To a Girl Squatting on the Roadside

Don’t you have an owned life? If it’s not your father, it’s your brother. If it’s not your girlfriend, it’s your girlfriend. What are you an outlaw for? How many nights did you sleep in jail? How do you fuck? Are you waiting for the future that is yet to come or you’ve lost it already? Why do you run? How many schools kicked you out? Did you pass your Biology? Do you know my last name? Do you have a favorite movie? A favorite cartoon character? What would you have for a weapon? Ever wished your mother had an abortion instead of you? Do you like chocolates? Ever looked up to count the stars? Ever hurt yourself for not looking? Got slapped by strangers? Spat at by men? Wrestled with boys? Who first called you a bitch good-for-nothing dirty tomboy? When did you learn to box so well? What is that scar doing in your wrist? What is the fabric you wear for your underwear? Who do you think you are? Do you give a shit about me or you’re just another heartless blast of loser wanting nothing that you’ll never get? I hate you. Mute dumb brainless ignorant girl. You can’t even get through High School and you’ve got the nerve to stare me out of your damned stupid life.


2006
Davao City
























THEY COME BACK AS STRANGERS

They come back as strangers, the daughters I bore,
over fields of gold and green. I know not
what has eaten them: coke for water, hamburger
for a meal, their days long in parking lots
and malls, their dinners packed short in styro
and foils, no knowledge of grains are they.
Mother they call me, and talk of strangers
with billions stashed in foreign banks,
their glass eyes walls of schools sat in and gaped at,
paper marks instead of scars, dollar earns and no learn,
how much didn’t get to them is all that could hurt,
all they know of pain.

Flabby in the middle, their bodies are their own now.
Husbands in the Middle East or in the Cold North
in a war over the peace booty. Papa their children call
them, but no better than house guests with purse
strings to pull. I pull them back home
but long severed are they from my womb.
They tug away, and I bleed inside me.
“Why don’t you get to your bedroom?” they demand,
their househelps at their heels, to drag me.
Soft in the sole they pad away, no memory of clay,
limbs without sinews, heads tilted, their hands
forever thumbing around tiny little monsters of letters.
Their voices smell of rust and though they summon me
to supper, I know them not. I am in a strange country.
A jungle of wires and picture boxes, all noise,
no fury, sly foxes and frosty bears, in spike heels
and three-piece suits, they drive me around, their idea of sun.
Highways overhead for trees, stonewalls for windows,
walled-in precipices for stairs.

Daughters of my lost earth, swinging on twigs
and branches, little acrobats of my youth,
what have become of you? And what have I done
that you should come back to haul me and tie me
around an empty crib hung with headless toys,
my hands growing cold, craving for soil and
the remembrance of caught rain.


2003
Davao City