from a burning room

I am slow to anger, except in particular times
There is no water. Nothing except dry heat
For instance this, in forsaken countries
(for there really are such forsaken places).

It was not always like this, the slowness 
The calm with which I attempt to take in stride
The many kinds of failure: processes and people.
There had been much audacity when I was younger:

Edition of myself that had not yet known better 
Someone I can now only admire on those still 
Burning in fire, those still absolutely certain 
On certainty. Leading the walk ahead convinced 

Nothing cannot be surpassed, no matter literal. 
Such admirable conviction! Such admirable anger!

Perhaps anger can be exhausted, though not all
Not all. There is still anger in reserves 
The kind that is slow to come, vengeful 
Poisonous and antipathetic, something that does

Not easily yield to forgiving or forgetting--
It is terrible! As all things are when passions
Come alive. Who is afraid? Who else is afraid?

2300

Twenty three hundred and there is a random line in mind.
An image lingered from the last story read, an Atwood;
the story, party autobiographical.
At the corner of my eye, a house lizard looks about.
You can almost see through its new skin.
There are no stars tonight; the sky is threatening rain.
I want to tell you about stray dogs daily seen
but it not going to be a happy story.
What can be told happily about? Happily being a word
that skips and hops like a child
singing a newly learned song or meeting a new friend
who has agreed to exchange marbles with a bubble gum
the kind that leaves a tint on your teeth.
When did you learn to whistle?
I learned to move my ears when I was nine or ten or
eleven or twelve; who can remember exactly when?
Summers melt themselves together; you and I once
ran light footed on the wind itself.
The ears can still move to this day;
a trick to fascinate any child with.
One of these days I think I will find myself
telling why I have stayed away from church
even though god must still be out there.
No one asked "Can a poem really change a world?" Answer is
no
but they are written anyway because the lines are there.
Lines like boundaries of what lies on either sides.
The day is unfinished, but has ended.
  

the angry books

Just this morning while calm 
out with dogs, I thought about
the angry books. The several
I keep where I take turns 
unmasking myself, also
masking self partly from self.

Perhaps, several years from
when I've written them I will 
see them better, see myself
better. Understand blindness.
As when I see my father now.

father's eyes

tonight the dark sky murmurs thunder.
sometimes there is a brief light.
my brother-in-law asked 
me this afternoon, was i not coming 
to family dinner.  i said no
while helping load his truck
some things i was sending away.
i have been away too often too long
lately, i need quiet alone in the garden.
hours later, staying in with the dogs
and watching massacre in a game
of thrones, i remember the day.

and maybe it is good i did not come
for dinner.  some things are better
unresolved.  best unremembered, 
even though not forgotten.  these days,
in spite of trying, i am becoming
in a number of ways like the man.

floating on water

in between long tables of conversations about plights, i remember the open waters from a photo by sue, two dolphins meeting, closing distance.

the body under light of day II

Restraint.  One of the first things taught
one of the most enduring things practiced:

never speak too loud, or talk too fast
or eat too much, or want too much.
A golden mean for everything.

In poetry, the practice is not speaking
what you mean to say.  To say it 
in another way.  To let you sense

want and desire, need and a kind of
emptiness to be filled, but does not
speak of it under the light of day.

the burden of light

summer here hits 38 to 40 degrees celsius.
the asphalt roads make mirages.
dogs not meant for the climate, suffer. and
people make homages where the ACs are.

still, everyone is warm
even though most dream less. 
many retire to their fate.

and while all TVs here show melodrama
and people easily laugh, cry and curse
the sunny weather does not 

tolerate stories of a particular kind.
if you were here, sitting across me
we will break open a bright conversation.

and will have to wait for brightness to somber
before telling stories of a dark, quiet kind.

In Blackwater Woods

In Blackwater Woods



Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.





- Mary Oliver

when half of the rest is asleep

always, when half of the rest is still asleep and the world as is known is quiet, with only shades of light in hues of blue and gray, the nip in the air still brings with it traces of the origins of sleep.  always, it is the best time, i think, to wander and wonder what is it in this world we all have to so joyously suffer.  one's perceptions so limited no matter how the travel and empathy.  not a few times did i wonder if it is better not to know a good number of things, including that one can only know so little.  perhaps it is better to be asleep like the rest and the others who sleep joyfully, fitfully in unknowing...

the roles we play

Linda, who said she can't leave New York there's just so much theater there, said I see her when I could, when she's back, there, or here, or wherever it is she is referring to, as home.  

