Ruskin’s Pathetic Fallacies for a Garden City

 

“I wonder mightily what sort of creature I should have turned out, if instead of the distracting and useless pain, I had had the joy of approved love, and the untellable, incalculable motive of its sympathy and praise. It seems to me such things are not allowed in the world. The men capable of the highest imaginative passion are always on fiery waves by it.”

—John Ruskin

 

Look, yellow-blue leaves! tumbling athletically
Downward without a parent. Typhoon’s giving

Them a dose, a treatment, and a last beating, as
I watch the play bemused, before the finale—

In heaven I can now see plant and man created
Equal, Gethsemane then, a garden. But that day

We clung to roots. Looked for our Asian lands of
Fading spaces and food. Ruskin thinking too much?

Ruskin, no doubt, was a city boy. So, we said, talk
To the leaves now; they looked often at me like

I owed them a poem. See, one day, my ill Wisdom
Did whisper to me: “would you want to buy some

Vegetables or would you rather farm yourself?
Well, even grasses need songs, so to forget their

Dream of walkin’ to Desertia.” I said, ach, my Sir,
Only snakes hide in grasses! Only fools speak

To bushes. “O okay, okay. So that’ll be your epi-
Taph, I don’t mind.” He closed a book of poems.

—2 Jan. - 7 Nov. 1986

Home-front

His neighbor threw him a cellophane bag o’ large fish innards, 
     his dog surveyed the treasure.
He started smelling it and then he saw it. His other neighbor 
Had a new stereo set from Saudi Arabia and it played a load 
     of love songs loud for the 
Whole subdivision to divine—So he sat at his 2nd-hand PC
     with a dirt-cheap CD drive
And played his own brand of intelligentsia rock, but another
     neighbor’s jeepney parked right 
In front of his house with its own splendid car stereo, its reply-
     sound of quick cymbals and drums
Transforming the subdivision into a sophisticated community.

This was a day in the democratic life of the poet from his
     imagined tower, from where he
Wondered when a neighbor’s jeepney parked at his window
     won’t fume a morning rage of
Diesel smell on his breakfast, from where he thought of
     emigrating to lands where the people
Play not their properties at each other, morning lands where
     maybe people won’t spit at complaints.

We May Come Like Water*

Go after a “big fish” yet still live/die with Marcos’
     democracy, 
That’d be like keeping the Philippines in touch with the world
     banks 
Now, as then, and well into the greyest future: no hope, no
     further hope?

There are our “progressive” telecommunications companies
     praying a
Late Hail Mary from a diaspora. But you know the
     plutocracy,
Right? The statesmen-merchants for leaders keeping the
     Philippines

In touch with the aid, and then Vatican? What banks? What
     touch? And
What’s the point of all this fasting for mother Earth? Nah—
     indiscriminate
Logging, mining, labor exploitation, manufacture of poverty,
     now the

Eternal clichés, . . . so let them reign forever, let them end her
     like used-up
Sand mines at a bitch beach. And let us ourselves rot for now,
     go and bleed
Fear. Like, sure, okay, let help stalk the provinces while being
     wary of the

Red-baiting as you hop from station to station, slowly onto a
     platform of
Another perpetual agony that we can again exchange jokes
     over, talking
About the horror of ghost roads, the ultimate political and
     economic joys

We all are familiar with, can relate to, through the Marcoses
     in us and
With us, US, China, forever flaunting telecommunion lines
     direct to
Our religious palaces, part of the rest of their providential
     world—

Mythological America, God-building China, in whom our
     palaces trust
Their profits (dangerous though a superpower might be
     should it lose
Its G8+5 seat). Then, for a long time to come, let’s push our
     women to

Look up to Mammon’s priests circling the scraped skies with
     blade-carrying
Penises, like eagles from a monastery, laugh against Marxist
     productions
Of judgments now on trial, oh crucified like a suspected
     liberation

Theologian, gone after, their/our big fish of neoliberal poetic
     justice as
Juried by erring militarized personnel who shall inherit forests
     and beaches
As their temporary heaven, until we, the resilient, learn to
     gush out:

Like water, flood their “I have the floor”s with an undeniable
     change of climate.

—1999-2007

—*This alludes to martial artist and film icon Bruce Lee’s statements describing the fluidity of his Wing Chun-inspired kung fu style, jeet kune do, and philosophical approach. Wing Chun would usually simply mean extreme subtlety in approach, as in embracing the grace of the Yin to service the Yang strength of attack. Jackie Chan’s “drunken snake style” can be considered another development from this style.

Two Ghostly Jobs

—for Josephine Patrick*

The restaurant’s full of people. Wow 
I’m gonna enjoy this, I say to myself. 
But I wish you were here to attend your 
Own death anniversary party: Ghastly! 
It’s full of people who really know your 
Father who’s really the celebrity here, 
You weren’t considered society like 
Your father. He still has his factory.

