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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