Thursday, September 24, 2009

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.

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

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?

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

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.

Monday, September 21, 2009

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.

Friday, September 18, 2009

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.!”

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

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.

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

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!

Monday, September 14, 2009

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!

Sunday, September 13, 2009

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.”

Saturday, September 12, 2009

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.

Friday, September 11, 2009

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.

Thursday, September 10, 2009

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.

Tuesday, September 8, 2009

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!

Sunday, September 6, 2009

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!

Saturday, September 5, 2009

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.

Wednesday, September 2, 2009

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.

Tuesday, September 1, 2009

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