You go work at that factory now you’ll
See how he’s treating us all today, now that
You’re gone, now that nobody’s running 
Our cause, but why did you ever have to
Get smashed by unknown persons at your 
Pop’s factory? You had this restaurant.

—*Josephine Patrick became the companion of the Filipino American fiction writer and unionist Carlos Bulosan. This poem is not about her as much as it is about what her persona in the fictional picture represents as a native daughter of neoliberal America.8

A Materialist Dialectic (An Americanized Foreword)

Taking away your
                                 silver dower,
Show me now the sandwiches.
Show me
                   working electricity.

And tell me no fantasy
                                        lurking
In the factual, some magical
          geometry. For

Is there any way to avoid, escape
          our arrival
At the knowledge that we
          are all each
                              a composite of atoms

That will later change into another?

We’re . . .
          are living in the finest

Hours, showing us
All the flowers,
Showing us
All these structures . . .

Telling us all energy
Functions with a marginal
Dependency—i.e., in wavering
Religiosities/
                    And is there—

Are there really ways of enhancing . . .
Is there any truth in “romance” or
Or . . . no survival really
From the knowledge

That we
                are all

Each a composite of atoms
That’ll later turn into another!

   Well, dowry-giver, . . . you gave me fine containers of wine
        and meat.
     Then we changed cars to one with another color:
          and how can I forget the quest of-
               of making it through

                                        the present way of Asian dragons?

               where Mechanics, Science, and other labels,

                                 have still only

                                 gone as far

                                 as one’s

                                 desire

                                 could

                                 see.

—23 May 1988

Paramaterial Dialectics

1. All Inner Walks are Outdoor Walks

A pedantic paradox, even this corporeal
Thing, a crystal ball you hold in your hand.
Though theoretical is weighed, considered
As a compass to a pole treasure for Mani.

“Badness!”—you laugh; I say, is it not
Objectified, like the wanted man without
Whom we’d be left wanting, mere wanton
Vandals set free outside example boxes?

The invisible good is here, we believe.

2. Immaterial Dialectic

Immaterial, not. By itself is already
contentious, for conflicts have materiel.

3. How

What does it matter?
Is it matter or what?
Where? How’s it made?
And, really, as what?

4. Why, You Say

Why? ‘Cause the poorest
Questions, asking proofs
Of existence, or of death-
Proof qualities, are already
Matters of life and passing.

5. Behind the Skulls

Beyond the mechanical, neuroscientific poetry.
Beyond political realities, utopia, fantasy,
Where each ghost makes cups and plates float,
Upholding boredom with sheer materiality. 

6. Therefore, Paramaterial

Material argument, not purely.
Immaterial, neither. Each of these
words, these poems, is begging for

proof, but of horror! Or beauty!
The significance of which begging
is in its calling upon a city of gods.

—April 2010

Alternative Prosaicnesses

In spite of the ongoing Congressional investigations over sub-standard dikes and national ghost projects and so on, . . . today I am still starting the blog-posting of my oldest poems, opening with the virtual-last-page piece "Alternative Prosaicnesses" from my first virtual poetry collection eponymously titled Alternative Prosaicnesses, a collection first self-published online in 1999 and re-published (again exclusively online) in 2009 under the same title but containing only the first half of it. As an online book, both collections were made available for free. I am therefore making it available for free reading again today, returning the collection online, one refurbished poem at a time. Without further ado, here is that virtual book's virtual-last-page poem, which was added to the collection as a title piece in 2013:

Alternative Prosaicnesses

I’ll lay it all down like a Proustian fountain sprout
from an involuntary spring of spontaneity, however
the lines shape themselves from Mondrianesque
atria.
Each leap
will welcome wanton jeers from purists and precisians,
them there partying with their bias, like stockbrokers
and fiscal polygyny, oh bulbous am I with my helium.

Every story that pours out of the woodwork is sweat
of some purple prose, fruitage to rococo buffs and
baroque bulls, jazz to the fanciful, puzzle to pedants,

putrid nonsense to your legalese or journalese or . . .
Have you heard from Helen? Has she phoned us
yet from Troy? So do I digress, as is my wont, . . .

Worm. That’s me. Call me Proem or Pee. But do not
make the mistake of thinking me dull or dodo-esque,
being Mondrianesque in my prolificacy or industry.

In the end I’m only like you, who tend to go round and
round in a calculus of thought that may never come full
circle to a halt like you’d hope for. But that’s the idea.

I’m essaying points not to extend your agony, sorry,
but to apprise you, prosaically but briefly, of the reality
of the situation, these abject objects’ objecting to our

contemplating in words gods. That Helen? I’ll take it.

— February 2013