The love we put away

And at the day’s end that is all she could do. Make a pronouncement, a post-mortem of me, and then on to the housing board, or to Jaycees. When I see her, and listen to her, what she is actually saying is, I really have no time for this. Easier to bleed.

So I turn to myself. Put the blame on me. That’s the only way. Or there’s no going back to her for more.

But sometimes she speaks to me. But when she does, I can’t see her talking to me. It’s like she’s always addressing the person standing next to me, or the object before me. Even when we are near, and especially when she is right in front of me, she draws back, peers at me. As much as I can I try not to observe her, because no matter how close she stands she has a way of putting herself away, like she is at the other side of the road at mid-day and I among a crowd milling at the other bank. I don’t even remember us conversing. Just once maybe. In the house of a friend. I went to her side and she turned to me to say something, about a book or a line in a book and I felt like one of the male servants getting instruction on some very specific information about the size of the nail to buy from which hardware store at this side of the street.

But yesterday she talked to me and said something nice about her country. She’s not one who really likes any particular place on earth, not even her place in Az. I sometimes think she chose that state because that sums her life up. So I would ask her, sitting among her poet-friends with estranged husbands in other continents, why did you choose to live in a desert? And she would tell me, not even raising her head to look who asked, just stop drumming her fingers on the table and sit back a little, her eyes on the garden behind us: “It’s not a desert, just a warm place.”

“But it is a desert! Cactuses and sand all over!” I would insist. She would turn towards me a little and smile a little. “In winter it’s gorgeous.” She wouldn’t trust you to be kidding with her. She would not even so much as acknowledge that you said a joke or something to hurt her. She is just too good for any of that.

She said to me yesterday that what happened to me would not have happened if I were in her country. In the US of A nobody can get away with beating a woman, she said. I felt lost. Toppled.

But she and her friends, they really understand each other. Like that time I told her about the visit I made to her poet-friend, who said to me she never thought she would come to this,  her life taken care by others, now she’s fed like a dog, taken to the vet like a dog. She cut me. Said I’ve got no gifts except malice. So I said this is getting me nowhere. It ought to stop here.

So now here I am, back to what they call one’s elemental self. I wouldn’t say I am better for this. The truth is, I feel barren, empty. And when I see my friends, tagging along their girlfriends, some making up stories about the loves they found and cannot quite get enough of, I get sick. I feel sick. I cannot stand love.

I prefer losses, really. Each time I feel clean. Lapped clean. Like a knife just done in the smithy. And once I got to that elemental feeling, I can’t even recall the love that I once felt, can’t remember the look the touch the lines she wrote for me. When you get to that, you won’t even ask anymore what it is that you have done, or what went wrong, or who turned away first. Somehow none of that matters anymore, only the knowledge, and the certainty, that it’s over.

Why do we endeavor to increase life expectancy when we don't give a shit about the old?

(Germaine Greer)

People I Know

When I read Migen's poems, my school of poetry crumbled behind me. Migen heard hushes and laughters; saw goblins and gnomes. She had Eve put sleep into God’s eyes, and the unawares bore apes.



by S.B. Alojamiento


I first ran into Tonton summer of 1995. He was in the doorway, standing in the half-light. Hair gray and long, pants tattered, shirt hand-painted, hunger in his eyes. He was strumming the guitar and hardly heard me as I asked for someone I knew who must be upstairs. In the kitchen someone was holding a bottle of beer, gabbling about bringing his family from stinking Manila to placid Dumaguete. He finished each burst of tearful talk with an eloquently rendered “What a sorry state of affair, oh what a sorry state of affair.”

The night before, I had slept at a bus terminal one shabby bridge over a dead river away from the city’s thoroughfares. I had unceremoniously left my last hovel, after a quarrel with my sister over an eel of a husband, bearing only my bag of a few shirts, underwears, and toiletry. Boarding the boat bound for Dumaguete, I was feeling a little wrong in the head. I had no enrollment money and I was thinking of taking up Poetry, which I thought Silliman University might offer me. As the boat neared the port, I beheld what I thought was Poetry Herself beckoning to me: wide stretches of green, rows of acacia trees, capiz-windowed two-story buildings.

