nearly midnight

It seems to you there is a consistent hunger
In you somewhere you can neither point nor name.
Everything else appears alright.
Action movie on the cable, some mutated turtles

The kind you could have loved lifetimes ago
Now you place on mute and sleep through.
Its only redeeming quality, a young woman
Too beautiful only the young can believe

To be real. You would have preferred bio pics, 
Political conspiracies, the end of the world 
As is known, at least; these are familiar.
Closer to what you have come to believe.

And what do you believe? At eight, you had 
Your last faith in Santa Claus; at fourteen,
Fools' love. You wonder how some can go on
Dreaming of romance. Or world peace.

You remember someone saying to look at
Inevitable failure in the eye, exchanging
Blows with it anyway. A hopeless kind of talk,
Pessimism you do not subscribe to but

Remember anyway. The hero suffers in the movie.
You feel yourself pointing out refugees dying
In the next channel. And at the street, 
the stray dog scrawny and sick with open woods.

The three candles you lighted at the church
Of Saint Teresa saying god alone suffices.
You still believe. And you feel it--although
What it is, you no longer know. 

All news by the day growing more and more
Disturbing. Stranger than any tall story
About mutants or aliens. These kinds of movies.
This world. Growing more complicated to resolve.

The TV goes on without sound.
Your dog shifts at your feet. 
It, too, cannot sleep. Ever shameless
In trusting you, waiting for you again.

calm before storm

The people on this island who still remember
their indigenous science can tell
an impending storm is coming

feeling the absence of wind, despite all
sunshine, clarity, and birds.
The large ring around the moon tells them

remember remember remember to tell.
But the animals who need no remembering

sniff for wind, are listless and far 
from the pretence of sleep.  Blind, I can only

watch the forewarning swirling on the web.
A hurtle is restless, is angry, is coming. 

Remembering the count of one to ten,
I prune the sweet wilderness of trees.

encountering a deer

have you ever placed your hand on a breathing body of a deer on an otherwise perfect path, broken only by the sight of its beautiful body that should have been running away from you, but there instead, lying warm and heavily breathing its lasts?  it is a beautiful creature, the deer, a gentle untamed-ness reminiscent of cool breeze on a night when there are no stars and a version of your self holds the hand of someone dear--no, not a lover yet--while the both of you find your way in the fallen woods through the forbidden part of camp. a brook can be heard from somewhere and a new moon promising.  the deer has eyes like pools that when you closely look you can only closely look at yourself.  what drives men to cut their heads and adorn walls with their decapitated gentleness?  how the deer's antlers remind you of roses' thorns trying to protect itself, in good faith.  when the heartbeat under your palm slows down into a gradual stop, the woods would feel darker.  there would be no birds.  and sometimes no matter the brook, the new moon, the perfect path, the someone dear close to you, the world becomes a colder, less gentle place on your way back to camp.

temperatures

1.  Monday morning; writing desk by window.  Gray white sky morning; clear breeze.  Sent instructions to secretary; most likely to stay home for a week (i hope not).

2.  Still woke up at 4 this morning, even if cannot run; how the body keeps its own clock; took med instead, talked to the dogs, made coffee, toast bread.

3.  News says what may be the coldest place in this tropical country made 6 degrees; it'll have to live with 9 degrees for the next few days; in this normally humid province, a mountain place along the transnational highway is having 16 degrees; word has reached the city already three elderly died from the cold; that farm animals are dying is old news.

4.  Was it a few days ago I saw a boy that must be no more than twelve pass the M* bridge, shirtless and barefoot, on the way to a junkshop by the obvious weight of his burden, rusty metal junk balanced on his head.

5.  Three things gnaw me since I moved about two years ago in this little island, supposedly to be close to sea:  poverty as clear as broad daylight, a resigned people to an apathetic government, a cruelty to dogs... Last week, I was asked to give a talk to young writers about the importance of poetry, a part of me is unconvinced.  This coming weekend (i hope i will be well by then) I will fly to N* invited to talk again about writing...do I really believe it can change the world to a better place?  Maybe.  But never in a writer's lifetime.

consider utopia

Consider utopia and how it exists
only in the mind.  An elaborate system
fallible when set into form.  Governments
that rise and fall, imperfectly perfect
people with souls greater than their selves.

