The Fundamentally Sentimental

How the slow and malicious bleating of cars in this sad lull of peace : the erring notch between dusk and early eve of May, brings back time slender The stars trampling on the way above dangling anglers that slice through the proud distaste and this quietude beyond the gaunt layers of make-shift content Plates moving as the grinding of teeth, breath to breath, a city too near each other, a door full of half-buried nails; there's no room in this weary anguish My plaintive blue crushed in the stropping of blades, asleep in the encounter, clawing its way away and how I ran away from myself -- Full of awry justifications, verity confronted with allusions; it's the way of the knife cold steel shining against the back of the moon and the hilt steadfast as it make blood roses bloom And it arrives again like forgiveness stolen in the caprice of jealousy we all found and empty room and in an empty room everything aches.

Now that I am older, but no wiser, enveloped in a resolute obstinacy against and for the people around me and their wrinkled smiles of older vicissitudes, I vowed not to talk of death lightly But tonight I am consumed by the single trajectory of lines even the blue snakes slithering at the back of my hands come to its end I crashed my small body in cul-de-sacs I intricately placed on each road, to incarcerate the self, to stop the fatal pivots of premature ruptures; but between my dissidence and hope for a leap beyond the blueness of the world, I yonder for escape I think of myself as an honest man An earnest man of translucence too much maybe - blind transparency groping for layers in this vortex of finitude I tend to consume the wholeness of events; meaning, I don't see myself fit for fighting, for reason, for forgiveness and all the other tender promises of this stone world -- a noncommittal truth to truth I know that the one time I will be honest is when there's nothing left to break and sometimes, like tonight, I see the black cat lift its paws reaching for me lifting my heaviness, bendable vanity, I can finally wish for it Forlorn and graceful collecting all grace for the leap I will reach for each of you and you will see my hands and I will touch you and I will fragment you a little and in the narrow spaces from where slivers fall I'll fit, hopefully but I guess there's no way of knowing I have canticles written for faces I learned to imbricate and I will recite them religiously, piously and without clemence and apologize for my wings of wax and for always scathing this demanding faith placed upon my quiet despair and spider house Pretending that my centrifuge is an isolated, untarnished soul wears me out to the capillaries, when I have never seen my self worth when I do not exhaust my machinations, when I do bot harrow for ropes that pulls you closer The leap - the invoilability of this equipoise, this vertical twilight singing of rain, is it all a vaccination to purge the fretful wish into courage, into this fragile oblivion? The black cat purr unto the tempest of the evening lights and I do not resist to the idleness The words will stop forming and the cinders will leave no evidence, not one shadow will stagger when I commit to this sinful heaven, now that I'm older hard to bend, the days slower closer, farther, mercy is in the haste; even for a romantic leap, too late.

Maybe the time will come when the cicadas squandering their life in the perpetual beating of their wings, signaling for some succor in this hapless stupor, resort to some supercilious relinquish. Maybe the recalcitrance will come to the end of its tether, the adamantine purgatory comes to seek for the end of the whiteness, the pallisades will drop asunder and little by little, the convoluted fight within oneself ends. Maybe, but maybe not today.

It is when the world stood still that I hear the weary and frangible whimper of these faithful splinters. The same sound, two or three years ago, a deeply seeded echolalia. No less fervent, no less melodious, no less stark from ambiguity. What do I cry for? The faithful sky still trying to renew its unquestionable blue. The quietude of this impregnable dwelling vying to moor itself without contention. The light of the day trying to esape the lattice of dream, purging itself from the conflagrations of self-imposed rue and guilt, burning the slimmest shadow in its hapless strife. The phallanx of clouds in Bulacan moves lackadaisically, leaving the horizon almost without notice, and after some time in the infinitesimal waltz of the earth, the improbable vastness of the sky is left vacant. Stripped off of the meaning we scour from the debris of a tempest that never looked below us. An emptiness so full to the brim, its treacle falling with the sun rays with a naked melancholia over the finitude that is tired, but not submissive, of denial. This self-consumption and mordant expectancy for satiation against entropy; this fight, is the grace from our armoured harangues, is the continuity of the inevitable end, is everything.