I was also feeling angry in a triumphant way. I wanted to rush headlong and jump out of the boat deck flying above the heads of the passengers moving like snails towards the gangplank. Reaching the pathway under the acacia trees, all the places and houses I had lived in suddenly shrank or toppled behind me. It was like finding an Anzalduan prairie, a new territory. I wandered around, sat on benches under the trees, took off my shoes and felt the grass under my feet. Enrollment time was a week away yet. I looked for Wanted signs: salesgirl, waitress, househelp, whatever that would allow me to stay around the campus vicinity. I found the school cafeteria, sat at a table, ate a sandwich and read a book. When it got dark I took a tricycle and had myself brought back to the bus terminal. I thanked my activist days: sleeping on cots for five pesos in bus terminals was always a delight, except that that night I got a space in a darker spot where mosquitoes feasted on my blood.

Six o’ clock in the morning found me in the city plaza, scratching my arms and sides. Guys looked me over, thinking I must have slept in one of the benches there or got myself laid badly. I took off and scrounged around for coffee. By nine o’ clock I was on campus grounds again, admiring the green lawns and the trees once more.


Someone I knew from circa 1980s had said to me years back that he planned to go back to school, take up a master’s degree in the School of Divinity in preparation for pastoral life. I had to know if that plan pulled through. I went to the registrar’s office. He was indeed around and I was given his address. Anonymity and prairie territory got ruled out. His house opened to a kitchen where, as I said, I came upon a hungry-looking long-haired grey guy and this beer-guzzling fellow. They both seemed to me a little wrong in the head that I felt less lost, less sad. In no time I decided to stay awhile, find out what I may find in the city. The next morning I boarded the same boat that took me there, took some money from here and there, then to the school I last went to some eleven years back to get my transcript of records. A week after that I was in the long queue of Silliman enrollees.


“Have you met César Ruiz Aquino?”, the editor of the then just-revived Sands and Coral, asked. If it is poetry you want, he said, he is the poet. Fine, I thought, though it was neither César Ruiz Aquino nor any of them guys I wanted to meet, but the Literary Establishment there, the Tiempos. It turned out the couple were no longer with the English Department and there was no creative writing program in that department anymore. There was this woman named Andre who I first thought had hurt her foot and was so nice to me. She would be a good friend later, for a time at least, and she it was who said that once indeed her office, the English Department, was Silliman University’s prima donna. By then it no longer was.

I made friends, at first with schoolmarms who valued my above-average literary élan, for I was your good Literature student. I liked studying the masters and I took to Ester’s maternal care. Ester was in her forties then, I was 32 going on 60. She graduated from Silliman a Nursing graduate some 20 or 25 years back and had been teaching English in a state university in Cagayan de Oro for so many years now, then suddenly, her administrators decided that no matter how good she was at her job, an English teacher should still be holding an English degree.

Ester and I had to part ways when I started going out with fags, but when we were friends, she was really caring as caring went. “I pity you,” she always said to me, voice and facial contours all-sympathy, every time I went to her boarding house to borrow a hundred or two. “You’re so deprived. Financially and emotionally.” I think that was when I began to hate kindness and confidences between friends.

But I cherish the times Ester and I dug the library archives, appreciate the laughter she gave me back in return for the metaphors I threw at the world that hurt. We would go to Sawi’s place in Purok Santan, where our classmate Franklin, Sawi’s friend, camped. Franklin had a sister, Migen, who went to Silliman in the summer of 1967 to join the summer writers’ workshop. She had left a sheaf of poems that miraculously survived almost 30 years of still life inside a steel cabinet. I could not remember what I was looking for that they fell into my hands, but I was always overturning termite-ridden steel cabinets and bookshelves, so it must be during one of those do-days that I found Migen’s typewritten poems in yellowing pages. When I read them, my school of poetry crumbled behind me. Migen heard hushes and laughters; saw goblins and gnomes. She had Eve put sleep into God’s eyes, and the unawares bore apes. I told Ester I’m in love with Migen’s poetry, but she somehow got it wrong that she wanted me to take on Franklin instead. Still, that did not stop us from going to Franklin’s place to search for literature. He had quite a hoard from his theatre and scriptwriting days in Manila.

