Aleatory Poems: Poetry & Epiphany

1.   Womb

Her womb is a magic no wonder, life can cast its spell. Her womb speaks of pulling life under the glaring cloth that no man can understand how it became possible if not, real. Her womb is a magic that the world until now caught in amazement that no other spectacle can rightfully endure. Her womb gave birth to the world.

2. Mamang

More than a decade ago, she spent her lonely days wiping dusts and leaves with her rusty wheelbarrow and a broom that once made me believed I can fly with.

She used to tell stories of mermaids in the Pasig River and doves crying crimson blood entailing the apocalypse. While us, both laughing and crying becoming piteous fools as if we are hearing a haunting bedtime story. Not until after seventeen years that how I wish I could fathom then and again those words Mamang sensibly chosen to tell a myth bound to happen not now but l’avenir.

Once, as she recounts her war time experiences, her old gramphone plays some vinyl records at the background. Was it Cole Porter or Sinatra? Until now, foolish as a child, still clueless of the voice but perhaps, it was Armstrong.

One day, Mamang fell from her chair. Her back broke. My recalls of her in pain still haunt me that makes me think (now and then) numerous what ifs. 

More than a decade ago, Mamang passed away. But her wheelbarrow and dusty broom never will.

3.   Fleur

Daffodils dance and all other fleurs that jaunty afternoon in the greenest field where she used to take us for a lunch I believe then exclusive for grilled chicken. She picked her purse, and from there she pulled some papers (I thought those were used receipts). All she had those years, were nominal letters coming from people who helped her bring her children to modest lives she always wanted to.

That afternoon, she cried.

Her eyes filled with tears like stars falling from galaxies longing from memories of people around her whom she expects willl never leave her until her veins run dry and her soul joins the firmament above. 

One day, I visited her. I saw her lying in a hospital bed where machines support her life. (Dit. Dat. Dit. Dat. Dit. Dat. Dash--) Those weren’t Morse codes after all, but I thought that time the first message delivered through it: “What God hath wrought?” I closed the door and walked in my momentum so fast that I barely know where to go.

At home, I found Mama sobbing hard.

I saw my aunt resting in cold tiles. Her eyes are not anymore teary but now closed for a long eternal sleep like old daffodils bowing down to the sun one afternoon. 

4.  Mama

The streets of Sampaloc witnessed her struggle from heavy loads of works to drumbeat her education.

She used to sell plastic bags made from cement sacks in the nearby market going after people to make some coins she would give to Mamang after the sweating toll of the day. Mama, that time, only smiles to her future.

That day she promised to herself that later on she would become a public school teacher. 

Fate was earnest to smile back at her. The struggle of her childhood whims brought her to the streets of Libertad working as kasambahay for a time to make her fortune for living & to fulfill her desire of getting a college degree.

If Mamang tells endtime stories, Mama relates her braving life. Like how, that on their way to PCC in Sta. Mesa to appeal for her lost enrolment form she saw a 500 peso bill folded, weighed by stone beside the railroad track. (Today, whenever I cross that same railroad I always hope to find one). 

Then, her appeal was a lost her pocket won the fate but she was eager to pursue her holy reveries. 

The street of Recto found her dreams resting under infinite piles of books.

Later years were crucial: her Papang died. 

She was caught in the web of religious depression and endless cry longing for her Papang. “Now that he is no longer with us, life will not be that easy. Perils will come day by day.” (Mamang)

She toyed the idea of stopping from school just to help her family in penury but, that idea vanished in her soul for that day she embarked to the tree of fulfilling her life’s worth promise. (No wonder she always reminds us the importance of getting a college degree). 

It was summer of 1978, that her name was called to the stage to receive a diploma bearing her name her dream, her aspiration, her future as the first graduate of the family. 

"The hottest love has the coldest end." -Socrates

You were there. Like stardust ever dancing in the light as if infinity swirls to you. Your existence declines my being. You waived all presences, defying the mnemonics of what qualifies existence.

You were there—not now.

Before, we were strangers looking at some abyss. After, we are strangers excited of what the future holds for both of us. In between, we are still strangers cursing all pains stinging our hearts.

