J.R. said the man in the helmet said, “Goodbye, my friend,” before shooting his father in the chest. His body sank, but the man shot him twice more, in the head and cheeks. The children said the three men were laughing as they left.*
-Daniel Berehulak, They Are Slaughtering Us Like Animals, New York Times

Manila, goodnight.
The world is watching you slowly die.
Tattered truths & losing sense of life
captivate your battered night. Mud hurls blood
streets batted with horror & blabbed
anonymous spirits ghostlier than ever.

(Even ghostlier than your Martial Law days)

Manila, tranquilize yourself.

Your rest will be disturbed by scourged souls, thunderous cracks of guns,
bullets hitting flesh, motorcycle tandem arrests,
people’s holy shouts shunning shibboleth sounding death.

Hear them not. Sleep well.

Maggots festering wound. Manila,
on your knees, worms stich your broken nerves
healing gunshot wounds with peace.

Your night will be a train of madness
shattered by lies through morbid holes in skulls
& confessions in cardboard signs.

(Justice today is served cold, so cold)

& everything from that day on is simply to be known
as a cold just.

Truth decays. Life smolders, vanishing.

Your nights will be unthreaded from memories
for no one dares to look back to twisted arms clenched
by plastic strips, head bowing to ground (instead of ground
bowing to head), ground kissing the body naked swarmed
either by grease or blood, the body breaking gossips
among gossipers & gossamer among spiders.

Weep not, dead men tell no fiction.
Their bodies are the shocking truth, forsaken
shocking headlines hissing morning papers
peppered with mint or lies.

Manila, goodnight for your night will be remembered
through vigilant myths & nothing more.

Often cold bodies, freezing voices from limbo,
can’t speak nor bothered the living.

Again, Manila, in your arms, dead men tell no tales.

The killing spree of fragmented morality,
mortality, fatality, vanity, sanity, insanity, apathy.

Manila, do not move. You are now sedated with fear,
stronger than cooked methamphetamine of crooked realities,
no less than a drug making your anxious, bothered
in the darker & dimmer night
in dimmer  & darker disaster.

Manila, walk with your graffiti walls.
Your gutters will be banks of blood. Daylight traffic
will erase your night’s unwelcoming sphere. Last night
persists as tiny figment of imaginings photographed
& again, nothing more.

Everything will pass like hyacinths of Pasig River.

Everything will pass like one’s eternal passing.

Everything will pass like a chilling December wind.

Everything will pass either a typhoon or a butterfly fluttering.

Manila, goodnight. I am afraid they will ****** you
in your sleep. I am afraid that everything will just pass
like your breath losing hold of your lungs then your heart.

I am afraid that your death, my dear Manila,
will just be a neighbourhood rumour passing
& everything turns into a fiasco of a madman who believes
that he is a messiah, was he a messiah or never he will be a messiah.

Manila goodnight, I will watch you in your sleep. Your sleep
will be a thousand fold peace. No more of your sons or daughters
will be killed at least not in my memory.

Manila, here comes the night. Sleep,
sleep holy in the hidden lair of my mind. Your
catacomb will be wreathed by flowers & tears.
Incense will be fragrant burning bones. Your life,
your tired life will be a gentle ebbing of time
like your Bay’s sunset beauty, like your lively street people
like your once known heritage, your life
in the busy daybreak of your kindred sons.

Goodnight, my dear Manila.

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.

You told me once that I am your favorite writer.

I was hesitant and unsure. Your innocence might jinx me this time. Then you laughed, as you always do, like a child giggling while waiting the rain from the summer sky. Everything becomes clear. After all, whatever comes from you is never you.

Of course, you are as always an empty being.

Your emptiness tells many stories. Your emptiness fools me. Your emptiness is the real vessel of soul. Your emptiness is a parchment for budding thoughts. Your emptiness is a magic.

No wonder, I fell in love with that emptiness. I just do not know if emptiness loves me back.

Or, was it me who stares at the abyss long enough that a centenary gone by.

1900: The Boxer rebellion begun. Freud published his Interpretation of Dreams.

1903: The Wright brothers marked their first flight. In turn, Curtiss decided to invade the sky.

1912: Titanic anchored to Atlantis, to its final resting place.

Two years after, the first World War broke out. Horses galloped to the killing fields.

1925: The first among many trials of the century began. That day, Darwin risen for the second time.

1934: ****** became Fuhrer. The world becomes a theater. “Absurd,” says Beckett. “Cruelty” for Artaud.

1939; 1941: Second World War broke out; Pear Harbor bombed. Asia Pacific meets its infernal fate.

1945: Three mushroom clouds seen: New Mexico, Hiroshima, and Nagazaki.

1960’s: Humanity becomes obsessed with multiple wars: cold, space, nuclear, music, universities; not counting the mutants who played major roles in between.

1986: Itay wrote a letter to Inay. The letter reached Manila after a few days from Jeddah.

1989: Capitalism won. Berlin wall fell like a paper plane after its victorious flight. My parents met for the first time. Months later, they decided to cut the cake and get married.

1993: The World Wide Web saw its day. I was born.

Twenty two years later, I met her. A year after, Phil Collins sang once again Separate lives.

That time, I know, I will never be your favorite writer.

In Aleppo, they do not weep
for how can one
weep in wounded time.

Souls bantered
piled up, interlocked
dead & dull
lost in dusts
in a cold frenzy night.

