It was around this time of the year

It was around this time of the year when I last heard from you. It was before the year I took you for gone. I was waiting for weeks on end for the money you sent me, and I was thinking to myself, Where is my money? Is someone vacationing on my entrails because you are saving on remittance fee? Because you want me to meet family? As though your brother would see a Rimbaud if he saw me. But I actually don’t like remittance fees and bank charges. The heartlessness of it. Plus this what you call my left-wing bumper sticker politics. Then I also wanted to meet more of you.

Your brother was good to me. He looked me up and I said to myself, this is pain and didn’t smile up at him. Wished he just got a crush on me. More bearable than whatever it was you were capable of appraising me for. I took a taxi all the way from Mintal to your house because I had no money for jeepney, not even money for a box of matches. The day before, I volunteered to burn the leaves at the neighborhood plaza so that I could borrow a neighbor’s match, then I could make fire to boil water and make a broth of malunggay leaves seasoned with salt. What I survived on for the last two weeks. But your brother kept on forgetting about money I had to call eventually. We were so nice on the phone, he talking about picking the book on my way to work like I drove a car, and I saying sure he may leave them with his wife and to not bother with me he just fetch the kids at school. That clean. That pretty. So when I saw him, I said to him, So where’s the book and the money? He said, oh yes, the two hundred dollars! He went inside and came back with the book and an envelope that bore your bank’s name and handed them to me. I thanked him and said I got to scram my taxi’s waiting. He said Ingat kayo like I was one of your well-off friends. Very respectful good-looking bastard, I said to myself. Because his eyes went to my oversized rubber shoes as he said that and there was that crestfallen look about him. I slammed the poor bedraggled old screen door on his staringdown face. Or maybe I didn’t; maybe I just went out and the door just slammed itself on itself regardless of me. I didn’t know he was soon vacating that old house for that one in the plush village you invited us to later. Should be housing widows and aged spinsters, I said to myself as I waited for him to come out. But I wasn’t up for anyone, really. All I felt was fatigue, my body looking forward to a change. Rest and food maybe and a new perspective that should come with that. I told the taxi driver to take me to the money changer at Aldevinco. Then I went to a restaurant there where I ran into a friend dating a lawyer boyfriend. What happened to you, you look twenty years older! she said. First time she looked and sounded genuinely truthful with her description of me. First time also that she didn’t call me Manang, her putdown address when she wanted to beat me to a size.

I have been thinking about you. I know you were not vacationing on anyone’s entrails. All those travels home to bury your dead. I probably think more about your dead than mine, mainly because mine are too ugly to think about, how much more write about. I was told they are going to be bulldozed. Something to do with boundaries and taxes. Maybe they had been bulldozed already. I wouldn't know how to speak about these things to you, or to anyone else.

I had been thinking about America, too. How brutal it is. How the best way to go on with life there is to adapt to its cold callous side. I said that’s why you’re a real estate developer. The way for you to survive; a way to be at the top side of the heap. At first I was lost, appalled. Like, you have so much heart in you, don’t you, why that? I couldn’t reconcile so much goodness of heart with a name like Coldwell Banking. Makes me think of pretty girls in sun-dappled days which you are not. So I said to myself, the poet lives in a desert, silent beyond the bog, so a cold well must be a nice place to dwell in.

A Hunchback’s Pledge

And when I take this path
I want to be ever so much careful.

To break no twig;
To lift no stones;

To take nothing;
And eat nothing

That will change me.

To remember that I come unasked
And unwelcome.

That you are a foreign country
And stand among my enemies.

That before your staring eyes
I stand naked;

Unloved.

That if I bring no harm,
I may leave unharmed;

But that if you take my hand,
I will be done.



29 July 2008
Pagadian City

Girl in the Jeepney

Letter from Home

As for life in the backwoods,
Do not say I asked for it.
In my country, this is the way to live.
A stranger arrives wearing the face of a daughter
Gone over the world and returned to say,
All this is wrong and had to go.

Neither is this about failed experiments;
The communes are not textbook scraps
Children of revolutions may or may not pick,
This is about secret scratches on the brain:
The memory of plow wedged into earth;
Of milk squeezed out of a beast’s teats.

It’s not even about serving time or God;
Nor about being mad or sad
That poems may be written on rocks and tree barks;
This is about reaching for the bottom of things:
The rust of steel dug from a feet deep;
The smell of sepsis breaking out from beneath the hard crusts.