Time inflicts its greatest wound: recollection. Malt ferments. Soul dies. Mind breaks down. Bubbles in beers imploded to every motion of the hand swaying, wishing it never touched you. Dreams stitched to rags given to wipe dusts and rusts. Time betrayed us, then and again. You were there but not now. Time cursed the being. Time stabbed us causing my heart to burn.

If only I can love you without time minding us all.

Atoms fall. They swerve a little, says Epicurus. Repulsion with others creates the world. That repulsion is a lasting encounter.

What holds that philosophy to be true is antimony. What holds us after all is just an illusion.

When I stumble upon old things finding some boxes, I remember you. When I see your picture in an old frame, forgetting becomes a sickness.

Is there a pill that can selectively erase your fading silhouette in my memory? Confession: I took that pill long ago. My mind fabricates immunity.

You were there in the horizon standing, holding an umbrella, ready to swerve from the rain that once made our love so cold and true.

I was there.

Poetry is not a prayer. It is pure heart’s discontent & from there the holiest verses spring like blooming dama de noches in the night fields of dried sultry soil.

Poetry resists. (Like chance ever hating fati foedera).

Prometheus, the insurgent of the lore declared war against metaphysics: “I hate the pack of gods!”

That day, poets sang for old gods & new.

Poetry is chance occurring like a rain during the middle of an intense summer warmth, surprising but desired.

Words give birth to poets-- maniacs of the dying day, prophets of the coming age; howlers of unholy poetics welcoming doom.

As always, let poetry rejoice the tiny death of truth, mourn the birth of tragic lies!

Poetry, indeed, is a noble lie, thusly, a killing spree of Truth.

Like how dementia slowly devours the dusts of anonymous graves.

The universe has to know that one day, it will stop from reeling like an old film in an aged theatre for it needs to die like how it conspired with the stars and other celestials to betray us.

Forget me. Love has to be a bitter drink.

To tell you, you are a magic trick under my hat.

Thought: Future lasts forever. Real: No.

That day, my poetry speaks of your hair and whims. of your eyes burning me within of your lips piercing me cold of your soul to which I rest.

You consumed my existence like an angst I cannot face.

A poet, like Zarathustra warned me, thus he spoke: “Fall in love with your own ruin.”

1.

From the unspeakable truth comes the unbearable silence. All men desire to know, says Aristotle. But what man has to know if mystery seizes him all of a sudden? Mystery provokes anxiety. Mystery invokes the limits of thinking. Mystery that limits even mystery itself.

2.

Reason betrays reason.

3.

Lunatics wander. Wandering in the fields of freedom sans reason. Wandering in the haystack of loneliness. Wandering in the lake of forgetfulness. They mastered the aleatoriness. They dominated what we supposed to dominate—consciousness.

4.

The older Greeks mastered lunacy. For them it was the mystery preceding reason that consipires to create the universe. Chaos. Disordered. Chance. The universe is a lunatic encounter denied of any cogency but of  pure limits of reason alone.

5.

Metis the mother of wisdom will one day bore a child that shall kill Zeus and his cohorts.

6.

The child bears the culmination of what the Camel and the Lion share.

7.

The child will later betray philosophy. That is, his Fate.

8.

History does not repeat itself. People repeats history. People are condemned to repeat it. We are obsessed with this repetition that we fail to recognize our mistakes.

9.

We need to remind ourselves the ever-recurring repetition of the same.

10.

How to unlove you? After all, truths swarm between us in a daybreak of miscalculated fiction that none of us thought would fester in due time.

How to hammer an atom into quarks and charms just to break every piece of what composes you even in my cryptoamnesiac unacknowledged memory.

How to unlove you by the time I am loving you most?

By the time dusts betray the earth & cicadas rise from dust after 17 years to mate and just die.

That evening is like chaos. The next day embarks silence. Soil loosened its body. All that binds us lose consciousness.

(and sadness).   And from there transpires the holiest mustering of the flesh and what it can bare as the sign of the most unholy sacrament weaved in the cloth of desire like an aurora borealis unseen in earth’s dying hour.

The universe is lexical but why we chose to drop all words and let silence take over? 

Atoms do fall. The ground shakes...

