"zither" poems
I sit along in the dark bamboo grove,
Playing the zither and whistling long.
In this deep wood no one would know -
Only the bright moon comes to shine.
5.6k
because our dreams of leaf-canopies and lignin
arrive at a certain variety of green, we will zither
anew with song
here in Bulacan; all the leaves are capsized
brandishing inflorescences as naked as
the scent of petrichor girdled
on the cobblestones: they are forsaken not by
trees but by seasons only, a twofold deliberation
of caprice: there is only two of what is spoken.
such is the warmth and coldness,
missing their obvious targets, hesitant and abstruse,
scattered and at long last, never collected
deftly camouflaged in the familiar drapery,
“Tantusan mo!” as they cry for marks to remember,
we touch the cicatrix to measure with our jagged hands
how much we have forgotten.
what we cease to remember descends deep, as wash-hand basins
concur such depth,
into the well of ourselves, later to discover such
perilous foundling in the squall of either morning or evening,
still devoid of sense: still arguing whether there is much
to reconcile with what has been found and what has been pictured
now, altered by such loss: this is danger, and so is nothing,
swollen and tender, the waters of the estero reek of such
remembering – we cannot ignore its perfume, oddly taking the shape
of the next dagger slowly making its way towards the back
of the skull to pare with river-run precision, what we all
try to hold back inside; so as if to say,
“Tantusan mo!” to remember
where we last took off, like a heron,
or a bird, wary of distances.
Jan 26, 2016
Jan 26, 2016 at 12:59 AM UTC
Dont talk to me about sense-vense -
do you, or do you not?
tell me this much;
Don't go zig-zag, jibber-jabber,
zither; look I don't care of
money-shoney,
this caste-vaste, mummy-daddy
and the society;
We could might never deny this,
pow-wows cannot measure this,
do you, or do you not?
That is, is all there is.
Feb 20, 2015
Feb 20, 2015 at 10:18 AM UTC
because love when cut,
lets loose
an empire of blood:
i have in my lips,
a treaty of oblivion—
releasing an embittered lemon.
in the throne of the sea,
waves repeat the crash
of perfidy.
by the mountains they ride,
the thick air of strobe.
rocks receive the genital fire
of lighthouses
exposing intones of shadow
one by one.
the beast maimed
behind the zither of trees
makes no sound like
an aleph.
i herald the collusion of night
and children
and weep at the solicitude of mothers,
because pines swoon in the dark
and with its hand, the gentlest war
threshes the flesh and blood,
raining on us forever.
hostile eyes bypass the silence of things
and lovers closing doors repeatedly,
disrupting the vale from its slumber.
it is because when love is let loose,
it releases both of us — weary, inescapably ripe with the wind, looking
for each other as doves do in flight,
separate and obscured, opening gates;
nightfall:
the savage aroma of wood
on the leaves that sway fervently
tippling away from boughs.
Dec 15, 2015
Dec 15, 2015 at 4:32 AM UTC
You are a poet, a musician and everything
When you smile it’s sonnet 18
When you frown it’s dark ambient to me.
When you pause and bury your head in the book
I would caress your hair like zither
Sing an ode to your soul
Your pale long fingers, fragile and bossy
Manipulate strings and words and minds easily
Slap me, pop me and shape me please.
Apr 16, 2014
Apr 16, 2014 at 12:26 PM UTC
Like Winston Smith,
I think it’s time to start a diary.
Follow me now: it’s April in Oceania,
The cruelest month,
The silly season, printemps,
A regular I see London, I see France.
I see Winston’s Underpants.
If you catch my drift?
La Primavera: Vivaldi’s rocking the
Juke box and the vote, Botticelli’s painting,
A mural on Jerusalem's wailing wall.
My diary will be hard evidence of thought crime.
Thought crime: one of the more severe varieties of
Religious experience & the most psychotic form of mental illness,
In a category known as antisocial personality disorders.
Thought crime means never getting into any serious trouble,
Until you’re caught, can we at least agree on that?
So, we'd better add the DSM to our stack of essential literary classics.
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,
Published by the American Psychiatric Association,
Providing a common language,
A shrink’s Esperanto.
DSM-IV codes classify mental disorders.
The DSM: a Frommer’s travel guide &
User’s manual for life on planet Earth.
So, like Orwell's Winston, I start a diary of my own; but
Unlike Mr. Smith, I address my message to the here &
What’s happening now, not the future, not the past but
N-a-zayer, N-a-zither NOW.
That's right, I write for the present:
“If thought was ever free, it is not free now."
If truth exists it is a closely guarded secret,
Although McLuhan’s observations hide in plain sight:
*“The new electronic interdependence, recreates
The world in the image of a global village.”*
Which makes us all global village idiots.
We are no longer different from one another;
The age of groupthink is here.
I write to you from an age of security & surveillance,
Warrantless search and predator drones,
An age where no man is ever truly alone.