This is about finding one’s true roots;
Ripped wires that burn and bleed underneath;
The gift of coming back to the bombed place;
To bury the bones of the dead.

This is about life taken for its own sake;
The homing of a knife into the heart.


20 July 2008
Pagadian City

Ba't Di Hayaang Maglaro

photo by Florian Kiopp, courtesy of tdh-phils

Eleanor Trinchera

Maaga pa ang gulo na nila. Naghihiyawan, naghahabulan, nagtatawanan. Sabi ko sa sarili ko, ano ba naman, pinapabayaan lang ng mga magulang!

Hindi puwedeng mag-ingay bago mag-alas siyete! Sabagay mukhang lampas alas siyete na ng umaga. Pero hindi ba nila alam na nakakaistorbo na sa mga tao sa kalapit-building nila?

E, bigla namang akyat sa isip ko ang kanta ng Asin.

Masdan mo ang mga bata, ang buhay ay hawak nila...
Ang sagot raw sa kanila makikita, sila raw ang tunay na pinagpala. Nga ba? At bumalikwas na nga ako.

Sabagay, gising na naman ako, pa'no pa ako maiistorbo, at bakit ko pa iisipin na makakaistorbo sila. Bahala na kung sino yung maistorbo nila, tutal gising na ako. Tumungo na lang ako sa kusina, para makapaghanda ng almusal, saka dumungaw sa bintana. Tanaw na tanaw ko sila: nagtatakbuhan, naghahabulan, punong-puno ng tuwa.

Oo nga naman ano, bakit hindi sila pabayaang maglaro. Bihira na nga akong nakakakita ng mga batang naglalaro nang samasama laluna sa parteng ito ng “suburb” namin. Bihira na nga akong nakakarinig ng mga batang nagtatawanan. Iilan na lamang sa mga kabataan dito and nagkakasama para maglaro. Iilan na lang nga sa kanila ang nagkakakilala kahit na sa isang building pa silang lahat nakatira. Iilan na lang ba sa kanila ang nagkakalakas-loob na makipaglaro sa kapwa bata?

Bihira na rin sa kanila ang naglalaro sa kalye o sa paligid ng mga unit. Madalas, makikita mo sila sa mga local parks o playground sakay ng kani-kanilang mga bisikleta o roller blades, o kaya dala-dala ang kanilang scooter, o bola para magsoccer, magbasketball, magcricket at kung ano-ano pa. Iyong iba pa mga alagang aso ang kasama kaysa sa kapwa bata, o kaya mga ipod nila.

Itong grupong ito, karamihan sa kanila mga lima o anim na taong gulang lamang lang. Mayamaya lang magsilakihan na rin ang mga ito, magbibinatilyo, manliligaw, magkakabisyo, magiging barumbado o kaya baka rin at sana, magiging mabuting tao. Pero ngayon heto pa, nagsisigawan, hagikgikan, taguan, parang talagang sinasamantala ang bawat oras ng pagiging bata.

Iba-ibang kulay pa ang mga ito. Halatang galing sa Tsina ang iba at ang iba naman ay maliwanag na galing pa ng India. Sa parteng ito ng subdibisyon sila lang ang madalas naglalaro, sila lang ang madalas nagsasamasama. Sila-sila rin ang madalas nagbabatian, nagkakakilanlan. At parang wala silang pakialam sa mga palalong mga Australyano at Filipino sa paligid nila basta't sila ay nagkakaintindihan.

Oo nga naman, ano. Bakit nga hindi sila hayaang maglaro at mag-ingay. Sino kasi nagpauso ng bawal maglaro at mag-ingay. Tutal napakatahimik ng lugar na ito. Kung minsan pa sobrang tahimik kung kaya sobrang diyahi tuloy umimik.

Pa'no, madalas pati magkakapitbahay ni hindi na nagbabatian at nagpapansinan.

BLOGSHOT: Ilostit!

photo by karen dias



I have the stupidest pair of glasses. It is square and big, too big for my bony face. A temporary replacement, I told the clerk at the optometric clinic along Magallanes Street. I don't even remember the clinic's name. It's one of those sidewalk cubicles you will have a difficult time looking around in if there were three customers walking in at a time. I didn't ask for a receipt or the clerk's name. A one-hundred peso purchase is supposedly disposable garbage a day after. If you don't know me.