Thinking of Migen now, I feel she and I could have been good friends. I got word from her telling me to call her in Manila collect if I felt like it, but I never did. Viktor, distinguished poet-bum, thought Migen must be lonely so to ask that of me. I told Viktor you never knew what Franklin told his sister, you know how men are. That got him grinning from ear to ear, like a sick dog.


Franklin wasn't so bad, really. He did prove useful at times, particularly when it came to the economic side of hunger. My landlady was threatening me with a new rate or I will have to share the room with another starveling. At seven hundred a month, I felt somewhat lucky. The house was near the beach, so instead of a cup of rice and fried egg, I often went for saltwater and a good swim for breakfast. Then one day my landlady thought of raising pigs instead of collecting more rent money from me. She made a hogstead right across my window. The smell broke into my sleep and I would wake up to the grunting of pigs. My little peace was shattered. And by then my head had been constantly spinning. I was taking my meals at the tiangge, at a carenderia owned by Sawi’s neighbor. For lodging in Sawi’s backboards and for sharing his latrine and his frontyard, Franklin got access to credit at Nang Tiaga’s Carenderia. He accompanied me there later to get me a meal ticket too, also on credit. Then on top of that he also offered to saw his room off into two parts that my housing need may be taken care of, too. “Or we partition it with a plywood or a curtain,” he said. “With Sawi just in the neighborhood we could talk poetry day and night just don’t mention it yet to Sawi, I’ll take care of that.”

It was Viktor, though, not I, he got for a neighbor. Viktor lodged at the opposite wall the next semester. Franklin would knock on his door at six o’ clock in the morning bringing coffee and breakfast, much to Viktor’s vexation. Habitually given to taking a long look at the dark, Viktor went to bed in the wee hours of the morning to rise at midday. Franklin’s knock on his door made him see vermilions. “Sheil, does he think I need looking after?” he would ask, gritting his teeth. I wanted to tease Viktor, tell him maybe Franklin got a crush on him, but you don’t trade jokes like that with a homophobe who did not get a lay all his life on top of not getting a good night’s sleep.


Viktor did not know, but I always thought of him the luckier guy beside me. He had a mother in the US of A or thereabouts who bought him an electric typewriter and French dictionaries. If I recall it right, he also had a brother or two and a sister who for a time looked out for him. Viktor however never got to put to good use his French books and tapes on me. At the time I didn’t know a single French phrase and wasn't in the least interested. I then put French in the same league as Mandarin and Arabic.

Viktor’s mother sent him a package of American sausages. That got Krip (who happened to be at Sawi’s place when the package came) gushing to have seen the largest penis in the world. Viktor liked to recount that part to me and we would laugh a little. Then Viktor’s mother stopped writing and stopped sending packages and Viktor grew worse each day until he could barely see the floor. That must be the time when Franklin thought he could fix him some breakfast, and poor Franklin, he was not even appreciated a bit for it.


When Jenny introduced me to Lorena, my eyes popped out. Up to that time, Ester and Andre were all the female friends I made and they were for a long stretch nice people. I met Jenny around the time Tonton and I were having coffee at someone else’s kitchen. She and I bumped into each other later inside Scoobies and she shoved me before Lorena who was then having her drink at a corner table by the glass window. Lorena gave me a Hi and a mindless smile, then turned her eyes to the road and the trees outside.

Jenny liked gluing her eyes to conversations which she herself could not conduct and wanted me to get into one with Lorena and her. But Lorena, apparently, would rather be up there growing on a tree or tapping for the minerals in its roots than talk to either of us. I would later hear people, girls especially, and their boyfriends sometimes, complain a lot about Lorena’s indelible scowl. “That bag of bones what’s her problem?” beauties would gash, essaying a boyfriend’s part.

I mentally took to Lorena’s side: I never liked niceness and friendliness in women; it always felt like brassware, offensive to the soul; smelt of grease, dirty. As for Lorena, I really did not get to know her beyond the fact that she was Tonton’s type and that Tonton wasn’t her type. I should think she was my type: sharp-edged from limb to limb and quietest when with people. Of course it never occurred to me to proposition her like Tonton did. I was certain that even for her yaya I won’t qualify.

