World peace at our doors

They have time to rack up an incest rape case they once slept with and claim this is the scandal, not peace money. As though there are no sex shows, no boobs shows in peace shows. 

How do they settle sexual harassment cases in Calgary? Like they settle gang rapes in Congo? Elders with slimy hands alhamdulillahing, admonishing the erring girls not to wear this or that, you are peace advocates, not sluts, don’t go motor-riding with Muslim boys,                don’t sit alone with them in a room. 

But this is the 21^st century, and that outside your window is the pavement, that the mall. What idiot can you con with tribal or Islamic law? 

And suppose all a curious lesbian engaged in interfaith dialogue wants to know is if her Muslim friend is circumcised, should she call a party? Should she be raped?

World peace must be at our doors if lawyers and shamans who ordinarily blink at incest in their own houses are now crossing class, culture, and geographical divide to help one party to a post-coital conflict. What I look forward to is for the MILF to get Feminist Solidarity nominations. My own candidate is the rapist’s daughter. 

They sell soaps at the UN, and the consultants are making a killing.

Where have all the flowers gone

Have all the cadres relocated to FB? And what disgusting things everyone is  up to, like selling spiked bead bracelets and fuchsia pink ankle boots, though I recall there was a lot of moonlighting work too even in those days, from lotions and underwears to malongs and Ibaloi bedspreads in between illicit loves and workers strikes and ED sessions on LIC (if your past served you right, you will remember what that acronym stands for).

But now, victory can be counted in 20 likes. Jesus O. Kuraiyzt.

So you report to FB like FB was your regiment, your company, complete with presentation shows and when someone pinches you saying she misses you, you feel like crying, as though you were once trenchmates in WWII and didn’t meet across the toilet of a plush resort. Then one you met in-person during your hardy university days asks you to please remove the piece she wrote ages ago, she doesn’t want her boss to find it, doesn’t want them to find her mind out, she might lose her job keeping accounts for which office you now forgot, and that yesss, she assures you, you will not survive in America, you will not survive here dear.

Now G badgers you, why didn’t you blacken your profile pic there’s an online protest against this Cyber Law, you don’t know? for all the libel that you do? Lord, I wasn’t there most everyday, how am I to know about one cyber law? But abide you did, like there was ever any law that worried you. What annoys you is her turn of words, she could have said, like Schnapps, hating, couldn’t she? or maybe like your exes, she could have asked, cluelesslike and indignant, why are you always insulting? Why do you always write vitriol? Oh did I? I don't remember writing that way, I just don't remember.

Why do cats meow? Why do rains pitter-patter, why do dragons spit fire? why bleed why think ink. Why not be like dogs barking at all the wrong trees arf arf arf! But then what if that's how it reads, angry bitter writing, like you’re some wrinkly squash with a sore stuck butt ---- how right she is, isn't she, unless and until you have set down your opus, everything you do is fart, ineffectual. 

I love Cineuropa. You go out of the moviehouse craning because you were supposed to change the world and you can’t. But why are they making all these movies about massacred anarchists and suicidals and red flags waving marchers singing the Internationale at the height of capitalism’s irreversible triumph across the globe? Is it about the past or the future?

Then at Cybertown another surprise. A daughter reappears after close to twenty years of silence. You admonish her, careful not to show any family emotion at all, because love is a junkie, a hopeless junkie. Mommy! Remember Vigan? Lord, what about Vigan, that day I stole a book from the library? Eee si Mommy nagnakaw, nagnakaw ng book si Mommy! And aboard a kalesa exegeting on the politics of thieving they hush-hushed you. Shhh! Shhhh! Marinig ka ng kutsero! Nakikinig ang kutsero!  

Makoy has a baby now, she tells you, he is well on his way studying bar tending. San Fernando teems with tourists. It could have been worse. Once you thought he will never finish high school. Since the day you last called and turned him down, he never talked to you again. How hurt could a child be? And every time you spell-checked a cad in Jolo, you wondered if your son is any better in the way of the Lord. At least the dykes there long understood what they want to escape. Does he?

They had moved on, the children. Their days sunny, their bones young. You haven’t. Cannot leave, cannot disengage, Peripatetic Thou, forever trawling your dark! Arkkk akkkk.

And this blog, fuckingdamnshittingshit of a blog forever detaining me. Why do I have to report here each time? A way to say hey look, they haven’t cut my cabbage head off yet, have they?

I'm Nobody

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us -don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

Happiness is a warm gun

I'm on a plane don't complain

Desires what of that. Those are for ordinary mortals. They eat they fornicate they use themselves up and then they die.  I’m no ordinary monster. No ordinary glutton, no ordinary fornicator. I don’t believe in death. That’s for my foes and friends to wish for me, for my own sake. I reject that.

