Vita Su Un Altro Mondo

All right. To make my vocabulary simple,

I’ll only whistle to a bus’ sighs, permit my

Daughter’s flying kite to get near my 15th

floor terrace, Beatles singing “Michelle,” a

French stanza, I have yet to ask her aunties

when they’re coming back home, an island

to reclaim their souls here on my tiled floor

with occasional birds’ braving for cereals.

Okay. And my dictionary by the rails could

kill a baby passing on this windy morning,

with cable TV blaring its own phraseology

and very, very articulate criticism of art.

Have I forgotten reality? I write, fart.

Though True, You’re Now Respected, . . . Corporal, Son, Don’t Go

Scintillating, not. Daunting, yea, but. But:

do you even worry so horridly, bolting so,

almost frolicsome to the hilt? Would you?

Of course I’m being condescendingly tocky,

creaturely cute, curvaceous with my logic,

but that’s all because I’m now tragic, ‘kay?

Let’s focus on my lyric attitude: one arm!

Now, turn. Exhale some vapor, but burn one

vesper candle to those open mandibles! Hello?

Know, corporal, it’s true you’re now respected.

Restless, neglected. But did you see how lately

one socky white lady frolicked over corpses?

As A Househusband Brings a Weekend Breakfast-In-Bed Tray to His Pooped-out Working Wife, Not Yet Disturbed by Their 8-Year-Old Daughter Still With Her Dreams ‘Bout the Zoo

Scintillating frying consonance was here for you, my love.

As are butter now on toast, pink pomelo juice, instant coffee.

I have not bathed yet in the Tuscan tan of your chamber, love,

Nor have I yet found you. Nor the dryer, nor our petting zoo.

Did you hear her door open, floor watchfully creaking? She

Won’t smell semen, you won’t be sore or cry for heaven, mere

Scintillating assonance of words, love, is here for thee. And

Me. But let’s exclude me in the picture’s focus. Allure may be

The name of the game I’ll be playing onwards, but it won’t be

A lame dissonant perturbance encumbered with noisy, biting

Crustaceans. I may not have bathed yet for the danger of our

Daughter’s waking up, love, and I may now only be thinking

Of you, but I’ll soon take care of the laundry in the dryer, the

Cat/dog food in our zoo. Then wake Mia, our current focus.

A Selfless Self-Centered Attitude

You fail to see that all art is vain, and the artisan vainest of all,

unless he stays anonymous or hides by a plumed name. Then

our vanes cannot see the rain inside, there will only be this

shy glide of fortitude, an anonymous phoenix’s swoon to

vague borrowings, own sorrowing, or careening to ohs.

But don’t fail to see that all art is also finally owner-less,

the artisan a slave, even as he stays eponymous to his work

or arrives with a Moses cane, waning soon to be not actually

a bane to himself, but the boon to glad attitudes in helixes

crooning big arrowings, holy narrowings, caroming off arghs.

Today’s Reign of Dengue Rains

1. Remembering a very preventable past while worrying an unpredictable present

This is me, irritable jester from one time of cholera.

The suffering demands now a plastic confidence, right

in front of the fear nursed by a containment of past hates.

Containers leak a non-color there, letters from here, each

time pride fails. I could’ve betrayed a street-smart history,

as some last indian, snake from the grass out in a defensive

gesture, head up, a cup of venom boiling from the glands,

ready now for the next steady rampage of fellow snakes,

fellow proud jesters in this time of dengue rains, AIDS

lanes, A(H1N1) banes, cancer industry boons. I am,

loony crooner now fearing your doom, singing here

of past moody angers eager for remembrance,

longing for peace from that time of choleric

vomiting and insane sanitation-systems

greed, wishing for an encyclopedic eye

and a log of creeds to never ever see

those cramps again. But, by a

2. Recalling a researchable present while watching a helpless descent

strength measured by a credence, there

drops from the sky an image. Hitler with a

brush, from over the moon, Pink Period Picasso

with another woman, Dali with his Francoism, Liszt

with a theme jumping from mood to mood amidst crazy

fans, waking Michel Foucault in Mons and a later Buddhist

socialism. Michel became cross jester in the daytime, by night

time a sufferer of your jeers and judgments, you who have

suffered enough humiliation yourself in the envious

greed of these times of choleric jealousies, NTDs’

politics. Never will we see him again. Not

again, that historian of basic illnesses.

Ain’t I Verily Now Like My Führer?

Soap made from corpses on my witless idol’s

head, though true I may be- I’m syncopated.

