Perennial Measure

cover photo and design by Marcel Antonio

--tribute to Eugenio Montale's Cuttlefish Bones

This is it. An irresistible purge pure as the putrid

smell of parmigiano-reggiano I just have to tell

you about. Otherwise I’d go crazy with laziness,

I won’t know what to do aside from job-wait

in the land of peer-hate and crimes’ journalese.

This is that, a party or poesy joyous among blasé

blogs, flagged at every measure but constantly,

blatantly musical, trumpeting uncontrolled ease

in the city of grey concrete littered with plastic

insensitivities and manic individualism. I hurl

my silent keyboard with impunity, tempted by

exclusions, hungry as yesterday’s hellish pizza,

though nostalgia won’t do us any good. Time

to be looking forward, to put up new standards

in service of the old, for the same ideals burn

in me as the Fascist desire—power/harmony,

but pursued in far greater graceful fashion,

sort of like Milan on a café afternoon, posing

as a dandy, armed only with words, only sly

inconsolable asymmetry from flagged poetry.

---Milan, er, Manila, August 2009