license

this much i remember: i cried in my dream last night. that lusty bursting into tears that comes after one, at last, has given oneself license to let go of something inessential.

only thing is that i don't remember what i dreamed of. and i am shamed by this.

at breakfast, the steam from my cup of coffee tickled my face and, perhaps, my resolve, too. this is to fulfill my strange sense of the fitness of things. no shame this time, i am making up my dream.

i believe last night, i dreamed some squall stranded me behind an island not unlike the one i grew up in. but the gravelly beach i was splayed in, like a japanese zen garden, was raked fastidiously. however, no severe, meditational, horizontal lines here. the invisible raker grooved the gravel in undulating, almost labyrinthine, eddies.

i decided to stalk the mysterious gardener do his thing. through the day, he didn't appear. when finally the moon showed its flame-white face in the onyx sky, a giant eel heaved out of the advancing ripples and danced its dance on the gravel.

i leapt out from behind the wall of beach hay i was hiding in and dove for the writhing gardener. at one time, i believe, i got hold of it in my palms. it felt like purging out water from a soaked pony tail.

and then, it just released itself out of my grip and ribboned back into the sea the way the steam of my fast staling coffee willfully tapers off in unsnatchable tendrils to nowhere.

 

midnight with no pain

so, the strange man has a name, after all. and it's stranger than i thought it would be. something to do with a flatbottomed jar used in chemistry. his father, he said, used to be a teaching assistant-or was it a janitor?-in a middle school science class.

after a weekend of being convinced that i was appalled by the strange charm of this man, this morning, i just decided to go to that public library two short bus rides from my place. beside the bloated building that is the library is the row of slim fronted stores, mostly foodshops, where in one of them generic glass-paneled establishments, the strangely named man works. soon enough, he walked into the library. it was not lunch break yet.

talking to him again for that short time-he needed to get back to his shift before his super beeped him-i let go of my desire to understand the snappy crackle of his hold over me.

i took the bus home, seated myself a seat away from a mother and her nervy toddler and, to liberally reword keats, just ceased upon my midnight of desire with no pain. the mother was indifferent to her son rummaging noisily through their plastic bags of grocery hogging the rest of the seats in our row.

i think i'm beginning to understand strangeness. it is a mother making no fuss of her child who enjoys only the mealy and saccharin sweet flesh of overripe melons picked in the garden in the last days of august.


 

long sigh

i wake up to an angry stream of jimmy hendrix guitar riffs on L's satellite radio. it is sunday, late afternoon. my back is wet against the leather seat of his car. we park under whitestone bridge. the east river is a silver blur ahead of us.

"since when do you listen to hendrix?" i ask L. he smirks and says welcome back. "really now?" i persist. he ignores me and goes on headbanging and, when he thinks i go back to doze off, some air guitaring.

around us, the trees are still full of day. and when the breeze comes, the leaves rustle. i am reminded of childhood afternoons when mother and her female friends never let me in to a room where they just sat and talked - whispered, really - of husbands cheating.

later, a stubborn patch of clouds covers the sun and blurs the blue of the sky. i see L staring hard at the silent river. he looks like a prophet at a loss for words, unable to divine things. i dismiss the thought that L could have known that the strange man i've been seeing is, too, a hendrix fan.

we stay there, hardly talking, until the sunset starts to shine like a moon. to our right, a man by the bank, continues to fish. when he casts a fly, a long sigh susurrates in the air.

 

on the road (3 tanka)

loyal

L is all magic
with the wheel. the big show-off.
the car jerks and jolts
at the light flick of his wrist-
loyal chrome-and-steel mistress.

lulled

the streets are yawning,
lulled by the whiff of quick rain.
the sun seems to doze
in the trees by the park's edge
where the Strange Man daily jogs.


in the mirror

clouds rolled in from east
and the blue sky cracked in two.
as we drove along,
lightning shot out in keen arcs.
my face merge with the shadows.


 

top down

the morning shudders to life with L ringing me. the sun slants in through the shades and fondles my startled body. i roll away from the light as if someone unable to respond to someone waiting for answers.

