a rope to the sky

There is a song number from Carly Simon. It says, There are so many stars. (What if I didn’t love you.) I do sometimes wonder, as I did tonight, if we are looking at the same sky, if we wish for the same things, if we have the same prayers. Maybe not. Maybe no two people have the same wishes the same prayer, or God wouldn’t be listening to every prayer. Dih He, ever?

A wish is a rope to the sky. Did you write that? I sometimes think I have no original thought of my own, no original sins of my own. Always, I must have read it somewhere. So when I say star or sky or wish or breath, they are not really mine, they cannot be mine, no longer mine; surely they belong to another poet somewhere sometime ago. They belong to you long ago, long before I knew you to be quoting you, before I had reason to speak to you, as I do now.

So if I say now that a wish is a rope to the sky to hang one’s breath with, they no longer have the hold, the truth, the power of words spoken for the first time; they no longer have the heart of a love hurting the first time.

Please mister please

I am not laughing at your pains. But suppose I were, did you have to take it too personally? Can't we laugh a little at a life we can never beat?

You know, when Stieg Larsson died on the elevator on his way to getting his little opus published, I and my mean friend Daphne laughed a little. Should we have cried? Then when he got some good review, we were quite a little happy for him. (Being dead, he could not be happy for himself anymore, could he? And what with that little fight over royalty between girlfriend and family.) Daphne even bought all his books and gifted her niece with those too. I did not. You know me. I only read Dostoevsky.Besides, I didn't think writing those books were the most important thing he did in life.He just needed a little dough, a little grease, I supposed, a way to get around his thankless and more arduous duties, for which no fame no money awaited him.

I’m sorry about your boyfriend’s assassination, ma cher amie, but if you keep on crying and will never be through mourning, I will really laugh. Huhuhu. The man who got away. Huhuhu. See that? Miss Sincerity is dead.  

I don't like Maoist boyfriends the whole lot of them. They should not have girlfriends, it goes against their vocation. They will only make them cry, dead or alive. 

Thank you, too, for your appreciation of the struggle for food over which there's no beating around, as you say, but I wish that your helping me survive physically had more to do with helping me survive politically, be me a maoist or a fascist, or I would feel the basket case lunatic that my maoists friends like to portray me. They call me “buang,” but it’s okay, for as long as I squeeze out during a thirty-minute a day lucid moments, what they want of me. They also wouldn’t mind giving me P25 for a copy of TLR. But not more, not even if I hand over my wealth of books in mortgage or in total divestiture, as I might make lembas or a grenade out of it; or I might put up a publishing company.

That ma cher amie, I find very funny.

Can't you laugh at your fate, for the irony of it; or cry, for the fun of it. Who cares. It's like celebrating Christmas in March April or May, like what your crazy family out there in Lyons does.

Hire a crier if you can never get through with it, I advise. The Chinese do it.

:) 

Huhuhu. I cry. For the irony of it.

Sheilfa, some questions don't have answers. One of those questions is why people we think we love do not love us. I have asked myself that question too, and as I get older I ask that question just for the fun and irony of it - to get me going. It is such an intriguing question. There is no answer. There is nothing personal about it, yet ironically it feels the most personal of all rejections.

a seedy thing

I have thought it over. I think it is just my ego. Nothing to do with love. Grudge maybe. Gets back at you as a need. A seedy thing.

I may have never loved you. They are right, your friends. It will never do. It is not because I will never have the dollar bills or the car to purchase you with. More because if I had, it will never be for you. I will always leave and arrive at my own time regardless of what happens at the waiting station. Maybe they are really more loyal to you than I am or ever could be. I sometimes envy the love they have for you. It is enough to make a good decent burial when all this will be over.

Thank you for the friendship you tried to proffer to me. Coming from you it already meant a lot. Sometimes it felt like sunshine. It made me happy.  I still don’t know what you meant by it didn’t work. Like I don’t know what you meant by done or winded and all those retirement house words. I still hurt when I think of the words you spat my way. I hurt even more when I think of the words you chose to forget and not say. But I must have done worse. Besides, your judgments and morals stand on the wisdom of the century; I cannot really measure up to them.

I love you. I have to say it. Maybe it is not true. Maybe tomorrow it won’t be true. Maybe today it is not true already. It is not true. Just the same, I want for it to live, coming as it is from me. Perhaps my love is like the moringa seedlings I am growing in this dumpsite toxic with discards and rusting steel. Perhaps it is just literary, like what I am doing now, which is not the same as loving. Paper thin. Something you can make a ball with and throw into the garbage bin at your feet without you looking. It will find its way to the garbage truck without you caring.

Whatever, I just have to decide what must survive and what shouldn’t be long before you and I will be gone.

Happier with a hammer

Had flattened mounds full of garbage into a picnic lawn. Planted it with carabao grass. Now I’m into rocks. I should have been a mason or a carpenter. I’m happier with a hammer.

an unmailed unfinished letter

Dear Sara,

Because as a documentor and writer I have always been taught that the world is something that happens before my eyes, or before my lens, I have to admit that it rather surprised me, even disoriented me a bit, what was it that you were trying to ask of me. Aspects of my life that will emerge? That what I am going to do is about me as well? Rather totally refreshing. So much for the collective pronoun, so much for the third-person plural when I had to stay clear of it all each time, stay clear of it all all the time.

I would venture to say that “risk” has always been an irrevocable part of my life. My head always on the line for what I venture to say, whether in prose, or in poetry, even in what should otherwise be plain accomplishment reports, what I try to write or what people ask of me to write in the vital world of work and transactional politics. Edginess is how my poet friends put it, and not always in appreciation, and while as a writer-documentor,  this trait of mine distinguished me ("sharp"", “vitriolic,” “acid” or just “the crazy one”), this has also, over the years, cost me a lot professionally. It’s never remunerative to be critical; people, as a rule, don’t care about analysis, they only want to be absolved; or worse, they only want your gratefulness your apology, your servitude, in other words. In my work, I always crossed boundaries and broke taboos, sometimes deliberately, but often, in spite of me. It had cost me, again and again, the friendship, the patronage, of important people who had taken it upon themselves to be the moral guardians of certain cultures and political turfs.