If we all are a reincarnate of previous 
souls or dust flecks from stars, are we all
but mere refuse
from utopia?








shane

i woke up shivering

Any one can comment about the strange weather these days.  One country can talk about their drought and heat wave, another about intense cold, these happening all at once.  It is the middle of January, 

and none of the things we used to know apply.  In this humid country, for instance, closer to the ring of fire than others, typhoons are keeping themselves at  bay, watching the too many dead and the grief-

stricken. Now coldness has come, temperatures dropping lower than people can imagine.  In the mountains, animals are dying and the whiff of their death like pollen everywhere, she said, 

commenting on my state over an elaborate breakfast of fluids.  I had woken up in the middle of the dark morning, shivering with fever. Now she looks outside the window and listens to the sound of the river.  

between four and six

Afternoons on Mondays and Thursdays between four and six,
I teach a class of "internally displaced."  Especially opened 
for university students who survived the storm, who wanted to
          move          forward         with the Haiyan on their backs.  

Their stories of back home are still on our TVs.  
On prime time news, their gutted city and wiped out towns, 
their people, families, love ones           bodies 
unidentified in body bags       while the rest 

of us watch while eating our dinner.  How art is a therapy. 

 A week ago in an earthquaked city still pitch dark
without electricity, even fireflies, children held on
to Crayolas and brushes to story-tell.  The artists 
supposed to show them how, ended as audience instead

or bearers of stories of stones the children had carried
like body bags on their backs.  Losing their parents,
siblings, friends.  Some or all of the people they knew.
Horrors no longer unfamiliar to us.

What is the human spirit really made of?

In class, the conversation of the day was Another Country,
a story about the many kinds of displacement, 
the many kinds of understanding      home and       
love.  Its varied complications.  Nobody talks

about death       and the drowned bodies on the streets
the looting, the aftermath, the forced migrations,
homesickness like palpable emptiness       
in this another country with its strange language.

How art is therapy.  How it tears raw

wounds just trying to heal         a day at a time.
A kind of patient confrontation.  "Too soon," I had said
to the student guidance counselor whose eyes
have long been softened on the edges by blunt blows.

She said yes and no.

after city

The children are dead.
The news does not say
even though their bodies
are all around.  In parts,
in missing wholes.
The entire city has begun
to smell of loss.  There are 
arms, dismembered, waving
at Red Cross trucks carrying relief.
Too many bare feet, caught 
cold in the act of running.
Everybody is howling.
But there are not enough names.

At the centers, the lines are long
for food, for water, for medicine.
Also for calling God.
But the telecommunications 
are all down.  
And the entire city is dark.








(Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda, Philippines)
 







by shane

rocks, water, light

photo by A.L. Abanes (may you and your family be safe)

at what point the anger? 

the resignation, the calm? 

how aptly it was said: 

when you know the storm is coming, 

the quiet has a shimmer. 

and shimmer it did; and Haiyan 

took many lives: children, 

men, women.  

no mention of countless pets,

no word about lovers

only strangers with unknown names

in a city nearly wiped unrecognizable.

was it only half a year ago i came 

backpacked to visit and stand

to admire the sunset at their pier?

no news, only reports of dead 
bodies in evacuation centers,

trying to explain the unknowing-ness

of storm surges. of divine plans.

but the footage of a man

the body of his six-year-old 

daughter in his arms, cold.

a shimmering light with it all.

  

it was fourteen years ago

no wonder.  but a wonder still.  the little boy, now a young man.  i hadn't notice: only seeing him once in a while.  until right beside him, a young woman.  

how so suddenly old i feel.  body weighing heavier despite the mind.  it knows what the mind forgets:  little sister is not little anymore; and hasn't been for a long, long time.


















 

where to be

There has been talk these days of retirement and retiring.  As if one has, inevitably, arrived at the one place, or time, meant for waiting in whatever way we may so choose to wait.

Ralph, he says, "in my dotage", and dotage is the word he did use, "I will stay here in B*."  We are in a cab, familiars and visitors of B*.  I look through the cab's rain pelted windows, to what I imagine as mountain folds hidden in the fog.  The world outside is wet.

We pass by a park and I'm randomly reminded of firewood, fire trees, and fireplaces; and the persistent mist that covers the windows, the drafts that let themselves in in rooms.  Early mornings at the hotel, I stay in the sunroom.  

I tell Ralph what would he do in such cold a place.  Will he be writing?  Be with a new, younger lover?

I say I write better too in a cold place, preferably with rain.

