About this site

Tumbang Preso (meaning, knock down the jail) is a game of arrests and escapes where each player's life
chances depends on the toppling of a tin can watched by a tag who plays guard.

Sunday, May 19, 2013

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.

:)