Nothing Else To Be Done I woke up to an antebellum without a memory of the war all things still, trying to last one more penultimate day after another My face, ravaged by a menagerie of fangs and talons querulously gnawing at the bones of contention, a loveless hysteria, a gossamer of flux, fighting and resisting at gravity's sure luck I let the squall go on waitng for the torpid to find the wounds deeper than the evanescence of the dusk and the first howl signal From my guts, I ripped an omniscient God and other gray divinities who prefers the drone of canticles, giving up the brevity trapped between sunset locked arms for the austere akimbo they sometimes call strength, or endurance, or numbness in ignorance A simulacre of life, dipping in the Bulacan horizon streaks of sad colors and the perpetual beating of cicada wings sending forth a garrulous message in a decible that I cannot understand but to me, it sounds like losing and losing sounds like peace and peace means looking forward to softer vespers, I listen The umbrage of vicissitude is a carousel spinning to its endless calliope its beggining and end misconstrued as the sustenance, as the meaning, centrifuging a desolate circle stride after stride, growing less weary of the sullen load of age more frangible than yesterday, slowly chipping ang breaking away and still circling past time, past what matters, dissloving in the past I am trapped in a wasteland a chasm born amidst the mountains of promises and sunrises around me, a hole left to remain as it is as the world progress in forgiveness and second chances, where the nightbirds scavenge for salvation, the fray between my illusory happiness and my veritable lack of passion always eating its own skin, and I know, succumbing to the untouchable light that there's nothing else to be done My grace is in keeping myself gazing as these walls around me rise - walls of people I implore in a dream and veer away from in daylight; my grace is keeping myself in tact all to myself, all to the palapable absence to the natural accord of solitude Nothing else needs to be done.

I am always a taut wire. I am always refuting or always hapless. I always stride as if I have the left and the right and that I am equally attracted and repelled by both poles. I am always resisting, always contesting, always avoiding confrontations. The truth is, I need to be a taut wire. I am my mind's gossamer. I am dull as a knife never unsheathed. I am the halcyon little steps, lost in the mother city of vaudeville noise. I am always too whelmed, always groveling for fixations, always running away from my lust. The truth is, I wake up in the middle of the night gasping for air. I am a bastion but of what's inside. I am incarceration, I am pride. I am the firefly wading through the dark in search of fire. I still weep, I still bask on hopeful thoughts and I still choose to quell all of this; because the truth is, I know everything that I want and I am not ready to want them.

It's an ambuscade. A luckless, loveless fight. It's a man whose letters from home are drenched in blood, limited bullets on his pistol, biting the bullet with his only memorized Catholic prayer. It's a supressed caterwaul of a wounded hope trapped in the midst of mocking mountains. It's a religious, dearth, and undying whistle from the quelled flames. It's a mar in the veneer you keep fingering; a cicatrix that wouldn't heal and a pain that wouldn't feel.

Walang bahid ng bantulot hindi lumulusong at hindi umaahon patuloy at nananatili sa purok gulod ng murang panahon Katalik ang lungkot na patakas kung sumiping sa mainit na gabi ay may baong malamig na hamog, nililigaw ang sarili sa sarili At sa panaginip ay inuusig ang katawan ay nakabigkis umuundayon sa kahabaan ng kaliwa, sa kahabaan ng kanan, hindi makapili hanggang sumuko na sa paanan ng hilahil Hanggang sa ang mga ilaw mula sa maamong distansya ay sumayaw kagaya ng balaraw na humihiwa sa bawat dapit hapon malungkot ngunit hindi kailangang tumangis Dahil ganito palagi sa hangganan Marahan Sapagkat gapok na ang balat ngunit walang nasa ilalim, walang simula o katapusan - meron lamanag sirkulong paulit-ulit, akyat babang hagdanan.

The immensity of the world keeps me questioning reality as opposed to the slow consummation of my exclusive experiences. These existences of reality altering each other like the gears of the clock, and while I cannot understand, I resist and pacify, my own existence subjugated to the limbo of ignorance and confusion. If the world and I should cease from each other, I will lift my hands in relief, finally fare forward from this incarceration.

Slowly, with the caution of a fractured bone harboring the strentgh to break, lusting for slivers and separations, and tranquility in demarcations running with briny streams I decline this interpolation of starling footsteps, dancing in circles inebriated tempo, sometimes higher than the throne of gods while the leaves are falling past autumn in abundance below our sporadic shuffling It's coming back from oblivion into the shadeless canopy of dreams, marauding with fresh abrasions from erased cicatrix, Coming back, like a memorized song tracing lines at the back of our hands, Coming back, like a seamstress hemming the sea into her motherly hope Please, do not change me please do not mortify the scars in these beautiful ways; by giving me ears, what do we make out of old symphonies forgotten with the soil tossed over dirges? Look at this sullen age and tell me we're not old as I reel from glossy pages the contour of faces I'd die to touch Look at the empty spaces caved inside out while light's away entropied too elaborately - the end.