From an age of standardization, replaceable parts,
Whirling dervishes, dabblers in spin control,
Newspeak and doublespeak,
Atlas shrugged, drugged and fugged,
The new world order:
All but the faint of heart need apply, …
"I send greetings.”
May 14, 2016
May 14, 2016 at 3:56 PM UTC
I bobbed on your crests,
I floated on your glades,
You drowned in loveliness,
I loved your ugliness.
Haze covered all and made it vague,
Like some dream flitting from heart to mind.
We walked on these shores,
We kissed under these stars;
The heavens were set up to shield us,
The moon was made to be compared.
Contrast to your black night face,
Pale white satellite never compared;
It pulls at our oceans,
Tugs on our sea-strings,
Plays my harp
And teases your zither.
Your voice melts into the pitch,
Your eyes shine through the gleam;
The streetlights vainly interrupt.
It happens once every so often,
Love like this,
This sort of kiss,
This kind of embrace,
This warmth on my face.
I am drowning in our boiling oceans of love.
Feb 27, 2010
Feb 27, 2010 at 11:14 PM UTC
it is not the tier of enmeshed leaves
nor the zither of green. none is their duty
to discover the lunar hook of moon.
— the old bamboo is the mistral
danseuse tonight.
whatever the etcetera
of it, whatever the birds demand from it.
a sling of breath is far-flung into the sky
announcing merriment before the child
beheads the tulip,
before the creature chokes the pistil,
before the light enters slow-churn
of synthesis.
hearing the giggling of bush in
the mire of wind, heaving in all kinds
of sleep, the children, the weather,
together; synapses drunk in translation
and we feel no longer the secret
of a guerrilla behind the foliage.
it is only the heraldry of the world
when the morning unclips its wing,
as monsoons continue their bushwhack
amongst petty citations.
past oceans gleaming and
away from hills dreaming — by the
river, dead of heart, riveting silence
of land, past the battered bridge in Marilao tracing deathlier waters,
all gone in recall, something
i scour to find only pining away from
scarcity of remember. it is never their
duty to bring back its image
to dance with me again.
Nov 9, 2015
Nov 9, 2015 at 9:04 AM UTC
ABC Poetically Foolish
A young poet, I am
Bilingual in rhythm and rhyme
Cast out of English seas
Doubt in my words
Evidently misunderstood
F#ck my ABC's, 123s
Gratefully humbled by critics
Heartbreak by lovers
I wish peace upon others
Joy to the world
King of all kings
Love eternally bound
May the alphabet
Never end
Oh, how I sound like tweets
Posting my twits
Questioning society's wits
Raising my fist
Strengthening my grip
Teaching the youth
Understanding my faith
V per Vittorio
Why do I question everything
Xavier resurrected
You represent me, &
Zither is my voice.
Jul 20, 2015
Jul 20, 2015 at 12:04 PM UTC
if love's the gaze of stone and hate
the water drifting hands to their
undreams of dreams, then it shall be
with the zither of leaves a quartet of wind
sifts inanimately so as dark as the night
they will not dare speak the ineffable.
if love's touch homing back to cities as
spry as an unwound, delicate moon as
can be, these flowerings drone
exactitudes the rambunctious plunge
of the roots to the Earth
and i will sing these delightful bursts called days in
April have not the touch of frolicking birds
and the quibble of the masses half-opening
and ultimately quivering are the mountains and the fish dance in the tumult
of their aqueous variations
it is April, sing gently, as now all the
leaves have fingers and the ferruginous rivers have feet and my love
a flower at last!
Jan 14, 2016
Jan 14, 2016 at 12:13 AM UTC
Mine eyes retain the scourge
of love
blueness bites vogue sun
scarring moon-clusters in
unyielding boughs lamenting
this sidereal zither.
Mine eyes burn pale fire
through chaffed hands pallid
markings wall-scrunched
and depthless now
names wield swords as their
sharp edges bequeath wound upon
wound taking helm to helm,
no shattered voice of pain.
Mine eyes still these urgent
importances distilling the
crucial hour's wane - unreliable sundial seeking the sun
to scale shadows telling time
Mine eyes know
her nudeness vague, her bareness clear, her voice splintering the woodwork of soul,
keeping it in a jar,
urn,
rotundly incarcerated there,
mouth sings lip-meanderings
multiplied wolves at
the door.
Sep 30, 2015
Sep 30, 2015 at 4:16 AM UTC
i shall carry with me
the steel morning as words
unmoving in swathes,
petrified
in my shoulders
and i shrug,
unbecoming of Atlas.
all the birds gone.
only trees zither
untold messages -
all stones displaced
in riverbed silence.
in the night
there is a lyre
and the fingers
nimble-dancing, unplayed,
alone as wind
fuses with ornate drivel.
my bones rattle
in unimpeachable oblivion!
an inamorata weeping
left touched without
violent hands, arms choke
out nuisances from
still-sitting inamoratas.
the loom of my hands
famished with light's fabric,
the children's laughter
frayed as i genuflect in thorns
and bleed only minute blood.
the threshold breaks
in the unrest of somnolent eyes.
a somnambulist without path,
a path without feet,
or no journey at all!
time's monuments leveled off
the Earth and the clanging
of metal collides with air,
a senseless caveat -
all gone, all gone!