Famously I glide along like old, old songs

familiar to Sinatra’s bobby soxers, but, yes,

crucified, while mollified. But it had to be me.

Not Santa but saturnine, too, red-flagged verily

too like the Führer, I get poked as my tribe’s

new chief as though it’s a new morning. Had to

be you? Oh I have to be free! Have to be, see,

to be wily again, to parrot again Charlie Chaplin.

English Easter

Even in England, fiery primates muse:

Easter Rabbit’s a pet, yet-to-be, being

postdated, your future guest, you in delirium,

it donning then various church company colors.

But really not the bird you fondly tag a cardinal,

it’d have the hue no Archbishop had dictated,

churches having focused more on the eggs,

the promised, not the promiser.

Ēoster must forget this prank, being

posthumous, set askew in the time of Lutherans.

‘Twas arbitrariness, the Bunny as the Virgin Mary,

among other meanings now put asunder.

But being critically liable, let the violins crank

up a future Voltaire among the rabble, against the

doctrines, fire up no heaven with a King or Queen

at St. George’s Chapel. This is all about

the Promise, not these promisers.

A Sergeant’s Wife’s Head On My Sleep-Deprived Shoulder on Liberated Corregidor: an Anti-War Confession

Non-alcoholized but sleepy, I’ve bestowed fervor

On the surreptitious, and so welcome back home to

Love. Sumptuously latent, though laughably/softly

Incredulous, am with the army still, the marinated

Fury, fomenting fearlessness, without ‘em noisy

Barometers for measuring men. With trepidation

Still upon humanity, kiss forgery awhile, crank up

Sonatas, pirouettes, and painterly history-data lines,

United winners feeling defeated, brandishing no

Enemy’s bandolier. “What the-?” went a woke,

Stunned, sad commander, seeing drowsy veterans

Kissing crying widows. “May their husbands R.I.P.!”

A National Artist Award Nominee Secretly To the Envied Award Winner

I am, like you, awash in a stream of pride and insecurities,

like you, co-opted by industries to present his tawdry human

résumé, account executive appeal, an enigma and/or shit

upon this earth that only wants to pretend life’s so pretty.

I am, like you, a corruptible artisan, willing to ass-bend

for someone’s fingering of my soul with books’ aesthetics,

patrons that we are to a common taste we lyricize as brooks.

With this Martian caliber of mine, I shoot a mirror’s smile

with alacrity, uniform praise being your ideal for proper

friendships, lordship that you are, avatar to an ego’s model,

filigreed film of a flatulent fornicator with fiefdoms, pre-

1780 Kantian diminished-rights non-criticality, your

astuteness put asunder, leavened bread to your fame.

Hunger, the plumbing for restless arts, carves sibilance

from acquaintances, rascals, even pederasts, lifelines to

aristocrats, and I sense endless abominable courtesies.

I am, like you, a waterfall of recurrent pride, insecurities.

The Myth of Religious Tolerance

Penumbral neoliberal libertarians. Noah’s seven laws.

Interlucate calls from intermediaries? Funerary! Infirm

Catechism! You loathe the candidate sewing ties to

Condoms and “lies,” saying, “surely there are other

Minds”? Let me broach other similar themes, provide

Antonyms and homonyms, that I may stay awake.

Southern lights, o scientific lights, make peace please

With the Christian hegemony. Oh, climate-changing

North wind, o silly wind chimes, ring me a bell for a

Fecund lecture-hall ceremony. Fight! Til the day we die,

We’ll be sibilant and flatulent both at the same time in

These hours of our lives, amour. Amour, yes. Amour I

Said as though we’re Catholic French, the long breads

We carried from camp to camp, silly as silly could be.

But no—we knew better, and so southerly we went

Toward Aussie bushfires, away from our northern

Druthers, me, you and my Pop art, forever and ever.

And where’s Amir? Amir, d’you remember? Christian

Crusaders were fencing with Moorish marauders, all

Fabulous, caricaturesque beauty for cinema! What

Campy creatures! Oh, I loathe candidates, ties with

Corporations, lookism! And lies! Surely these Other

Minds, debating, “will die”? Ahahahahahahahahaha!

A Burgeoning Working Class Revolt Aiming to be New Royalty

“Coffee and toffee for the dominatrix, Jojo, quick!” To bully

Back or not to be, bully that they are, is the answer by itself,

The cycle that rolls downhill beyond the burros from Chile

(Not here), behind the bisons from Depression-era America

(Past now, not so welcome to our bullish generation, ‘bye).

