We were

D’s friend O wanted for me to see his psycho-therapist and join  self-transformation seminars. I walked out on my job raising monies for fucking Mindanao NGOs and occupied a bunkhouse in what should have been a dumpsite to grow crops and an herb garden.

She needs help and she doesn’t know it, his friend O told him. Poets are innately chemically imbalanced, aren’t they?

I told D his friend and his frigging office deserves to be backhoed into the dumpsite of history, that’s where he rightly belongs. D said I should see a psycho-therapist I have delusions about artisthood and writerhood.

Islam and Putin

I never thought Islam would sit well with Putin. But it happened to me in Jolo. 

When we were still looking around, a madrasah teacher who also did NGO work said to us that organizing gays and lesbians in Jolo is perfectly alright; those who sow intrigues against Tumba Lata engage in fitna (slander) which is worse than murder. Later, after finding out we don't pay people for being interviewed, she said: Did you know what the Koran says about homosexuals? They should be buried up to their necks and be stoned to death.

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

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.

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.

:)