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.

Thursday, June 6, 2013

If I were to write about my life, it will be without praise. Without rancor. And without hope.

Monday, June 3, 2013


People will not always walk up to you to tell you what they see; but there are those who see and they’re the ones who matter.  Not this army of locusts infesting the land.


Oh social therapy oh funding agency

I actually like it if people think that those who have stuck to their guns are nuts. That means one of either hasn’t got a clue. And will die blissfully.

I even like it better if friends insist you are in need of psycho therapy and they don't

all that anger.


I told Dee, friend and mentor from way back: Our friend Z is still the slob that she is. Her health project seems to have only succeeded in reproducing the worst in the petty bourgeois.
Dee said,  Why don’t you go see a psycho therapist.  

Thankfully, no ambulance came.

But all that racket. They callit self-transformation seminar. Some callit feminist healing. They pay for your ticket to send you to a spa in Bali so that you can have a steam bath while they fornicate. We all make mistakes. We are not here to hurt each other. We are sisters. Bilat sang kuring buli sang amo. Why didn’t they get backhoed in Ampatuan? That’s where they belong. I wish Bai Sandra read this. Orak, you rascal, I never even once asked for a favour from you, did I. I held the camera you shoved into my hands when the Dimaporos started shooting, remember? Since then I have made a career out of documenting who is shooting who. A fine job it is. I could never have been better suited; could not have been better educated. If I give you my hit list, Operation Kahos will keel over. I will be the only person left in the Philippines doing human rights work. That to me is world peace.

And now I feel like running up the hill and do a Maria van Trappe number.

A you’re adorable
B you’re so beautiful
C you’re so cute and full of charm

Oops gotit mixed uo. That should be Lea Salonga, not Julie Andrews.

We only have each other dapat tayo pa rin ang magtulungan. Why are you in the feminist movement anyway. Why don’t you just shop to death you eel.

All that mumbo-jumbo. After murdering a sister.

May you die fat and squat. The top of your head meeting the tip of your feet.

Holy Mary. I keep on at it and I’ll get another invite.

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.

:) 

Saturday, May 18, 2013

Huhuhu. I cry. For the irony of it.
Sheilfa, some questions don't have answers. One of those questions is why people we think we love do not love us. I have asked myself that question too, and as I get older I ask that question just for the fun and irony of it - to get me going. It is such an intriguing question. There is no answer. There is nothing personal about it, yet ironically it feels the most personal of all rejections.