She said why do I not leave this place.  I said why do you return.  I did not ask do you feel like a stranger here?  I do.  Every time I return, the place has something new.  And I get lost:  the streets

have a habit of changing names.  The landmarks have the habit of changing faces.  Old places disappear, always something new.  When I first saw Linda, she was not 

the picture of the name in mind.  She was otherwise; and warm and bubbly; meticulous about each step of the process.  I was not surprised.  Long years in the theater have a way of creeping

itself into the skin.  In a workshop she tells the participants the cliche among us they may not yet know:  we're all actors playing our lives in roles.  Linda says we are friends, we are lovers, we are

wives, we are children, we are mothers.  One time she whispered I am feeling cold: I think I might be sick.  She asked for a pill and I gave her a glass of lukewarm water with it.  She curled herself 

on the couch, like a fetus.  I turned off the lights and closed the door.
What are we when we are alone?  What role do we play in front of the wall?

bench at the park by the river

how does a conversation between two humans in their bodies begin?
in awkwardness and in pretension.
pretend the body does not matter.
nor the face.  the length and color of hair, of eyes, of skin.
the kind of smile, the crow's feet around the eyes, the even-ness
of teeth, the lips, the lobes of ear, curve of neck, sound of voice.

in conversation, the two humans list on walls of air
their life's achievements:  the various ways they have survived
the onslaught of years;  the ways they have carried on
all the weight of accumulated disbelief; all the personal
histories seen, felt, or otherwise.  how the body
tends to hide behind the eyes.

if the conversation is long enough, it ends with coffee
together with a hundred other things known
on how to keep bodies afloat on the surface.
 
if the conversation is not enough, the two humans, body-less,
stay on the bench at the park by the river
souls talking to each other, both facing the waters.

supermoon at the edge of the world

when the supermoon happened, what were you doing?

i was out with one of my dogs around the neighborhood.  He likes to sniff his invisible world.  And hide under the warm shelter of things.  Likes cats too.  Likes to sit facing them, and the two of them would look at each other without saying a word, making conversation.

on staying under the sun

roger has written and published another non-fiction piece.  a memoir.  and it is beautiful and tender, the kind that makes you be on a boat watching the glowing dusk and white waves.  he mentions reading as a child The Little Prince, the "old" grownups always needing explanations; and how now he himself is on his way to needing those.  i sent roger a post telling how beautiful his new published work and how i wish i have his bravery to step into the light, under the sun, for the world to see.

roger says he walks around naked.  sunburnt.  
i say that is why i write poetry.

semaphore

in a cozy cafe by the ruins, a random bottle vase of fresh flowers.  just there.  a bouquet for the happen-by stranger.  not unlike at all:  these nameless writings: messages adrift in bottles. 

expression. of peace.

after red


i tell my lover i am going to do painting today.  i will go to the hardware store and buy the paint brushes.  flat ones intended for walls.  those that are meant to color.  and are unapologetic.  i do not care if sio montera says not to use house paints.  that they are not meant for art.  great or otherwise.  i will get a few pieces of good wood.  some nails.  a hammer.  a white canvas.  and build myself a frame.  large.  and rest it on the wall.  i have a stroke in mind.  it is blue.  and slightly convex.  concave.  when seen from the other end.  center bottom thrown to top far right.  i mean it like a wave.  of something else.  maybe a part.  of a circle.  even though it trails away

tell me about your self in darkness

tell me about your self in darkness.  it is better.  truth in its self-depreciating version, easier between strangers.  this, as much a confession.  in a room, turn off the lights.  and let the shadows play.  the outlines of leaves and silhouettes of dim slanted light from the window.  in darkness, we are strangers without faces without names.  and the walls that is our body collapse without restraints.  in darkness, we merely are psyches.  with wear and tear.  closed in the seen eternal space.  reminiscent of eternity.  no matter how illusory.  there is no line, there is no body.  only voice and breathing.  and a small lock, with its tentative key, from a deluge of eidetic remembering.  

the persistence of the every day

a student in the university committed suicide yesterday.  because she couldn't pay the fees.



and so she becomes news now.  the activists rallying behind her dead body and its story that no one really heard until it, too, stopped breathing.  behavioral psychology major, couldn't make the fees, past extensions, plus the depression, the family poor, the government to blame, not enough education subsidy, the officials say the uni is not to blame, nor the policies, the students want someone, anyone, they walk out from their classrooms today

but they will be back tomorrow.  and after she's buried, news will be new.  as expected.  the dailies roll.  and every one carries on. 

a brief long note on lines

1.  Something happens in between the panels of a comic book.
      
2.  (was it Scott McCloud who said?)

3.   What happens in this negative space? 

4.  The interstice, no matter how brief, saying without saying 

5.  Something has been omitted in favor for another

6.  Or.  It is all a matter of "seeing".

7.  Who sees?  

8.  Who chooses what to see?

9.  Drop a panel, and the whole story changes.

10.  A matter of version/s, 

11.  Of course:

12.  What is not told is as much as what is told

13.  Perhaps even more.

14.  (Louise Glück said:)

15.  It is the remnant, the incomplete

16.  That calls the power of the Whole.

17.  How I am drawn to poetry because of this:

18.  Words are

19.  A mere thin trace of a thought.

20.  A verse line is like 

21.  A visual line

21.  And the "line" of space in the middle of a panel

22.  All of them operating in 

23.  The context

23.  Of silence

24.  Speaking.