Believe them when they tell you. Burritos, bad when you’re

Full, but fine when the bandurria begins its hungry trills for

A ballad my abused maid of a mate sings in Bisaya, sounding

Something like business in theatrical gaps, him screaming,

“Yaya!”—broad breath in the orgasmic moment, bouillabaisse

For her hair’s tendrils, diaphanous for creaturely subjection

That matters most when our masters don’t bell a ring-like tone

To deafened ears assigned to something a little farther. Wham,

Bang, your bed is red! We are green with envy! The color of

Their green-plantation bullcrud, . . . of soon-to-be-blue blood!

Art Audiences

a. When art becomes synonymous with expensive

“Artisan”’s quite a trade expression now, almost like mindless

Slang or a bitchy platitude, a vociferous, confident assumption

Or a tic like unplanned masturbation. But while many artisans

Have eyes fully aware of the exclusive politics around their

Macaroons of craftsmanship, the majority of our people

Simply don’t care about the pastry chef’s churning out recipes

To make his/her baking sweat, wake eaters’ sweet palate,

Make them eat his/her cake while making them all own it!

b. When artworks become more important than the artist

I am a critic, with another set of tics. The politics around the

Picket, the racket, the rocket of artistic dancing and sulking is

My job, my eyes’ slippery candy. Who am I talking to? Good

Question. For whilst others see my essays’ expression,

Artisans’d merely shrug on their rugs, carry on with their

Masturbatory squirts, vomits, and farts. I’d say, in my turn,

“I don’t expect artisans to have neither minds nor hearts.”

Sperm Cell That Refused to Proceed to the Womb’s Egg

What else can I write about if I must always fornicate under

     consent of the king? How

else can I adjudicate alliances if I am to play this gentlemen

     only ladies forbidden game?

How maledictive, fictive, and irreparably parabolic, kryptonite

     to all human superflights.

What else can I sing of if not penance for imagining a swing,

     i.e., with absent swingers?

Not soft as rosebuds, an overdose of thorns, shall I truly find

     you there? Haa-choo! Is’t

you? Careful of the draft, ill-covered lady, it’s only Saturday,

     not okay to die acutely

of sex on a men’s holiday. Who will pay their respects, lower

     salaries regardless? Who’ll

cry or light a cigarette, or sigh, or fight for Queen Margaret,

     or, furious, be equally daring?

Fye upon me? Me? Me? I haven’t even thought of beginning.

     I have not even been living.

American,Televangelical,Exceptionalism

Each sevennight’s end,

seven seals play around my white

male televangelism

informing dormancies and normalcies

not divine,

play around freely,

in turn the mal-informed court my find.

What is this, my re-electionist

prince asks.

Why not, I reply,

with no panic.

I’m the one sacrosanct,

begrudging favors to darkness

and arts that suck.

Aw, shucks, man. I really appreciate

your light fiddling o’ tunes, . . .

and fiddled on I did my sincerity

and did fall laughing at right moments

swapping saintly fortitude for

wealthy magnanimity.

I’m not now famous for nothing.

Am for Him, and

won’t be sleeping again

till blacks and women learn modesty.

Computer Widow Cooking For a Famed Busy Living Editor Always on Vacation

Computer widow cooking for a famed busy living editor on vacation. Unbagging a notebook at a Baguio home, watching as well her profile while playing alone, watching like a friend. Notebook. ‘Twas in a box in an orange bag with his name, amidst logs and more, aflame in an outburst of bookmarked URLs concerning .com yahoos and houynhhnms. Certainly he, while cooing a trill with a feathered renown, though vexed still by a few Wikipedia entries, part of the game, . . . certainly he sees the social isms that measure his blogs as absolutely of the Philippine terrain. Social isms that aren’t charity from heaven, but sweepstakes on our sensitive napes. And now to his office website for a submission. Other bookmarked URLs, other uploads attached like mental caresses under duress of requisites, eruditions. Other webpages’ upstarts, others’ untitled art, all part and parcel of his vocation’s notations—rotations on that desktop in his grandmother’s antique sewing shop. It’s 11:26 ante meridiem. Time to check out lottery winning nos., get some lunch beyond last night’s stale burgers with her omelet, marmalade, but first, to that website for submissions to underling copy editors. Then, finally, he kisses her with a kiss like a blade, . . . a kiss on a gelid nape.

Amidst the Conflict among Nationalists

A semblance of jurisprudent influx

Informed the caricatures, carried on

A lamentable cannibal in us all.