Lorena was great on the stage. You don’t have to watch her perform in a big play to see that. She took part in a poetry reading on IWD and essayed a role in a cast-of-two workers strike act that climaxed in a rape scene. “You should have watched her play battered wife,” Jenny said to me, raving, as always. “The part when she got up from bed ever so slowly so as not to wake the sleeping husband? When she took off her clothes and put on her bra her shirt? The calm, the tension...” Each time Tonton attempted to describe her poetry, I would be all-envy. “Now she goes for details. Corners, bed, table…” Up to that time, I did not think of myself as a poet, at least not seriously so. Until I met the César Ruiz Aquino.


Sawi indeed was the literary event in Dumaguete. You could hear Mikki raving his name, from table to table in every watering hole. Younger poets would hover over his poems to hunt for women’s names in the lines and Tonton liked quoting his poetry:

Ultimately she couples with the sun
However axes retrace their way and heads
Roll by the blade of her eye.


I think lots of us fell that way. I remember jogging to Purok Santan one sunny morning and playing with ants under Sawi’s window because he would rather get back to bed than make me coffee and conversation. By and by he would get up and play some blues and would croon along, What’s happening to me? I would giggle under the window.

Even Jenny whom I thought too dumpy to have a thing or two to do around a loft like poetry, got high every time she spoke of Sawi. She was sauntering in Sawi’s class of senior citizens – a herd of MAEd students serving their second life terms in the academe in pursuit of professional advancement – and was having the time of her life watching Sawi hipping it up with the old cows.

“Have you ever known love without hope?” Sawi, in inimitable grandeloquence would pitch the question above their heads, and Jenny’s heart alone jumped. On my way to class I would find Jenny’s poet seated on his table, knees spread apart, his heart leaping out of him. On some afternoons he would be under an acacia tree, engaged with a clump of girls, his face dazed, Love Without Hope becoming him. Ester, who once too often would be walking the path with me, would be shaking her head, lowering her gaze and her voice, and would tell me about a teener classmate who confessed about Sir Aquino’s advances.


I realize now that I should have stuck to Poetry where Sawi was concerned. What do you want ba, one interview would go. Poetry on the verge, I would tell him. On the verge of what? Death? What? On the verge of madness, I would venture. He would nod. “You are like Sylvia Plath.”

That got me whirling away and flying up to the second floor of the university library to find out who Sylvia Plath is. I could not believe my eyes. Then later Tonton would tell me, “Sawi was oh-so-sad today, his adopted stowed away, so he went like his life is over nobody loves him and no girl could ever love him, so I said, Try Sheilfa, you know what he said?”

“Shut up.”
“He said what I want is a simple girl.”
“A what?!?.”
“He said Sheilfa is too libidinal for me.”

One thing I liked about Tonton, he didn’t think libidinal a dirty word, even if at the time I thought it was and was all-shame around it. So I said to Tonton I could not take this idea of poet-maniacs discussing me, so much for the tale of the dying minotaur rejuvenated by a good screw. Tonton he frowned kind of annoyed. “Cesar Ruiz Aquino? Saying that of you? You should be honored!”

And so I was.


Put together, Viktor and Sawi did make a really good pair. The two of them made quite a sight walking one behind the other around the streets of Dumaguete. Like a picture straight from Darwin’s Evolution of the Species, I would tell Ester. As for sexual advances, I should say they really did not make a long way. I reckon they were just lonely, for all the mad millennial claims they made. Viktor, for one, seemed happy enough with counting his erections and was decent enough not to do it when I was looking. One night in summer at Jo’s Chicken Inihaw he sat with a group of writers and fell in love with this fellow from Manila and my, he could not get up, he said, because he got it standin’ up as they were about to leave the table. The girl was so disgusted and wanted to bash his head, maybe spit at his face, too, but the guard and the boys had their day.

