where the poets have no reading

don't sell my story please

Dear Germy, as for turning the world upsidedown with what ILYB magazine, we was just clowning around, weren't we? ILYBmag was your and Nico's idea. I'm just a sucker. For what is an idea if not pursued. Just thought that would be fun. Thought that it could be possible (what would you want out, anyway, a publication called The Daily Grind, who would buy that when there's PDI.) I really don't care about upturning the world, it can go on with its ways regardless of me, regardless of you and me, but fun with me or fun and me seems not your idea. Bitterness is. But bitterness is best savoured alone. So there is nothing to share. There is no sharing it, sorry, it is mine alone. Lord, have I developed a philosophical mind from reading Sontag or it is just the old wit in me? She called Virginia Woolf's "Three Guineas" cantankerous feminist. Embittering the text. All feminists, writing or not writing, from the aesthetic or from the aesthete's which we are not point of view is cantankerous. Reminds me of Lia Lopez-Chua's poem Their anger aged/ hardening into a creed/ can't quote the next lines with exactness, I will be dressed down publicly again. All dressing downs are public. Thank you, Poetry, that you are not dress alone; that being dressed, you have nowhere to go. 

I start talking poetry and I forget that I am supposed to be quarrelling with you, for Nico's entertainment and edification, that they may admire and enjoy the bitterness of women and help themself to it if they likes. But I love Sontag. Like I love Lia Lopez-Chua. The men I don't love will never understand. What was I saying? that ILoveYouBabymagazine is apparently not your idea of fun; it was just an idea. Hauling books and putting one's life that isn't yours on public auction seems the more amusing. At least for you and Nico, when you are with Nico. But I can bet you, too, like the cads and the women in Jolo, have no fixed loyalties. Have not one loyalty. Not even to feminism. Not even to books. (Thought you would say, not even to Sean, or to Karl, just because Jan is sometimes unfair. Drop the qualifier sometimes.) Ya, Fair Germy. And I felt sunk because Nico doesn't even have 1k to spare for the books and the entertainment. So it was like friendship between women, friendship between women and gays, even women and gays who don't have men coming in between them making their day, is very hard, I should stop needing people I should stop talking to people, I will just leak in the mouth (to quote Sontag, when she wanted to keep herself to herself). Okay, Germy. Make your day. We only have one day in the sun we had better make it. Yes, Germy, I now admit: I alone write bitterness with a precision that stings the eye. It is a talent honed, though, I didn’t get it from my mother.

But Germy, Respect for the dead, please: If I die tomorrow and you are still up and about, you are not to know. You are to water your dandelions and mint flowers and are skipping media coverage and the writers who murdered Satur at his funeral are to be with you, gardening. Don't make a minor event of a non-event by organizing a search party. There was to be no death no disappearance no footnote about anyone's final annihilation. And you are not even supposed to know.  LoL, I can imagine Nico cheering, Nagsugod na gyud! The spectacle of two ugly unhappy women at each other's hair. Are you going to publish this, too?  Ang bayot. I think I will cry. If nobody profited from me alive, nobody has license to profit from me dead.

Don't sell my story, please. Don't give me away. You know I'm a monster in a cave, why out me, why protect me from obscurity. Remember Tolkien, on walking along dead marshes? Keep away from the lights!

Canon fodder

Jolo is terrible each time. But the last trip I made was amazing. Like there was some fairy holding me by the hand, and I kept on bumping, at very precise moments, into people I only wished in my heart to see but believed I long lost to the dark.

But really, I do feel like a thief. Having gotten this far. My head still on my shoulders. Ces was gangraped, beeh, the human rights women say, with glee. But of course. Why would they accept, take it as given, that their own men would rape their own women but not that kaffir with a camera out to make a story of their savage lives? If they can kidnap and rape their own women, why not Ces Drilon indeed? Are you not afraid? Anthony Tan asks. No. I said. That’s good, he said. Good. To be not afraid is to not bear the reason for being afraid, right?

I sometimes think if the corner princesses will order my beheading, the rapists and the drug addicts will speak in my defense. But that is just a feminist fantasy. Such is my disillusionment with female agency, with female solidarity. Jolo, you see, is very sectarian. Separatist. That's what all those wars have done to a tribe. But not so. Not every Tausug man can be conned into believing that to get to Heaven, one must carry on the tip of his sword a kaffir's head. That's what committing a parrangsabil used to amount to: dih kunu makasud pa Sulga bang way kaw mapatay Kristiyano.

If I am guilty of any crime, it is feudal poaching. I should behave like a captive Bisaya slave, and not like a runaway Bisaya slave. I should be forever grateful for the spared neck, the spared head, forever paying the corner sultans and the sultanas little honors, rostrum mujahideens little praises, little dues. I should not be strolling around the downtown area like the stretches of the roadside canals and garbage-laden pathways are my garden, my skating rink, the hotel rooms and the convention halls theirs. I shouldn't be cussing in the vicinity of the princesses’ houses.

