I do not know what it feels like to live in someone else’s dream.
Outside the house, the moon, like a mistress, slits its throat
and bleeds white. The nature of all things around me has its way
of heaving out the wrongness, as if a drunkard staggering for words,
floundering in a curt reply after being asked where’s the nearest station
towards nowhere. I remember in 4th grade, they asked me what I
wanted to do with my life. All I ever wanted was the same clichéd response,
without knowing the appropriate punishment the desire coming with it.
I am not culpable. I wanted to be a bird stirring in a plainsong: free.
Whatever that meant. In a room where cross-sections of you tender me
margins I cannot cross. When I was young, whenever my mother would
leave me for the marketplace, she told me to always lock the doors
and never let anybody inside. The sound of the gears resembled your hand
in mine when we held hands, securing each finger into place the way
the night tucked us to sleep. It is still something the unforgettable, with
its feigned urgency, its ersatz summer days indoors spent on nothing but
gibberish and luxuriously lounging at nothing, looking at blank spaces
as though they were naked women the first time and the last. In a place like
this that selfishly spires with thoughtless hum, it’s conversations with the smallest
details that cover such distance, revealing weight I cannot solder.
Freedom to me is as bizarre as any other feeling that pushes one person
over to the next one. I have its wobbling sense scattered all around like a crushed
scent of bougainvillea. What we have to give in exchange for it, and what we
are to acquire after trying to weave out denotations that would make us swill
over like muck over the city that we selfishly breathe in, and our almost
ridiculous misunderstanding of the word riddled with unsparing details.
I had myself mull over it, passing your decrepit house. Freedom,
the wind, or a bird, or anything unloosened like a waning volume from a stereo,
a readying tip of fire awakened ready to catch the corners of your fingers,
a basket of fruits in the morning from a remote bazaar, the peeled off and pared skin
of an orange, some November night that burnt auburn, anything that may take place
anytime in our hands – something that does not break in it, but holds still, waiting
to take place, forming names, sliding away from fingers. Freedom, to have a shadow
engraved on an architrave and a cornice, and to have your name in my heart
like a frieze ornamenting some entablature, or that long dream of striding past
the Metropolitan, knowing how erroneous it was to feel so immense at that cosmic moment
of sizable smallness: the perpetual dialogue between a host and a barfly,
mellifluously woven striking in sense, a farce raiding meaning all afternoon, like the close
eye of the Sun inspecting furniture, or your nosy neighbor taking time to stop watering the
plants and watch you dance from your window, to a music that he has no knowledge of,
but I do. I do. If it wasn’t plainsong, then I was wrong, writhing and alive
still, leaning in the air of a dream – free, wandering,
*wind, passing of figures, clenched fingers, nothing.