Oppress Eden
but not Aleppo
not today, not tonight
not in this time
where children can’t weep
to save their tears
for them to drink
& not their blood
while trapped
within collapsed walls
of the wailing world.

Children of Aleppo
cry not, die not.

Memories will never bury you
to the infested ground
saturated by psychedelic bombs
& festered by maddening
cataclysm of human cold art.

The old world tries to redeem you,
to let you live, live with living
but it cannot for how can the world
try to win, then and again
tears back to emotive impulses
breaking the wind pulsating
in the plane sanity of mind?

In Aleppo, dead men forgot
to weep. Forgetful men
wept yet weeping
with no clause why.

Aeroplanes are still there
buzzing the sky,
bombing your hearts.

Aleppo, your body might die
tonight & several nights more
but memory, in this wounded time
will never bury you to ash
for Aleppo, young child, will live
beyond wounds, beyond cries.

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.

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.

“The hottest love has the coldest end.”
-Socrates

You were there. Like stardust ever dancing in the light as if infinity swirls to you. Your existence declines my being. You waived all presences, defying the mnemonics of what qualifies existence.

You were there—not now.

Before, we were strangers looking at some abyss. After, we are strangers excited of what the future holds for both of us. In between, we are still strangers cursing all pains stinging our hearts.

Time inflicts its greatest wound: recollection. Malt ferments. Soul dies. Mind breaks down. Bubbles in beers imploded to every motion of the hand swaying, wishing it never touched you. Dreams stitched to rags given to wipe dusts and rusts. Time betrayed us, then and again. You were there but not now. Time cursed the being. Time stabbed us causing my heart to burn.

If only I can love you without time minding us all.

Atoms fall. They swerve a little, says Epicurus. Repulsion with others creates the world. That repulsion is a lasting encounter.

What holds that philosophy to be true is antimony. What holds us after all is just an illusion.

When I stumble upon old things finding some boxes, I remember you. When I see your picture in an old frame, forgetting becomes a sickness.

Is there a pill that can selectively erase your fading silhouette in my memory? Confession: I took that pill long ago. My mind fabricates immunity.

You were there in the horizon standing, holding an umbrella, ready to swerve from the rain that once made our love so cold and true.

I was there.

That night, the rain substituted to a poet’s tears.

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.

To miss you is to shake the world like the apocalypse
& all known myths vanish to cosmic depths.

That is,
if you are still there or somehow in time unknown
you choose to imitate those myths doomed
& decided that after all, stars never explode
but devoured by spotless black holes of your memories.

Your home rests under polar lights;
sleeping under dancing specks of dusts.

To miss you is to allow the gods kneel
while I am lost in a young galaxy,
light-years away, perhaps just a millimeter, from home.

I did love you once.
-Hamlet

Light floods the road
invisible from the pavement
turned into beds of beggars
begging for the godly hope.

People plainly pass
perennial plot of pretensions.

Peace tonight is fragile,
so fragile that car honks fade,
so fragile that tire screeching
dies in the night.

Above are stars eaten by smoke.

The father and daughter
shared the night
with the blanket of stars
made of dusts.

(The night so fragile can’t hide their stomachs growling)

1.

Clarita, 24
let the night pass
under the warmth of coffee
and her broken press
whose myth died years back
but never in memories.

2.

(An old woman passed by with her cane fiddling the asphalt. I can hear her wishes. She wants to die.)

3.

It was Clarita who smiled
to all foolishness of childhood. True.
It was her way to ****
the marrow of life
knowing Thoreau or not,
from the threads of forgetting
& horrors of remembering.

4.

Her communique
falls flat from what she supposed to say
for she can’t utter a syllable
so ironic that she just tend to pretend
she never remembers
she never cares
for all what she need
is to let things reveal themselves
so apocalyptic that even herself
don’t mind when.

5.

(Lovers passed by with their hands swaying, either by gravity or by air)

6.

Her mother tried her luck to pick cherry blossoms.
Her father stole her past.

Clarita killed them in the vignette of her neurons.

7.

If only she can turn back in time
and live like her diary’s wishes
Clarita, whose heart pierced by a chance lost
will redeem what she has to,
& sleep like a child in a dusty bed
where the blanket hide her
& her universe.

8.

The phone rings. She can’t ignore the line.

9.

She hates the feeling of falling in love
like how she hears the phone ringing
in the middle of the night
where insomniacs finally sleep
from a distant snoring of customers
barraging like thunders of senseless
predicaments and tongue-tied promises.

10.

Tonight, Clarita made a promise.

She will let the night pass.

Yo naci un dia que Dios estuvo enfermo.
-Cesar Vallejo

How to write like Vallejo
& breathe his poetry?
Write as if I am seeing
the true Peruvian sky
that inspired his solitude
& thousand times longing.

Tell me, how to weave words
like how he penned
the silk cobweb
missing its spider-child.

Sadly, the spider died
tragic lost, it was.

The cobweb fell
only to find the dusty ground
but only a poet,
true to his words,
could redeem its memories.

How to write like Vallejo
& let in my fingers flow
the solitary spirit
of the aesthetic?
Words after words
sigh after sigh
& let the womb
of the poet’s love
give birth to verse
after verse.

If only that womb
can bring the spider back.
If only that womb
can see poet’s tears
for that spider
that once he
drunk those words with
as he stares blank
with his eyes dead as an oak
to the wall
of his poetic friend.

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.