and the boy drew a line
with his stubby hands,
feeling the roughness
of the pavement.

and it is his stubbornness,
when his name is called,
he doesn't look back
pretending not to hear.

with dirt on his hands
he watches the sparks slither
into smoke through his mouth
to taste something ominously sweet.

24 March 2017

And here you are
Child, come to me.
This. What it used to be.
The entrance to your
Marble home.

The pillars.
the four corners that held
your baby clothes, old toys.
Like a wicker basket
In flames, now blackened
And covered
With the thick vines
And mired in green.

Nothing withstanded
The once and Great war.
The nights lit up
like fire-flowers blooming
in summer. Every thing
Burned away. Nothing
sacred was left. Doors and
Walls no longer stand.

You touch what is left
Grazing your fingers
On the roughness of
This old, old skin. Tired.

Now.

Only the stairway
Is  left.
The only portion left
Clothed with marble
Not carved away
by scavengers.
It looks sad
now that it leads
nowhere.

It led only to sadness
If you try to remember
What is no longer there.

With finality
You pick up your things
And go.
Content with the past
That it once held you
In its brown,
But now white and bony arms.

For Nick Joaquin

(Paolo Jerome D. Cristobal / Augsut 12, 2014 – Bulacan)

I.

“You can only fight the way you practice”
― Miyamoto Musashi, A Book of Five Rings: The Classic Guide to Strategy

His lessons started late
As always, and as always
What is thrown is a question
You grip tightly
around your fingers
as one would,
as one always should.

With a branch he beckons:
“Come” he asks,

“if a stick is struck from this angle,
what would your answer be?”

Always, the old man taught
With each strike, each parry,
Each disarm and lock,
Each time my knuckles
Would hurt. This way
he makes it sure
that my body
remembers.

This is always
the first step.
My mind might forget.
But the body
Remembers.


II.

“It is difficult to realize the true Way just through sword-fencing. Know the smallest things and the biggest things, the shallowest things and the deepest things.”
― Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings: Miyamoto Musashi

With him, everything starts
The vague quality of nonwords
Taught from pain, simplified
Through science:

the fulcrum and the lever.

Each joint, each turn,
a pattern to comprehend,
all things work in context:

A framework of the undeniable
Fact:

the world is separate
In only these two words:

Taub at Tihaya

The colloquial words for
Face down and face up;
This is a pattern
of the body.

III.

“If you wish to control others you must first control yourself”
― Miyamoto Musashi, A Book of Five Rings: The Classic Guide to Strategy

Tihaya

The lesson starts
When he presses
His thumb forward
to a hand asking for alms
like turning a doorknob
too far to the right.

Taub

when I pull back
four fingers
on a giving hand
too far to what is left.

these are the means
for control.
When I know
How much is necessary
To push or to pull,
To teach or to break.

- 18 October 2017

The place where the atmosphere consists of main outbreaks,
Whether the dishes weren't done or the floors weren't mopped correctly,
Something so small can effect the gross unification of "family".
Feeling like you can't necessarily express yourself,
Leaves you to feel drowned out by the many emotions that flood your mind at the worst of times,
It allows your feelings to grow more and more profoundly erratic; anxious.
Allow me to go into full elaboration as to how I constantly maintain my well-respected position of a so called "good person" or complain about the many people who are just as careless as the majority of people nowadays who simply do not ask how I've been.
I've let days slip by,
Suddenly, I feel no difference in what occurred yesterday or really, no contrast in the feelings I'll most likely encounter tomorrow.
At home, mass mental destructions happens,
It's where I get pulled into a place where I'm just trapped in my own self, similar to the way I feel in school.
I don't know, it could possibly be causing my continuous feelings of nervousness whenever I'm surrounded by people,
Or it could merely be the fact of which, I haven't yet chosen a path or seen quite a way to go through and feel a protective environment around me.
These winter days are gradually approaching,
It's only a matter of time until my mind goes away like the sun at night,
These seconds, minutes, hours can patrol for what feels like perennial timings, but anticipation is what's really foreshadowing my shallow whole of a "home".

It kept her inside the workshop,
the only noise, a sewing machine
quietly purring like an old moody cat.
Spools of threads closed into fists,
Fingers curling back into their tiny shells.

She places a piece of cloth on the table,
The open seams sticking out
like the yellow stains of a neck fold.
An old worn out shirt with little holes
filled with imaginary garden trolls.
The smell of moth ***** seeping out.
Curling her lips like a slug with a pinch of salt,
A hesitant hand moves deliberately
as if feeling the roughness of a warty toad.
To keep one is to improvise, to mend spaces
tightly with thread and needle on skin.

She will say to herself: “I will keep him close”
Her little lover’s shirt on her small bruised frame.
chipped, she will drink liquor bitter.
She will drink it long and drink it deep.

November 2014