I just died yesterday, the day you bid the final farewell the day dusts cursed the ground the day clouds stopped sobbing the day all tulips died because the soil turned black the day the horizon swarmed your figure the day summer turned into winter and yet with no breeze, Or, any promise of its irony.

“There are no cannibals in our tribe. We ate the last one yesterday.” -Eric Santner, Traumatic Revelations: Freud's Moses and the origins of Anti-Semitism

1.

The soil that day was foiled by dripping blood violent chimes of bullets penetrating flesh and bloodcurdling shouts of tormented souls scoured by long lost hope behind the bars of corrupted ideologues and phony politicking whose holy days were forgotten after fading promises to deliver those souls from hell.

That day...

God was sick (Vallejo) God forgets (Dostoevsky).

The Last Man must die (Nietzsche).

Last Men reigned over those soils & their blowing wind shakes the crops where rain missed its chance from falling & the poverty of the living is again festered by maggots of the never-healing wound of greed.

2.

Ask the dusts.

See you in highlands where silence is the scar of ignorance & violence is the putrid of reason.

See you in highlands where in every power there comes the fragility of conscience.

See you in highlands where climate dictates that the last of us are cannibals ready to devour the zombies in dire time of deceit.

To my aunt and all my memories of her

1 It was middle of October, rising noon She was born like bunch of flowers  under the summer sky. So bliss that darkness can no longer bare from chrysanthemums to daffodils from hills to seas the weary mood of humid seeds such pollen grains welcoming waters from clouds investing teardrops  nourishing petals to bloom. 2 Count the days of tormenting pains. From medicinal nozzles of chemic solutions Dilute threads of tissues and nutrients. Incalculable. Unimagined. Uncanny. Cellular death of multiples  crippling the legwork. Stale. 3 How many children you fostered? The same number will cry as the soil misted by tears & flowers keeps on kissing the body that slowly depletes its once forgotten energy as your legs strode a thousand miles winning all people’s heart listening to their voices like flowers blooming in May welcoming newlyweds with high hopes of ever recurring sweet songs pledging an everlasting love or should I say seeing you in that position where you almost kiss the tiles because of decapitated muscles, strength claimed by the Father & eyes solely speaking of body losing affects & mind gulping by squashing cells. I wish that the darling fleur of May can vest you everlasting life to which I can still remember as how you tendered my childish heart. 4 How many children you raised? The same fellows carrying your hands as for they cannot resists

the way you are now

resting in cold tiles. They cannot simply look on how their precious mamang suffers from a pain her sons and daughters cannot figure out or even feel for they wish that they must be the one who languishes most during the time,

their mamang should be happy after years of gaping in the dark like finding a black cat in a dark room to pay her children’s tuition and spend a good summer time in their festive youth. The same summer heating my day, a year ago, someone informed me of your diagnosed fate of which my poetry spoke Irregular, Lifeless, Solitary, but still, hopeful of surviving another day. Here you are, living for a year after that wary news knocking our doorsteps well that day I presumed death exists for if not, who will get one’s life as your daughter said to me death and birth are things we cannot touch for it is only life something we can hold with and make beautiful. Those lines make me sober precise memories of life, birth and death as tireless cycle Buddhist once told ever-repeating, ever-recurring like sober piano notes. However, in a different melodius tone I know you will be going there, woman who fostered children gaping not in the dark anymore but in honest lights of mercy, 5 See you, We will all see each other in thunder in rain &

So long.

To be,

Beating a becoming.

Mongering souls of the being.

To come..

Restless moans of the dew.

The spring of lascivious virtuality

On the imagined-imagery.

On coming, and becoming.

Wet, red and lunatic!

Ejaculate…

The semblance of the phallic!

Quasi-riddle of the climactic end.

To which, face-to-face:

Only talk and chat will surmise,

The endless convulsion of the flesh.

I was killed by her love in all ways she knows. That day, everything died.

The universe went back to its inchoate formless particle. I, there, abandoned in the explosive sky waiting for comets to crush my being.

Sad. None arrived...

Let me tell you one thing:

The past is already forged with deceit but why trust it? Let your body speaks thousand poetry I will let mine be the scar of healing wound for which I am reminded of plastered walls either Michelangelo or Bernini of your body painted in a canvass revealed in the world so exposed after the bombing of Guernica.