We got on well, though, Vik and I. He would heap me with books, some of which I did not manage to read for a long long time: Thomas Mann, Norman Mailer, Albert Camus, Henry Miller and Henry Miller. He was unabashed about his sexual fantasies, a trait you would appreciate, knowing he mistook you for a prissy feminist cunt. He and his friend Mikki had this idea of dying with their asses up so that they could donate their penises to the gay liberation movement. I would tell Viktor I think the gay liberation movement is after its own tail and not his or Micky’s, and that men are too addled-brained to relate to sex toys and robots are better function-wise that he would grin and scratch his head and his tail. “Sheil, why do you always speak like an old woman?”


But I do miss Viktor. Beside Migen and Sawi, I loved his poetry next. If Migen heard hushes and laughters, Viktor had an ear for permafrosts cracking on Arctic summers and could make Bob Dylan’s train come through his head in a dream. He crunched poetic brilliance all day long that mostly I just played the sponge.

Whatever happened to Viktor, Tonton wouldn’t tell. But he had this poem which he wrote after Tonton and Eliot which I have kept. About a woman by his side running away in her sleep and the wave’s wild music played by cold and secret fingers.

BLOGSHOT: One on the IDP

There’s no fool-proof listing and validation system to protect aid agencies from those they seek to save and serve. Outsider’s help can only do so little, and come too late.


Almost ninety percent of the evacuees in Maguindanao and Cotabato have either returned to their places of origins or have resettled. Or so representatives from the local government units in these provinces say.

That should be good news because among other things, that means that they will be able to go back to tilling their lands, to say nothing about being able to cast their votes in the forthcoming national elections next month.

Does that also mean that there is no reason for emergency relief organizations to linger in conflict-affected areas and there is no reason for welfare groups in Mindanao to continue to exist?

That's rather so impertinent a joke. There is the better alternative, which is to evolve. In the first place, isn’t this big racket called the civil society movement a product of adaptation, of self-preservation aka evolution? Help is always good and welcome we have to keep it coming.

Because disasters never leave anyway, and that’s one wonder with backwoods politics. And in Maguindanao you can bet that it didn’t leave with Army men being redetailed to Apari and other far-flung islands in the north. My sense of it is, if the massacre of 58 people in Shariff Aguak underwrites anything aid-related, it’s the necessity of good governance projects in the ARMM. That should be enough to keep us busy in the peacedev circuit in the coming years, if conflict-related issues and climate-change related damages will not.


Days back, I was talking with Sammy, a Moro cadre I used to know. The last time I saw him he was in some peace caravan that sent thousands of that rebellious mass called Bangsamoro people on to the roadsides in support of the aborted MOA-AD between the Philippine government and the MILF. Now he looks a deflated bag of resentments, and not just against the traitor government which cannot do better than all it can, but against about everyone, including me.

He doesn’t like all this pacifism, he said, all this developmentalism, this welfarism. It misleads the Bangsamoro people, giving them wrong notions, such as that their salvation is in the hands of other people, or that people in government are there to give them the political solution they needed to solve their problems, or that relief agencies and kaffir-run development organizations will provide for them.

Nice take that. Except that we were the both of us part of that which we speak against, no matter how we leak on the sides.

Going around evacuation centers in the thick of armed hostilities between government forces and the MILF was depressing. Going around relocation centers on the heels of emergency response and relief work is even more depressing.

In Batulawan, Pikit, in Cotabato Province, you won’t see any remains of the evacuation sites as the roadside areas are now being plowed and prepared for planting. There is even no signage indicating that Oxfam’s disinfectant WaSH project (for Water Sanitation and Hygiene) was ever there except for the four latrines standing clear white and shining at a distance from the road, a pair at each place. The roofs and walls have been ripped down or taken away, probably to make a good wall or roofing, a way to get back at what had been done to houses that survived the bombing and burning.

Right after the July 2009 declarations of SOMO and SOMA (suspensions of military operations and military activities of government and MILF forces, respectively), barangay leaders monitoring the demographics in the evacuation centers claim that male population suddenly rose. By male population they mean those in the above 18 age range. At the height of the armed hostilities, they say, only the elderly men and the very young boys went with the women and the children to hand themselves over to relief workers, the implication being able-bodied men must have enlisted to the armed defense of the aborted MOA-AD, the agreement delineating Bangsamoro ancestral domain.