Sep 14, 2015
Sep 14, 2015 at 10:49 PM UTC
Spritzed me with rain, this morning.
Rooftops unravel inner coating like old scabs
to wounds. Quiescent mercy of the Sun
bleared behind curtains of cumulus. There is a far
more in-depth correlation between an insurmountable
ex-facto and the fruition of affront:
something a sutured lip unwraps, a sotto voce.
Murmuring murmurings,
tousled the leaves to a zither like salad on a depthless bowl:
a coarse susurrus unattainable through lip-reading: tongue’s the
scythe and the message that rummages athwart, something
that rushes in the blood, a scrape on the sinew
as I coil in pain like a thing in womb revealing its fetal nature.
something that speaks for another one – ventriloquism
in its keenest sense, speak for me, you, both of us lost
in frenzied translation.
Jan 27, 2016
Jan 27, 2016 at 1:44 AM UTC
what it meant, first time, felt,
the night blacker, moon daresay zither
of birds asleep somewhere
stone whetted by air, lingual and sharp
with reticence, that obscured
thing of beauty at the edge
of forget— ah, our memory
that picks the derelict, so much is truer
in abandon: tear-shed, stifled, watching
the word dart through the carapace
pulverizing a sensible universe
tracing the line of shadow
immaculately awed.
inward gush of blood as always
and a smile feigned,
running across the turgid avenue
burning bright, the rebel,
fading out.
Oct 27, 2015
Oct 27, 2015 at 12:02 AM UTC
Great Vanity of vanities
How much Art and feeling
In our world today
Is warped and twisted
Perverted and falsified
Willingly
For the poisonous pleasures
Of Reward or Fame?
I admire the man
Who left only his zither and a donkey
And the donkey ill at that
But he left his rhymes
His touch on our Times
The pure sense of his thought
In the letters that he wrought.
Let me try instead
To bend my head
Embrace poor and meek
And never seek
Praise or Reward
And never be torn
By withering scorn
The plentiful sneering
of proud men jeering
I just ask you to know
I tried to show
without doctrine or preaching
or toffee nosed teaching
the flawed Art
of my beating heart
Let me leave behind
the honest confusion
of a groping mind
and the scars of contusion
a hint of the sleepless
the long nights pacing
thoughts wildly racing
all seen by
who?
Perhaps all this cacophony
The madness, the rage
Cannot be nailed
To a printed page
Perhaps the lone witness
The jury in court
The only observer
Of the demons I've fought
Is present only
in the silent rays
When a quiet sun
Through mist and trees
Creeps in and visits
And often sees
A small man, rhyming, puzzling long
Composing, two fingered, his feeble song.
Jul 31, 2016
Jul 31, 2016 at 10:31 PM UTC
I play zither well,
but I make a few mistakes –
then he looks at me.
Oct 11, 2020
Oct 11, 2020 at 5:17 AM UTC
I.
In cold rains cicadas shrill,
red leaves shaking, drearily still.
At the Hour of Great Waste (sky’s sun-ray laced)
A hundred Li’s away from Tongguan’s lofty gates
We part our ways amongst the barren hills
II.
When I plucked flowers from my crisscrossed hair,
(they were still blooming like yesteryear’s pear)
Your carriage passed by my garden, whips lashed
on your steeds (in golden halters they're restrained).
My Lord you were young, without fear or suspicion,
Could still dance and swirl, or play jewelled zither
I (too young to be your lady) knew not what sorrow is
Had only drank tender tea, picked from last pentad.
III.
Fifty strings on zither play in vain
Thunder cloud brings a sudden rain
At the hour Ying and Yang entwined
Tears rolling, my sight they blind.
Aug 4, 2019
Aug 4, 2019 at 2:36 AM UTC
A Knowing Feeling
stirs in me
when I choose colours
when painting or
strike strings on the zither
Others make inventions
design processes
write the truth or
fantasize it
Is it the Muses
a divine spirit or
is it the flow of time
that pours nectar
into open mouths?
Just open the mouth
like a chakra
and receive it
no longer feel yourself
and enjoy
total peace?
Feb 15, 2021
Feb 15, 2021 at 3:55 AM UTC
in the bleak --
the span of your forest's questions
i cannot shun with my hands.
it is like naming the trees in the
morning and almost with ease
from the bend of the boughs
to the song nearing its end in
the once-told twilight
of the never arriving,
forgetting everything
in the night as the space widens
like an eye awakened to
new pains yet old truths.
underneath the sovereign
of which darkness remains uncharted
is the single candle
burning, intent to squirm back
to its death.
it is sure than when our
eyes meet, in knowing this,
there is ineffable readiness,
than when i try to remember
with frail knowledge the
sorry names clinging to elegiac
leaves zither no more,
you are ready to forget.
Sep 14, 2015
Sep 14, 2015 at 11:44 AM UTC