The past which you are still a prisoner sad but true, does not exist

If only poems can erase those my desire to write will fire up the earth.

I was with you in those nights you spend with him in the wasted gallows of libidinal insomnia.

First Fact: I forgot you.  Clue: We are doomed to forget our previous lives.

Second Fact: I met you. Clue: Our paths are deemed to cross (again).

I am scared of the world coming into pieces if ever memories rule over the present.

(After knowing Pauline)

The world works in this spectacle. By play of chance, in the most unknown time still, the chance favoured the ultimate meeting of you and me, in this arid desert where life seems to be a probability of comets bulging the gaseous space where you & I are just speck of dust.

Our bodies will soon join the sacred promise.

You & I, by play of chance in the most unexpected time will have to denounce our old faith and believe in what the future has to offer either forget or remember but I know, in all the names of fortunate heavens, you, the lady of committed blushing flowers in the darling buds of my present is a spectacle I must not miss like a comet passing once in a lifetime like you arriving after midnight.

I did love you once. -Hamlet

Light floods the road invisible from the pavement turned into beds of beggars begging for the godly hope.

People plainly pass perennial plot of pentinence. 

Peace tonight is fragile, so fragile that car honks fade, so fragile that tire screeching dies in the night.

Above are stars eaten by smoke.

The father and daughter shared the night with the blanket of stars made of dusts.

(The night so fragile can't hide their stomachs growling)

1.

Clarita, 24 let the night pass under the warmth of coffee and her broken press whose myth died years back but never in memories.

2.

(An old woman passed by with her cane fiddling the asphalt. I can hear her wishes. She wants to die.)

3.

It was Clarita who smiled to all foolishness of childhood. True. It was her way to suck the marrow of life knowing Thoreau or not, from the threads of forgetting & horrors of remembering. 

4.

Her communique falls flat from what she supposed to say for she can't utter a syllable so ironic that she just tend to pretend she never remembers she never cares for all what she need is to let things reveal themselves so apocalyptic that even herself don’t mind when.

5.

(Lovers passed by with their hands swaying, either by gravity or by air)

6.

Her mother tried her luck to pick cherry blossoms. Her father stole her past. Clarita killed them in the vignette of her neurons.

7.

If only she can turn back in time and live like her diary’s wishes Clarita, whose heart pierced by a chance lost will redeem what she has to, & sleep like a child in a dusty bed where the blanket hide her & her universe.

8.

The phone rings. She can’t ignore the line.

9.

She hates the feeling of falling in love like how she hears the phone ringing in the middle of the night where insomniacs finally sleep from a distant snoring of customers barraging like thunders of senseless predicaments and tongue-tied promises.

10.

No one sees the redeemable light That thwarted the foreseeable night. Tickle the ticklish fish That swims to the lighted wish. To courage, or freedom? Seed possession that swims to womb. Invisible walls and slimy road, Survival, yes subsistence woes. The placid moment, the restive act Fumbling the pooh-pooh deadlock One ought to bash, and millions left behind An intimate cohort would mind. How to live in a vanishing world? That perishes to the foot of the forest. When one speaks of mitochondria, then one hears coquettish fold. Three hundred nucleuses wanes Sixty eggs laid by the ewe. Five matches into unity A year or so, from loss to birth would foam. Only facts shudders the fiction, Of me as a killer and a conqueror. I wonder why innocence is me, when my first function is to slay. In order to be one, I should murder some. In order to be some (thing), I should murder one.

1.

I knew it was her who was forced to pay love with a fate she never wanted from the beginning until now, amidst her broken family swarming for her trust and all lovers promised her of truest intentions and yet wasted because who can resist such eyes, the smile that can make a man becomes a child in her mother’s arms and be shy of what the world reveals. 2. She, 23 amidst life decadence deserves to live in all faithful ways I know than in chains where she sees mere shadows of her, and her past that rumbles her mind to trust anyone who promises her bliss.

3.

I knew it was her who was forced to pay love but now, love must pay her back in all years, in all frappes in all chocolate hazes & sultry coffee mixes.

4.