The first time death arrived on our shore

Care of the marine camouflage,

I was not here. Not there, and have

Always been unbattered, uncoaxed,

Though disenfranchised by severities.

Often I’m carousing, bodily bare.

But I’d not declared myself saintly,

Was not sacrosanctly benign, with

My own Pilates. No! But I was

Far an adjunct to any of you,

Far adroit with fearsome flatteries

Unhindered by diplomacy or influence.

And, often, a joy to the mere super-sundry.

While journalists were arguably true within

Bounds and their own rounds of beer,

I’ve only watched TV momentarily,

Absent with absinthe, which consequently

Abetted rankiness toward the devil

Who inhabited my blue sea.

Seven days a week I’ve watched you

And taunted you and fainted with your . . .

‘Til the daylights conquered my insanity.

Then, lo and behold!—the draft, my cold

Craftiness, no longer arbiter to my drool.

Am here now! Mumbling. And screaming

Inside this conflict among our nationalists.

Priest with Lung Cancer

“Indefinite,” he said. “I would certainly not be pressured, no.

No, not be pressured.” Censured, but ventured on, yes. “Oh

     yes, I still can,” he said.

Oh, no, you don’t. Do you take me for a fool, like that stool

     on

The carpet? “Well, baby me any day but not this minute, not

     with this

Thing hanging on my shoulder and the doctor saying he

     wonders

Whether I can really still do this for 30 more weeks. Light the

     wick, I feel weak. . . .

“Someone told me the day I fly will also be on the pilot’s last

     supper, or

A helicopter will take me to heaven, and I will bring with me

Incandescence, phosphorescence, fossil-fuel incense and

     myrrh.

“Of course this is not the last time I’ll ever sing this song—

     come on,

Then, sing along, we are the champions, aren’t we, my

     friends?

And didn’t I keep showing you the end of the rope, the hope

     of love?”

Che Guevara’s Ship Spots Balseros Heading for the Florida Coasts

Drank at the Casa de la Trova, swam around in Hispaniola the

     president

of our corporation, the tortilleria chain. There were refrains

     and key

changes and loud riffs and streams of solos, but the

     synchronicity

was not exactly what I was looking for. The syncopation,

     infusion

of ladles and rhyme, was an unfortunate Canaveral to a

     working class rocket.

Thought I wouldn’t last another minuet. The firing was fast,

I do not even remember who did it. Was it you, Simon?

Was it you, Pedro? “Was it I, Lord? Why do you ask? I was

here when you found me, and now you say you love me?”

Along with the music from Cuba (& Europe), Florida’s food

are adored by its patrons. Roman Catholics, new Republicans.

Cocaine/Heroin Was More Popular than Jesus during the Martial Law

Pocket the billiard ball as I/you sip coffee,

one hand on my cue stick, another palm on a wall,

why do you say I always lean on divinations?

I’m jobless, tactless, tasteless with dubious

religiosity that forgives you, bastion of hope and

ticket to the moon; always swoon when I see

you, even as death crimsons in lively parodied

fathomless depths like unhealthy sub sandwiches, belie

the Beatles were here in ‘66. Did you see John?

I liked someone aloof, another infantile, despite

curmudgeons and pantheons devouring my life. Then

you came along, took me to snort it up. Jesus.

Call Me the Artist Who Doesn’t Know What He’s Doing

I’m late, as ever, but likely will soon see again

her lips, her flattering buses of Biedermeieresque

sycophants, ja?

I’m blasé, as always, populous and closed as Bombay

heavily rained on, flooding my temple with Subhiksha’s

cellophane, hm?

I’d brave it, m’nurse, caress it within infirmaries,

laugh with you, my cant/hubris, you are unperturbed

by debris, haha.

Three hundred girls, Spartans, met me for their mousikē,

told me about a disco where infernos or pseudanthiums

bloom, oh yeah.

I said, bring em on, caress me to heaven and why not?

Insufferable, indomitable, am welterweight enough for

sympathy, oh no!

