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.

I do not know Adrienne Rich

 I don’t know what is the last book that Adrienne Rich wrote and I wonder if she died because she stopped writing books? To this time I still haven’t checked if she died in her own hands or what. Low-grade depression, she calls it. In the forest without trees, in the forest of cables and steels, quoting john haines. To outlive one’s political uses. She could have not possibly begun doing community organizing. Like Wilhelmina Orosco. Distributing pamphlets at 50. Like me. Selling a twenty-five pesos tabloid to people who only tolerate you because you have human rights and not because you are literary they are not.  If only they start buying because they read, that should be halfway to victory.

 Books books books. Maybe I will never have the time to reread them Maybe I do not need to read them. I just feel sorry Mherz might never get to read Tolkien. He will read it, said he, the blasphemer. If he will read a bit of Bob Dylan and some of Bono, maybe Cobain, I would be happy enough. 

Blast of loser taking nothing.

I Do Not Write Loneliness: a repost

 

 














I do not write loneliness. I do not write poems. Not with the directness of the sun in a desert. Not with their scorching absolutes, their blinding truths. I shut my mind in. There in the dark where I will not be found out. No laser beams to shine on my ugly sides. The gnarled roots of my existence: dried remains of a carcass that was once my body. The same one that was once possessed of a heart and a brain pecked on by vultures wearing the clothes of friends.

Of lovers I have no memory. Only strangers come to lounge at my table and bed. Strangers who, content, then discontented, went back to spouses children dogs estates.

There would be mornings when the mirror reflected a pretty thing. Tall, a surprised lookupon her face. A shimmer on her hair, curly behind the ear and cropped just so and ever undone. The skin glittering soft. Too thin too young to look all those lived years. The long bitter days. It was just the right amount of light coming in through all the windows.

I no longer hold my life any more precious than I would the fishwife’s next door. Her eyes! Popping out of their sockets as she stands sideways to watch me scratch dirt bent on the low stool I made. Knees apart. Splayed toes crawling out of hiding, dibble in hand. Wedging in thin stalks of sweet potato into cement-laden earth.

There would be salvaged lines yet. A long time hence when the bones shall have crumbled into dust. For now I hold soil reclaimed from among packed sand and gravel layered over clay. Boon and bane of the reconstruction years when cavalries of revolutionists subdivided into couples and families and moved into apportioned lots and corners the size of a cow’s dunghill. Fenced in. Gates grating as people slip  in and out of each other’s lives.

I converse with cats and wives. Sneaks from Hell! This one, come lately, is starchy with gossip. She likes to stand askance as I crouch hacking at the coconut with a bolo she walked the roundabout way from her kitchen to my side of the fence to lend. On other days I would have wielded a cleaver at her face like she were finished cadaver. That she is. But today I let her have her way. Look the terror that she felt as I whacked and cracked open the shell in the palm of my hand to reveal before her staring eyes and open mouth not the hoped-for milk but rotting flesh. It spilled through my fingers like pus on a leper’s stump alive with worms. The same godforsaken nut the househelp back of my fence threw into my debris-laden garden. She must have been told that hereabouts what they cannot eat up as young meat is salvaged to be squeezed dry for milk.

The couple she serves are second-lifer Catholics. In their youth they tracked mountain trails tubao-strapped, knapsacks on their backs. Told the peasants the story of The Foolish Old Man, taught the students about the life of Norman Bethune. Their kitchen window my unwalled fence curtained and screened from where noises rise on early mornings without sleep. The clatter of cups and dishes wake me on days without coffee or bread, their own hunger days of corn grits and cassava tops dipped in vinegar and salt now riverbeds away, a gauntlet to keep poverty off their children’s way. Their days at the barricades and the purge they escaped a closed book unfit for the young to read, like men’s magazines hidden in the attic of kept under the bed. The clip-clopping of my typewriter’s keys and the heavy falls of books on the floor horsehooves and gunshots warping their time zone.

Their goodly neighbor has a son whose father they hid from her. She was a comtemporary, a Gabriela cadre once now making a living balancing checkbooks and padding cash receipts for multi-donor NGOs peddling peace. Her brother she would like me to marry. Ask him to sleep over on days that you’re away,” she liked to tell me. “Better to keep the house safe and you have free-service security!” The brother himself thought so well of himself having been asked to fix my door and bedroom window for a cup of coffee and a little fee. He mistook my wood-hacking ways as female industry soliciting male company. She herself must have thought he was more than good enough for me. Could strum the guitar and belt out a Don McLean on top of his peasant origins, just like me, to say nothing of his time with the peoples army. It was an honor otherwise well-bestowed, I being by then a has-been writer-activist whose last caller was a tazi-conveyed married-looking fag with a grocery bag.

Why don’t you sleep with your pathetic brother?” I found courage to say to her one day. Her chicken eyes blinked at me, only then suspecting butchery. Now she wouldn’t part with a hundred and would rather ask her househelp to trust me to repay a pinch from her laundry money. Some mornings of digging dirt her brother would perch atop their evergrowing fence to heckle me with spittle. Pthwak! went his sticky charge. He would spit every after looking my way.

I hack and stab at buried rocks.