She was good, the salesclerk. Understood right on life's less emulated virtues when I asked for the cheapest they had. But maybe it was because I said to her not to call me guapa because I'm not guapa, I'm a boy, little boy blue. How she giggled at that. Didn't stop smiling. Made me wonder if she got a girl-bf or got a crush on one, or she was just not used to being spoken to in English like she mattered. Probably she was just counting on my coming back to her for a real replacement of the one I lost. A costly trip that would be, sweetheart, one I'm not likely to make soon.

The one I lost. I could not be thinking of my eyeglasses? Or of the laptop that broke down before New Year's Eve and is still held hostage by the computer guy who I suspect is overcharging this time? Or of the jobs that my friends in the NGOs liked to offer me so that I would talk and talk as I bit into their well-dealt sowhatdyathinks until they knew what to do without me bitching? I had seen how many of my one-pagers and two-liners turned into press relations speeches and three-year programs that took care of children's tuitions, SSS and Philhealth payments, gas and gadgets, while I hanged in the sun to dry until I got to love it there in the sun.

Of late I have learned as well not to bleed too much over what got away or didn't come my way ever again. A dream research project. A writing and publishing grant. A teaching job. Now I'd like to think that what I don't have money to buy is at the moment not worth the purchase, I need not miss them, I will have them in time: a Doris Lessing's latest; a Charlie Chaplin set; a loyal laptop, a canvas as wide as my door; even just a quiet room with a writing table and no man pissing around. The best things in life are free, I count on that.

My life's constant companions are the books that, like the children I once had, I did love with despair but now, I can also freely give away. Let go, I tell myself, each time I hurt, knowing that they might never return or may fall in evil hands, be eaten by the elements, like the son I hanged up the phone on when he said You get me from here, you take care of me! Books don't hurt like that. But I recall how once when friends borrowed then stole, I cursed:

That what they took will not make them any richer like it made me.
That for taking from me they will not be better by me.
That what they destroy of what they cannot have will not grow around them ever.

That what I don't have will not make me less but more and more of myself.

Later, I would learn, too, that the friend who stole from you once will steal from you again and again. At first it may just be an Arundhati Roy or Mrs Dalloway or a bundle of stories on Switzerland and Germany you or a thoughtful friend took pains to photocopy page after page out of Granta, soon it will be a job, a friend, or a network of friends: a rope to get you by in your poverty, in the outway. Next it will be your sheaf of rip-offs incinerated with a blink of an eye, your life's gathered prose on the way to the typesetting machine, your journals of daily hurts searing the skin in the face, your first art works, the hard copy of your first drafts, and finally, your own words, a speaking position, what tiny audience you're left with, what little right to self-description you have: to speak about one's self in behalf of the self, unlaced by jealousy or hate, even the right to love, to burn a path to reach out to another soul in the cold, uninstructed by ethics, unmediated, and unobstructed by proprietary and brokership laws.

Thanks to their graces and harmless ways, you will find yourself walking a land mine of hopes blasting you to pieces.

And yet, ages later, you will have to thank them as a way of returning the favor. You didn't die, did you? You didn't get even, you didn't even get published, you only got better, madder, and bloody shameless as ever. Is that what you read, Jeremy?


So what did I lose? Beside a pair of glasses to see me through?
I lost my way, I suppose, while writing. So now I navigate the road aboard this hundred-peso joke above my nose and I skid as I walk like a boat lost and coasting along craggy mountain slopes.

My hope is that my friend Circe won't be far-off.
Don't follow me!

Ode to Viktor

I know you hate me.
And when you raped that girl
I understand I was among those prissy cunts you
wanted torn up. You must have envisioned
telling your story from the point of view of
rivenness? But her blood on your hands,
how does it feel, Vik?
But Vik, if there is one word
to describe my life, undone would be it.
Remember how back in school
our favorite phrase was poete maudite?
We reckoned if we didn’t make a name
for ourselves, we might as well just lie
and lounge among them poetes maudites.
That wouldn’t be so bad, we said.
Then we snickered, hi-fived,
and downed our beers.
But every time I thought of it,
it was like being run over at midday
by a big truck: It limped me for life, Vik.
And Vik, you never said it out loud,
but I heard you:
Nobody wants to be explained away as
thwarted poet;
Nobody wants to be remembered as struck
at midday by a big red truck.



2003
Davao City