A Lullaby for UN Worker Lila, Beyond the Blue of the Sky As She Prepares To Sleep in New York

All right, then. Doff the sky-blue helmet to the UN-derbelly

Of the war cynosures, Lil, the Maccoa duck’s bill can wait

For the dawning of a new day—the urge to change the world

Can hang fire. For now, let New York hoods’ sex traffickers

Shake on in their big, un-espied-on obscurities beyond the

First World, ignore basic need for subsidies on corn all over

Resulting in high currency assigned to cheap food. The daily

Massacre against our own poor, subtle genocide, Lil, is not

Without its accompanying lilac protests, Lil, although, Lil,

Sometimes outrageous as anti-Bush shoes . . . but we’ll not

Choose Sylvia Plath and her tulips in Ariel, plotting the pith

While the kids nap. The human development in your dreams,

With mortal delinquents descending like sheep down Amartya

Sen’s hill for an attack from the flanks of the capability well?

Mark time, Lil. Let Sen, seen since on a page on freedom, Lil,

Expanding freedoms, float now above you distributing wealth,

Equitably, sure, along with social services exploring, Lil,

Capacities under our helmets, little sis. O sleep as a bud now.

Tomorrow, window lilacs shall hope anew for sky-blue bliss!

Lullaby (Motherless, Nameless Young Torturer Torturing A Fellow Young African To Sleep)

a derider you say i am. i am

but a ridiculous riddance of

my gods, and a lad at that

with sumptuous filaments of

sinews and prejudices, sample

burr—my courtesy, my infamy.

a fiduciary inquirer you say

i am. and so i would, as usual,

summon gumptions of, bitter

still, hacks and better kisses

of bort. a derider, you say?

i’m but a kitten, with an ax.

on your bloodied face i blurt

out a laugh and loud lisping

for comedy / chancery blues,

and whether seams erupt on

the robe of my lost mama i’d

still laugh, secret whimperer.

a defiler, you seem to know

me to be. i hate your beauty

o hanky panky of a luxuriant

black aberrance. how can you

wondrously, crimson and fine,

still look precocious, dead gazer?

die now, please! close your eyes.

Losing Her Religion

Cram, cram, let the breeders be infidels,

as they always are, anyway. Forever, amen—

In seventeen days Noah shall pass, and boats

big as sunglasses for the Sun won’t moat up

kings’ palaces like cantons insecure from

Wrath. Dust curlicues, unseen, fornicate

with the desert winds devoid of chance, no

one contesting Patriarch Kirill’s samovars.

I was absent for a while, cantankerous as

Mary of Magdala upon lyuelye faythe, the

time passed presenting crocks with myrrh

in Jesus’ tomb. Only to be sacked, shocked

by ambulant quarrels ‘bout an impure womb.

Devotions, lies! Seventeenth day of Passover

month. Cram, cram! The breeders still infidels.

As they always are, now and forever, all men.

The Gentleman from San Francisco’s 401(K)

Action, action, action,

Armchair factions? Lottery

ethos insisted that I note down

wallets, pomegranates, and youth,

the speaker of my house demanded

“sift through and sow magnifying lenses,

devour defenses, battery power insurance”

Being a gook, I wasn’t allowed solemnity.

I asked for indemnities but He was absent,

I called for anti-poet Parra, he was laughing,

I ingrained my thoughts on bra, ob-la-daing,

And I’ve been truant, now like an old hit song,

I was dying for a bathtub, aching for lost loves

Our cellophane bag lunches swallowed the oceans,

but that is not our concern but God’s, always, forever,

so let’s just live, live, live til we die, die, die, die slowly,

in a gooey death refusing to—retired—believe that the

consumerist blame is not on the veiled abundant plastic

fishes murderous in reefs, but on the leeches in a forest

of a capital city’s rivers and old houses and banks and . . .

 

I was happy to see you but you were not so happy

to be born, and though there was the TV, sure,

“I know I can’t hunger or clamor for more,”

throwing your arms round ‘n’ round

in desperation, asking for respite,

for salutations, while I sighed

in my own incarceration

In twelve years

I will be

free,

see

4 160-Character Poems

1. MRT NIGHTS. Such train o thot gts u nwhr. Salary in celery pickld lyk a trying tickle irks u, angers u: pushn & shovn til u, alone, gt yr way. Pray nt bad loan.

2. LAF. Ghost glaciers, far’s i cd c. But in ‘tween, th sea warm lyk a sneez gave th loudst breez. I’m such a wiz? Half o Manila drowned by the sound. Half? A laf.

3. COMA. ‘Twas a comma. Saw her & a karma, calmly car-crashn ovr & ovr til th nytmare woke her 2 a daymare. Rmembers a mate, wreckd lyk a neck downwards. Was wine?

4. HER JAM. And so it did, casually intriguing at first, horribly intimidating at day’s end. Undone, came it did. Then slid, or vice versa, joyous as m’ marmalade.

2008