L says he's about ten minutes away from my place. we are going for a drive somewhere, some place i did not catch. the light from the window seems to rob L's voice of dimension and renders it flat as in a message left in a machine.

suddenly, the smell of the strange man still lingering on my pillows slams on my senses. it's as if my bed, for the past three days, has been a planet independent unto itself, disdaining all knowledge of earthly time. i jump out of bed and sprays my cologne thick against the linens. the jet bounces from the sheets and curls, like temple incense, in wispy tendrils towards the light.

i am already at the curbside when L veers into my street. he is easy with his smile the way the light bounces off his hair. the top of his car is down and i imagine us scudding through the interstate in a symphony of him incoherently screaming, the convertible gears grinding and brakes screaming while i, grim-lipped against the wind.



 

the prodigal

there is just no getting used to coughing. the body is disgusted. with something strange. the lungs, like the leviathan, have got to do its work - expel jonah, expectorate phlegm.

the world is a beautiful place to be born into, the poet lawrence ferlinghetti said, if you don't mind happiness. my system, however, is not wired for happiness, i suppose. every time, happiness turns up in my vestibule, i always seem to chase it away like a cantankerous woman brandishing a brittle birch broom.

i feel like the prodigal son now - sick and scabbed with unmendable sorrows.

i don't expect forgiveness when i grovel back to the dust at L's feet after squandering this good fortune far away in the sweetly sinister land of this strange man. no feast in my deplorable honor of what was lost and irretrievable.

 

the cough

and just like that, the cough, unproductive and wracking, came. haven't been out lately. no big crowds. no nothing.

there's just no accounting for it. and so with the sudden afternoon shower, another earthquake in japan, a plane crash in peru, even the muted sunshine in this late summer day, and this unshakable attraction to this man.

so even if it's still day, i take this night cough elixir. to make me sleep. perhaps, to rid myself of myself.

but even in my sleep, i hear this man's breath against the small of my back. and my entire body convulses. or is it from my cough?

my poor body. i don't know how long it can still take it. it has done so much feeling - the oppressive obsession to see the littlest of things, the kick of strong coffee served like hemlock in little cups, the febrile hotness of my cheek every time i speak with this man on the phone.

 

easy

this man still hogs my bed. it's almost eight in the morning. i open my window and a draft smells of ripening summer leaves.

this man curls away from the light, his spine as perfect a curve as the rim of the sun. he groans. something like too soon. a cough erupts from my chest. he turns around and asks "you okay?" i nod and tell him it's time to leave.

when he's done with his morning things, he asks for the nearest subway. a short bus ride to ___, i tell him. "oh, that easy," he replies.

if only things were that easy, i think to myself. but what if it were?

what if all it takes for him to get me off his mind is to lock hands with me at my door in that ghetto handshake he learned me at the bar? what if all it takes for me to shake him off my system now is simply to imagine him swipe his metrocard at the turnstile and meld away in the heaving subway crowd?

 

responsible

it's four something in the morning and i'm up. the windows, still curtained with night. and i'm scrubbing the sink.

on the wall, my phone blinks. i remember van gogh. how terrible yellow is! L has called twice, no, thrice last night.

and i feel like writing. anything. a letter to mama. an email to a friend who lost his newspaper job in manila. who was it who said that one writes to shake off an unbearable weight?

"what are you doing?" this man's voice, like the bilging light, seeps slowly out of my room. i walk over to the foot of the bed. such exhilaration, to notice his toes. they are breathless on the crushed pillows.

i tell him "be right back" and tiptoe back to the sink. i tear a piece of paper towel and wipe off the constellation of wet stars glistening on the counter top. i feel responsible for the coming of dawn and the end of night.