Aid and emergency relief workers also like to volunteer the information that when they were distributing medicines, they had the impression that at certain times, everyone was complaining about the same symptoms and that even old men and women who otherwise were not ill, would be telling them they had fevers and chills and cough and cold and all sorts of ailments that had nothing to do with aging bones and joints or worn out lungs, which they took to mean that the epidemic of fevers was elsewhere. Some days, they say, they had good sense enough to feel generous and let the evacuees collect all the bottles and boxes of medicines they could get from them even if they knew they were being conned, but most of the time, they just felt helpless, captive to their supposed beneficiaries’ demands.

Relief distribution is never easy, true, especially so when the aid workers were Christians who could not even understand any Muslim dialect and have so little sympathy for that war which made of some people “IDPs”. Well, later, thanks to affirmative action aka good governance, aid agencies made sure that they hire more Muslim professionals to mediate, interpret and manage or co-mage for them relief projects, but of course that did not stop the perceived cheating. When you only get to the evacuation centers during relief distribution conveyed by chromed vehicles and you don’t even spend the night there, you wouldn’t know the next thing about the labyrinth of blood relations and their interlocking directorate of needs and mutual assistance. There’s no fool-proof listing and validation system to protect aid agencies from those they seek to save and serve. Outsider’s help can only do so little, come too late, as those with more will always get twice or thrice as much than the neediest and the poorest IDP family.

Whenever I can, I never ask those with less than I have questions like So what do you need how may I help you. Two decades of aid work can only do so much harm to people so that the best and the worst of them must have smartened up enough to make them prepare a long list long for you to go over. From frying pan to mosquito nets to farm tools to houses and chicken heads and goat heads and draft animals and seed capital for livelihood. That much you owe them for they know that they are the politically and commercially viable IDPs, that f---ing coinage that drew many a bleeding heart and many a fly. Like this 27-year old Grade school dropout who owns a motorbike that ferries NGO peace builders with receipts to wield in and out of so-called interior villages. My, his family is collecting little houses in every relocation site! His mother has one in Datu Piang in Maguindanao, he himself has another house to his name in Rangaban in Midsayap, North Cotabato, and my guess is, his father (who is the smarter ass between the two of them) has also another house in Bakayawan in Pikit, North Cotabato, where the family originally hails from.

“Kawawa talaga ang mga IDPs Maam,” he keeps on repeating to me. I wish I could tell him I have no pity for IDPs like him and actually want to yank him off the driver’s seat and run away with his bike, if I didn’t know that their own idea of rebellion happened to have evolved to just that: to take as much as they could from the kaffirs playing peace makers in their accursed country, the same kaffirs who made good money and good salaried work out of their fucking IDP status.

Relief money, says a municipal disaster coordinating council officer, is sliced in half at the top, in the provincial level, divided again in the municipal level and down to the barangay level so that by the time it gets to the evacuees, so little is left to be distributed among them. One barangay captain who got so little that he had to make do with occupying a vacated ceasefire monitoring bunkhouse was so furious at all the anomalies that he proposed a stop to all relief work. I pity him. He seems helpless against all the cheating and stealing in all places, and his own barangay “intruded” with “false residents” and false shelter claimants who don’t stay in one place, busy as they are with chasing after where the newest Food for Work project is.

I am exaggerating, of course. Because these men aren’t really false victims. In fact, their houses had been burned down or dismantled, their roofs and wallings converted into Army quarters, the floor and boards made into firewood. They are legitimate IDPs, for sure, and if they keep on moving around staking shelter and land claims here and there, it’s probably because none of these are permanent rights. It’s a way to get around the mercy mission of aid agencies.

What they do is so much like the ancestral domain racket that some Lumad leaders have made good business of: recruiting their relatives now resettled in towns or working as wage earners in plantation economies or sugar factories in other provinces to pad the populations of ancestral domain claimants in their turfs by rewarding them with a portion of the ancestral domain claim territory, never mind if the claims will just be forever just that: bloody claims.

All this sucks, Sammy claims. It is misleading. It draws the Bangsamoro people away from the path of struggle.

Of course it misleads. And that’s the idea. To mislead and to misable.