Is this not the true romantic feeling; not to desire to escape life, but to prevent life from escaping you.
-Thomas Wolfe


When the rain falls flat
in the rough plane one morning
& the stark meridian sky
hauled by night before
the sun rises not like any day,
serious & sullen silk same.

When you walk on the earth
hearing your footsteps
tossing stones and hurled mud
like how you hit and hit
the letters from your womb
in the dark swollen night
soon to burst like a pulsar
where even silence tempts
not to hear again the pulse
& let silence devours the cloud.

Ah! When the rain falls flat
when you walk on the earth
this little autobiography
tells the life so cold and brute
squabbling, wrangling
like a supernova missing its due
perhaps a century, perhaps a second
but who could tell
when one about to implode
will he be the same being again?

The tealeaf shivers
in the rain not in a cup.

This, of course, is not a myth
but a thousand telling noise
of nominal truths soaked
in ashes of those leaves
burnt in the midday sun kissing
that no one, even a wind
could ever remember
but just a tiny hissing
or was it meant
for a long hush hush.

I have lost my son,
the child I loved so dearly.
Is this what life is about?
-Yamanoue no Okura, Lost Child

After knowing your eternal rest
my soul cries in its inner depth;
trying to trace a soft spot
for some wistful nostalgia
amidst your unbearable sadness
to which I can tell in all ways
hides between your lips
& scavenged in thoughts.

After knowing your untimely passing
it will never be the same again.
After all, when was the last time
you felt something different?

Those times solitary clouds
tried waiving your cracked loneliness;
you died, haplessly, alone & tragic
in the most uncompromising time.

What made you think to hang the world
into a subliminal rope? Was it delusion?

There are two things:
One, the intense heartbreak
between you and the world.
Second, the romantic union
with the abyss.

But what goes in between?

In between, there is you. Solely you.

The only thing, other people can’t see
is that how you lived in dullness.

Your life saw its day
& now your night comes to an end.

Lay to rest. Die not.

To behold the daybreak!
-Walt Whitman, Song of Myself from Leaves of Grass

In days like this one,
when rain drops so light
& everything dips
into weeping grey
my sanity longs for memories.

My sanity longs
like impulsive recalling
of plummeting sadness
in greying day
sashaying mournful recollects
from sunrise to daybreak.

Remembering vanishes
in the joyful marrow of life.

There, forgetting lives.

Tell me the last time
bliss comforts your soul.

It is a transient tick
too stiff to evoke.

What about the last time
pain feigns your saneness.

Memories turned into bullets
slitting shrapnel
warping into my soul.

Happiness lasts for a second.
Sadness, a lifetime.

Tell me how to get rid
the hurting clout of ache
existing as a blunt fragment
benign yet reminisced.

Daybreak pours so hard
and my sanity like a waning light
crawls back in a miasmatic cave
along the river known
to be a home of a witch
& her cursing narrative
of throwing silver saucers
making her a spotless shadow
through vestal times
never again a thriving spirit.

Forget Blake. Forget Whitman.

Only in daybreak
where everything
churns into life,
my sanity shrinking back
collapsing
into surreal gaps.

Here & there,
my sanity longs for memories.

To all bone fragments of Galeria Del Osario*

1.
I want to place you in the depths of forgetting.

Place you like a butterfly in a frame, looking alive but dead of course. Place you like how numbers are arranged from 1 to infinity (but who cares to count?) Place you like how chaos displaced darkness. Place you in the tip of a glacier knowing that the entire block will just disappear in a decade or two.

Like how climate tries to displace us. Our trace will soon be forgotten.

2.
Surely, the climate is too rigid between us;  two beings who found separation in all degrees of telekinetic attractions. For two beings who found shelter in the anonymity of chance. Chance to meet. Chance to declare once and for all the unfolding of luck.

Did luck really unfold or it was just me who hoped?

3.
Time is the bare witness to all tragedies, say two lovers who never found the consolations of fate. Time is the curse of the flesh, the rotting wisdom of conscience.

Time flees. Time forgets. Time remembers.

4.
By all means, the world is too small. Sometimes we wage war to small dimensions seemingly large. Where are we by the time that the world collapses into a small room? Where are we when the room pretended to be small but the gap between us is a year, light years perhaps.

Nomads, we are not. We cannot call any cave a home.

After all, what sort of space would cater us?

5.
A massacre happened 43,000 years ago. No one cares to remember. Nine of them were killed by new comers. El Sidron witnessed the coldest crime. If only tears can shed their fate, can we cry for them?

Who cares to write their memories? Who cares to paint their thoughts? Who cares to count their broken bone fragments in the caves?

I want to place you in the depths of forgetting.

After all, poetry is a savage calling.*
-Edel Garcellano

Let poetry be an interstice.

Say, an intervention to the gap of loneliness. Depressive. Let bitter medicines dissolve or, madness will make its ultimate call.  Convulsive patterns of mental spasms. Schizophrenic impulse hitting the nerves.

What is known to be rational flees. Enough to learn from the burning of its wings and Youth.

Say, pulling a magic trick under the hat. You know you are being fooled but why enjoy such spectacle or, better enjoy than masking the truth.

Say, a glimpse through an interstice—from Whitman’s poetry.

An intervention to the rashness of day. An intercept to the chaos of the soul. A reminder that we are not assemblages forever desiring.

A poetry fumbling to the course, enough to welcome the rain of sad realizations.

“The task is heroic. Poetry is a minor matter” (E. Garcellano) – an intervention/interstice, the negotiator to the ultimate task of poetry.

We are savage gods. We feed on the detritus of truth, those are, lies.

Consider this poetry as an epitaph. To the disremembered victims of El Sidro. We dealt the cards of fate. We intervened to live. We pierced our stones to their hearts so cold.

Darwin’s prophesy always reminds us that in every epoch there are some interventions we cannot avoid. After all, we are his favorite animal.

We are gods feeding on loneliness. We are agnostic souls entangled in caves of shadows.

Say, are we forever trapped in the compulsive dimensions of ourselves? In love, for example.

To answer this question is the task of poetry.

Let poetry be an interstice.