But I do not say I'd like to stay close to sea.  No matter how much I love keeping hands on a garden; maybe, no matter even that I'd want to tend bonsais the way my mother used to do when I was so very small I can hardly remember.  Teach a potted old tree to bear flowers, or to bend an arm like this to catch the sun this way.

We arrive at the fellowship dinner place early.  Jay, still quite unstable after the afternoon vodka, and I decide to take a walk.  B* is a beautiful place.  I wish I had a cigarette.  We talk about politics.  And B*.  And retiring.

Maybe not here, Jay says, I'd like to see fields after fields of sugarcane when I wake up in the morning.

I laugh and say "You sure take after ---*." 

He shrugs, still looking pink because of vodka.

My own literary parents are retired.  When I visited M* she showed me her garden of herbs and gave me turmeric and local varieties of basil.  J* too wants to farm:  Like my father before me, he said.

What I'd want to do in my last waiting days is to always see the moon, rise gold, rise silver, rise quiet.  And maybe instead of running with dogs, I will be paddling a boat out to sea.














 





     

rain for our many kinds of loss

the season of rain is coming.  already it beats cold on rooftops, rough on pavements, and soft on grass, on mists, in the middle of nights or in the break of mornings.  a number of people are growing colds (myself included) and a number of plants bloom in this odd time of in between seasons.  some didn't make it past the scorch of summer.  some still trying to survive, holding on to this last stretch of distance between dry now and tomorrow's rain.  

for what ever it lets us, the rain, how it is both gift and loss.  also, an embrace and a promise of gentler things to come.  see, the softer earth, ripe for planting; see the buds beginning to hesitate, growing drowsy with the weight of its dreams of coming summers; birds migrating in numbers.  it's a loss, and a flight from it, towards gentler things to come.

light reruns

When we came in to see the feature, two girls at the back row were already whispering to each other in a kind of annotated version about the film.  We caught the word "mind fuck".  So the movie was a mind fuck eh?  We settled on our seats.  Earlier, the poster near the counter had showed a large ship with a face that looked like a skull; something familiar in the countless times I've visited shops of videos-for-rent, looking for suspense thrillers and horror or action films (never gore) to kill time.  After watching these films for some time, one would notice running threads, both explicit and implicit, that one may actually read them anchoring on cultural theories.  How these films do not as much depict actual monsters than monsters as re-presentations of society's inherent, unarticulated fears.

Anyway.  

In the next few minutes it became apparent that the film, Ghost Ship (2011), wasn't the movie I've already seen, though they were of the same title.  This one wasn't remotely horror, but of something else more interesting.  My date and I would discuss the film soon after, and marvel at the movie's concept.  How the movie was not as much about the plot than it was about the concept.  Or the play of the concepts of fate, and choice, and possibilities lived out from the variations brought about by the "intervention" of human decisions in the grand scheme of things.

The ship in the movie was named Aeolus, of Greek mythology.  The name itself distinct; as Aeolus, in the mythology, were three separate characters whose lives became intertwined in a way that each Aeolus becomes indeterminable from the others.  That the characters boarded the ship sets the theme and tone of the film's entirety; though, of course, I also think that if we attempt further to "read" the ship, we may also most likely arrive at the idea that the ship, of course, could mean something else.  Like life per se, etc, considering that the ship as it is, and the sea, and the act of voyage, are themselves metaphors of something else.   

Then. 

So Jess, the character played by Melissa George, lives the varied, yet singular turn of events as a number of her selves attempted to make decisions to get out of the cycle.  In some instances, she watched these selves, and at some point, even engaged with them.  One always manages to follow a certain variation of events which inevitably leads to killing the other self; but always the cycle remains.     

What did the film say about fate?  About the power of choice?  About the metaphysical world and the so-believed parallel universes where each of the possibilities of our decisions are played out as lived?  About life in general?

We did not answer the questions and let them hang open and called it a night.  At home, the dogs welcomed, and they were let out into the humid, star-filled summer night.

days of disquiet

while running on this foggy early morning, ravens.



how does one write political literature?  it is to be at heart an idealist and a radical, an optimist.  it is to be by blood, brave.  and uncompromising.  and brave.  

no matter some, many, never few, of your friends will be gone without a trace.  no body.  no trail.  save your own memory.  some photos.  stories you retell and retell.  that has no ending, no. it couldn't have any.

to this day, families and friends still look for their missing.  and to this day, there still are families and friends missing.