What is your psychosis? Moira asks. Each ought to have one or one will not survive. Hers was supposed to be catatonia. That’s what kept her in the odd jobs that she seasonally took on in the US of A. Yes, you will never survive here, you will never, she tells me, after taking my foot size for a pair of sneakers she hopes to ship to my address, from which I got evicted, a couple of weeks after we chatted, then she logs out. 

I’m on the plane on our way to Coron in Palawan to attend a wedding, a good old friend texts. I message back. Hey wrong send. She said she and her expat husband are sometimes afraid their daughter will go hungry, like me, she is so idealistic. Couldn’t tell her that’s too much to ask of their daughter.

ROADKILL! (The Seven Brothers)

III


The Seven Brothers, according to Mhang, is a religious group, some kind of a cult composed of men ages between 30s and 60s. People go to them for help, as when an injustice has been done to the family; as when a daughter disappears. They are armed with kalis, a bolo meant to cut off heads.

"I see. Are they the ones that perform the parrangsabil?"

"Yes."

Yess my ass. And God help me, help me to be afraid of people, not of rapists and revolutionists with heads to crop.

It was the Seven Brothers that went looking around Takut-Takut and went looking for Tumba Lata, Mhang explains, because they wanted Ferhayda and Ridz. They each was carrying a kalis.

"They came to Tumba Lata all seven of them and they each was carrying a kalis?"
"Some stayed right outside at the gate to Takut-Takut."
"You saw them yourself? All seven of them?"

"The people in the neighborhood saw them. There were four of them, two waited outside."

I wanted to cuss. If I could just make a joke out of it all.

Maybe they were just on their way to chop woods?

ROADKILL! (Or The truth about Mary)

II

A week back also, I was told of another series of roadkills. One was that Mary is pregnant, that is why she is leaving Jolo for Manila. Two, that her cousin, another devil-rider of a street tomboy, and whom I would now call Magdalene, has given birth to a baby, which they now gave to the rapist (they don’t use rapist there, though; they refer to him as the father); and that three, at Takut-Takut, another tomboy is going around with a bloated belly, courtesy of a pedicab driver who was forced by his elders to marry her and then left her for garbage a day after. 

So now, the dopeheads at Takut-Takut are talking. They say, Amun president niyu ha Tumba Lata yadtu? Hahaha. 

I told Karen it could be that some joke must have passed at the men’s lair; they must have wagered on the street dykes' pussies, or how come the serial kill. 

Karen was appalled. “That’s infuriating."

Yes, I assured Karen. Mary and her cousin Magdalene are the toughest in the gang, so they beat them first.

What I really thought was slander. And told Mhang, Tumba Lata’s resident reporter and information comptroller, You don’t believe men when they talk about women. Here that’s how the drug pushers get to marry the Muslim girls they want, by telling the entire barangay that she had had been had, she is no longer a virgin!

She carried on like I have not spoken. “Men could tell if a girl is pregnant.”

“They couldn’t!”

“They say Mary’s tummy is big."
"She drinks beer and slumps a lot."
 "And that she has the looks of someone having her morning sickness." 
"Whoaa."
"It must be Joseph, the guy who supplies him with shabu. Or that boy with a motorcycle, the one Mary borrows all the time, and the one who helps him with the laptop.”

“Who?”

“Joseph. A very ugly fellow, let me tell you. Dark-skinned, thin like a skeleton, a pedicab driver. They say that even when you were here, Mary was doing shabu every night.”

“Please, don’t believe them.”

"That’s why he was up all night." 
"Mhang, you're the only one who sleeps at eight and wakes at six."
“"One of the policemen was even saying that he has shagged Mary.”

"You’ve told me that already.”

“Once an addict, always an addict. Even when you were here? He was on shabu. It was his dinner, you don't know.”

Now I know that that statement was more for me and not about Mary. They tell me that all the time. You don’t know this and you don’t know that. You can’t do this and you can do that.  You don’t go out into the street without us, you don’t hang around with lesbians at the docks, you don’t jog, you don’t set up a program, you don't organize lesbians, you don't know Tausugs, you don't and you don't.

Well I don't. So I asked Mary. Are you pregnant?   Don’t lie. If it could happen to Magdalene, it could happen to you. In fact, it could happen to me. I didn’t tell him I have been getting an inordinate amount of propositions in my mobile lately.

Of course Mary got angry. And of course she covered up for his cousin Magdalene. "I will smash their teeth for spreading that kind of shit. I even went to see Magdalene to find out and it is not true!”

“I am not asking to accuse you. I want to know that I may know.”

“Don’t believe anything they tell you!”

That was the second time he said that to me in days. Don’t believe them; don’t believe the  Seven Brothers. They just want to scare you, so you won't go back there.  Huwag kang maniwala sa kanila, nananakot lang yan sila para hindi ka na bumalik doon. Huwag kang matakot, bumalik ka doon.  

You always root for that about Mary. He always was The Opposition. Everybody scampering for safety and he will go the other way.