cradle lives
The fiberglass chairs will outlast these young boozers
huddling at the tables like vesper penitents,
laughing & drinking to the future
the angel of history wouldn’t even divine
O how to leap over the invisible ravine
between the calculus of your hot, iron heart
& the logarithm of my river’s third bank
where I, turning into mud, sip cold dark coffee
from a dirty cup—
As when that particular morn of yesteryears,
when eyes were fiercer & hands quicker
I waited at the Basement for the first dawning of you
this eternal recurrence of the eternal you
amid the tumult of shifting friends & foes
who droned away the deafening silence of this heart
Again, again, & again
At Oz, “It’s Saturday white & dry…”
Everything changes
& nothing has at all changed.
“If you’ve fallen for someone, it is nothing
unusual—it happens to the most calculating
as well as any ordinary bum—but you’re in deep shit, man!”
he says with the softness of a malevolent grin
He lits a Marlboro as if to stop the ambush of words
from his bottled heart. He’s on a Hamlet mode,
the invisible skull telling it like it is,
& in this telling he eases that pain—
O let sleeping dogs lie?—so malignant like a bad tooth’s,
but as in the earth’s tectonic shifts
that rock islands & continents,
this pain is strangely dulled in every beating of the heart.
[Move, move, move! Or you die]
He sees me staring at his San Miguel.
Quick is he to signal that, like the palm of his hand,
he knows the story’s semaphore. He, Kilroy, has been there.
What is there to say?
The history of loss is everyman’s common history.
[& God Almighty doesn’t seem to care.]
“O yes,” he adds, “that cruel rap is just another sign,
a microdot on Yahweh’s nose
whose designs we mortals never will understand.
& so it goes: the street wisdom of flaneurs,
eyes properly grim & sad, hands clutching at straws
like pistols cocked at some dangerous guys;
that life, brief & linear, is a complex plot of truths
hidden under layers of sand & rocks…
She, he points out, is a “girl from Ipanema”
who moves, o slowly moves, out of his radar’s eye.
This, paňero, is your given: How shall you grieve?
Is it beyond the alchemy of texts?
You wear your pain like a filmic brand for all to see
Oz pedagogues to decipher, reinscribe
probe a sadness beyond suspicion & rite?
The history of passion is heavy with poisoned blood”
[But what about her?
O yes, what about her who roams the circles of hell?]
“Nah,” the guy across him drawls.
“She has her own world to conquer.
Her smile is the future where doors are slammed shut.
Way off are you from particularities of her sighs.
It was all happenstance: when she smiled
you were simply blocking her path, ha-ha!
You’re in your prison house of signs
that strapped your divinations onto a circular rack.
If, monsieur, you cannot snap out of it, buy a shotgun
& aim it at your heart, ha-ha! If scared to make real
this Shakespearean art, Shut up, man, shut up!
Does God exist? He does; he does not.
The first, after all, makes pain necessary, multiple
The second makes abandonment real, acceptable
[Imagine Sartre floating on an Atlantic chunk of ice.]
That love isn’t fair, that’s the golden rule?
O when passion’s most true, truly most inconsolable!”
I rise, making for the exit
& into the deepening night
that doesn’t give a hoot
to love, loss & truth’s hellebore.
From Voices of Violence, 1971
“Encircle the city
from the countryside.”
–Mao Tse-Tung
The forest still screams loudly in our ears.
We advance wary through old thickets of decay.
Wild birds abound, flock into fallen sentinels,
The wicked city looms; the high command blares.
Our feet are sapped, dragging to roll of drums;
Our women dry up, their brats bloat & die…
Forcibly we trek anew the road sloping in blood
While ruined garrisons shatter the calm of countryside.
We, in communal design, are fast on the heels of death.
The peasants rear to buck (The hinterland is secure)
the final surging tide from the spitted eye of vice:
“We are coming to storm! O Brothers, take heed!”
Tarlac, Pampanga…The Sierra Madre’s a python huge
coiling to devour the white animals of the plain,
as centuries after, it brushed the chains off & moved:
“We’re on the road fatefully, leaving memory behind.”
& our eyes huddle, the men close to their rifles.
Old women gather round, stoking the camp & fire.
Night prays. The sleep is long & hard; we dream.
The sky breaks, ringing voices of dawn. We crack the whip.
The vanguard bellows, the leader waves: “He with us,
low savages, was once your kind, doomed ministers;
but quickly abandoned he your groping art & pyres
& sensibly spewed old tragedies and Greeks.
“The horizon of our lives widened for wakefully he came
to invoke the craft of reason, justice & repair…
In the hard years, you, rats feebled by circular ways,
saw us no longer men but turned beasts to hunt your days!”
From Voices of Violence, 1971
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