Dearest Kafka, I am always fighting against my ignorance, mostly, with the advantage of ignorance and I am inclined to see, in the straightforward abstraction of your evoking words, or rather I chose to see, that you do too. But the world always sees us as an irrefutable, egotistical maniac, who always resist against plaintive answers. Whoever believes in answers before the questions are asked; before the argument is pleaded? Sometimes I do not want to care anymore. Often times. I wonder how you put up so many fights, so many questions, smashing your confused but obstinate head, wall to wall. Sometimes, I choose not to care anymore. Often times. I wish I had more of your spirit and faith, more your of doubt and furious vexation, that the world always sees otherwise - as lack of faith and spirit, just because you decided to go against readily presented answers and accustomed states, and find the right questions that should reel the answers. I envy that you are not afraid to look for your answers even if it means questioning more answers. It seems to me that it fuels you to ask further, to go further. Always resisting - a bulwark bastion lancing towards the gates of heavens where no one dares to knock. God, you're dead and you probably don't know. Regards from the living, Norman

I have, for the best times of my life, been sitting at the back seat. I watched the world unravel - strings of hope and sapid dream-like awakening recoil, from the backseat, over shoulders that seemed to carry with them a sunshine no one has lee against with. A sunshine I have not seen in any sky, a light that the sun cannot evoke alone. Always at the backseat, and suddenly, as the drive comes to its full and inexorable consummation, I found myself alone; my eyes, haplessly dependent to the frames of shoulders that seemed to illuminate hesitancies and obfuscations, cannot see through the fog that shrouds itself a sobriquet to a fragile world. I watched the world I came to love recede before my eyes. Going backwards. Going backwards. Going far beyond backwards. Reeling. My pitiful, fearful self does not know how to drive. As if I my bones weren't carrying the flesh attached to it and the soul hanging by its little seives. As if my consequence depends on the consequences of my expectant faith to the consequences I received from others. Now, I drive on. After I came to halt when going backwards doesn't seem to lead to a place of beggining again; I taught myself to drive; taught my shoulders to carry. And it has to be against the lane. Inevitably, by consequence or by some absurd play of strings, it has to be against the lane. The lane that made and consume me. Inevitably. Collission comes, and, naturally, I have averted. Resolute to continue my drive, I checked my compass. It may take time to find where to go, but there is no time any longer than the time spent at the backseat.

My irrefutable constitution has always been myself as solitary indvidual of unfettered connection from the world. A bloated egotist, a self-sucking fuck, a stoic solipsist; anything but a broken dog sleuthing for company. Anything but with anyone.

I can almost hear the footsteps climbing down the unused staircase disturbing the clandestine and the ghost frogotten I can almost see you there letting the farce take you A rivulet streaming with the sweat on your temple Almost hear the little splinters break in the nostalgia this firedrill singed  inside you Of vicarious denials in easy conscience, laughing cherubs from a heaven of pretentious questions, of bulwark dispositions scathed on the veneer to deep in the crevices of fearful isolation Of long bus rides to ease, to appease, the oblivion of whittling daggers that strops on your mauve skin every day, relentlessly and faithfully but you never let them touch the tender things Of every fulcrum in a calculated pivot swaying to counter what clocks you have - easy conscience, cussing cherubs a dimple to substitute a missing tooth a smile with no bite I guess we both awakened to the crying lightning in the middle of summer, smoke like hands of benediction on our throat and April is losing to these separate capitulations and all of these I made inside my head Now, I am falling back to sleep less awake this time swimming through the sibilant silence of your sanctum Did it really happen? Did it rain last night? The world so dry a bone the hounds wouldn’t suck Passing like a dream wrathful lances of rain enveloped in the irony of ending and beginning Now I pry behind these gentle suffocation hopeless for air it doesn’t hurt to breathe easy in the flames While a day might be a map and the next a fist of mountains, A day moored to stones of the silent earth, the next in endless transitions I caught myself always sliding in the window of your  far off and soundless sleep I luster like the remnants of a star you wished for because it doesn’t hurt what always does