Piso para sa MNLF. Since women cannot fight, the least we can do is help in the fund-raising, pity the fighters. They collect fighters like they collect chickenheads for slaughter, and now they have a pang of conscience, so they collect half a glass of rice from every house and one peso from every tricycle driver that the MNLF may be fed and have a stick of cig? You can bet that most of the fighters are of the tribe that cannot refuse being conscripted. No wonder, Susan is so afraid of getting an inch nearer to any MNLF rally. "Susan, we will only listen to what Bapa Misuari had to say about the giyera in Sabah and then we go home!"

"Dih. Ipamungluh hadja kita ha Sabah, Kah Sheh," no, they'll make of us fodder in their war at Sabah, her fear so real that she gripped my hand as we approached the gym.

Reality check

I found 17 still very much around: Dex (1) washing clothes in the river with her partner, the same girl she eloped with after getting back home in the island some time in the middle of last year. How thin she has become, her skin burnt dry. Susan (2) has grown her hair long, and unkempt, too harassed with work to get a trim. Still within beck and call, and still the cad that she is, hasn’t finished high school and is now working in a big house at Chinese Pier, cleaning and washing mountains of dishes, maybe piles of laundry, swarmed by legions of flies singing round her head. She earns one thousand and five hundred a month, said she, and wants to save up for her entrance fee this coming June, three thousand pesos, which Aisa says is putting, a fib. Her sister Alex is now lost to them or the family has lost track of her, they have no idea if she is in jail or out of it, the last they heard is she was still into pickpocketing, she and her Bajau crew in Manila, and they have a preference for Melikans and Koreans in their trade. Vaness (3) is sweet on me again. Last time her father shooed us away, shooed me out of his way, apparently informed by Inah Cely that I am out to bring harm to his daughter, exposing them to the elements, them and their young minds and precious lives which I supposedly don’t care about. Ivy (4) is still out of college, but wants to reenrol in June, is interested to join the writing workshop at Notre Dame of Jolo College, where she used to go to. She’s still with the girlfriend a bit older than her, the same one who walked with her when we crossed paths. Nuralyn (5) looks the same as last seen, surprisingly, and still the shy one I remember her to be. So that’s where they go to hang out? Where they get stoned, someone said, if they made so much noise or did unpleasant things, like making out with their girlfriends. No wonder that old man there dreads most the population explosion of tomboys. Nashra (6) is much bigger and taller and the same timid girl we first met at Subah Datuh. Mherz (7) colored her hair brown, LoL, and he looks a Bajau prostitute with it, something I couldn’t say to his face. All she needed, I said, was a lipstick and she may dance. What I wanted to say was stripdance or stand at the doorway of a beauty parlor like an authentic hustler that she is. Kept on repeating Ingat lang, Te, obviously aware that so many people want me dead. Earlier she refused to do the legworking, cannot bring a friend to the meeting with the MNLF, she said. I have not a single friend here, you know that, said she. What freedom. I wish I could say that and not be damned. Aisa (8) seems doing well, healthwise, only that she is making of her girlfriend her househelp and has two other girls on the side. She also dropped out of second year high and has another important gang, Klan Adventures, of which she is a founder. Mherz said she and Coms are still into drugs, but it looks like she and Coms are not even very good friends now. Cannot even call Coms’ girlfriend by her name. Amun iban niya babae maitum, they kept on saying. Gema (9) is still the big baby that she is, though mentally she is way out,  most of the time. Like Vaness, she is very hard to involve, intellectually, in the work and study level. Riyang (10) looks well, but who was it who reported she has a boyfriend beside the older girl she has been living with? She denies it, of course. “Who told you that?!?” Arnalyn (11) is doing good and appears like she actually has time to go out if she likes or if she finds group activities worthwhile. I wish she were a little rebellious, but she makes good compensation enough beside all the ungrateful and heartless cads that surround me. I still don’t know what to do with Amrina (12) and her gang. She doesn’t look like she is capable of any independent thinking or any thinking at all outside bread and shoes and brokenheartedness. Told that Tumba Lata is a goner, she believed so. Told to burn down the group resolution, she complied so. Suppose they ask her to shoot me down, would she shoot me down, too? Should be on her way out if only she knows of other ways out. Her gangmates, Ness (13) especially, seem way too unreliable to be counted on. Chanda (14) though has a set of parents wise and good enough to see her through, if only she would put more mind to what we are trying to do. Arriana (15) I still have to know; same with Ziana (16). Next trip to Jolo I should sit down with them two. It is Robina (17) I much trust better, always ahead of herself performance-wise, she indeed will make a good Pinay sweetheart for some gullible Melikan.