 

wake her, fuck her

on his 90th birthday, the columnist-protagonist of gabriel garcia marquez' latest novella "decided to give (him)self a gift of one night of crazy love with an adolescent virgen." then shit happens. transcendent shit.

the sleeping girl fails to be roused and the nonagenarian asshole of a hero falls for her, visiting her night after night in all her sleeping beauty splendor. "wake her, fuck her brains out with that burro's cock the devil gave you," another whore advised our hero.

it's always like this for me. the sweetest point of reading a good story is the coming to that shadowy cognition that i might have been told of this already at some other time. like realizing, after coitus, that i have already slept, perhaps, with this strange man splayed sweating in my bed.

a strange poem i have a vague recollection of starts out something like i will die in some beautiful city, paris, i believe, on a misty-is it?-or rainy day, on some day i can already remember.

this is where great stories sleep. somewhere around unrecoverable memories of death foretold and of the sweetest love savored only in the dark, witnessed only by solitude, and the rain, perhaps.

 

oh, oh, i forgot to tell you

the shakespeare guy, the one who came in late for the two gents of verona, called me up yesterday. oh, i forgot to tell you (8/18/05 post) that i gave him my number. why? well, he asked for it. and yesterday, he asked to see me.

i didn't tell him i'm sorta seeing somebody. i just told him i couldn't see him because i'd be hanging at this used bookstore in lower east at around two in the afternoon. he said "oh" like he's dense (which i think he is just playing) and i chirped "alrighty then" like i'm real ditsy (who knows).

and so he was there at the bookstore by the time i got there, perusing on a well thumbed copy of canto general by neruda. he squinted at the pages like he was questioning line for line the canonical status of the chilean poet.

so, i had to say hi to him. and he stuck his hand out first with the air of someone who had already done his part and expected the other guy--that'd be me--to fill up the rest, ice breakers, smiles, and all. all i did was shake his hand back. he smiled, without saying a word, like he met someone of his ilk.

later, my phone rang and it was L. i ignored it and i saw the shakespeare guy smiled his smile again. then, we went outside to check on the racks of really cheap books. hemmed in between a book on post-partum depression and a romance was a graphic novel on a girl growing up in some suburban hell.

meanwhile, a courier passed by, almost running, and had a hard time wrangling in this raging bloom of balloons. their shining sides are so bare i could write dialogue lines on them. whatever i want to. like i'm starting to write a new thread for some really flighty comics.



 

yo, yo, yo

"but why?" i asked her. this after she told me she was flying to the philippines tuesday. she, being this always sharply dressed african-american osteopath who is preternaturally attuned to what's hip. she just aced her residency in our hospital thus, this gift of an extensive asian travel from her parents who made good at microsoft. a tad earnest though, she was tone deaf to the wryness in my humor.

"i only have a day in manila," she said. she'll spend more rubber time in the lazy mekong delta. "where should i go," she asked, "to get it?" "get what?" i asked back. she said, "you know, of being true philippine?" i find it charming of her not to learn yet that the nurses she worked with in the past year prefer to be called filipino than philippine. sounds too close to philistine, perhaps.

told her to go to quiapo. "wow, is that the soul capital?" she asked. i nodded earnestly. a kababayan who overheard our conversation refused to contain her snort. later, i thought of paging her to tell her that was all a joke. but i didn't. and i now wish that this doctor have not asked another philippine for a second opinion.

for i wouldn't want to rob her of the chance to be blown away by a typhoon of sounds as soon as she gets off her temperature controlled cab in quiapo. i want her to hear a muezzin calling for midnoon prayers from the grand mosque just an earshot away from a catholic cathedral that shelters a mute black christ which is just blocks away from the dozens of confucian temples filled with chanting monks in chinatown. i want her heartbeat to fibrillate to the sounds of hard rock, rap, r & b, sappy pinoy pop songs, movie soundtracks blaring from the giant sound systems of the purveyors of pirated cds and dvds. i want her to hear the laughter of the jeepney honks, the familiar earnestness of videoke singers, the cough of a 12-year old boy smoking on the sly some of the contraband cigarettes he is hawking. i want her to listen to a mangy street kid, who seeing his first black person yell at her, "yo, yo, yo," thinking all black folks talk in jay-z and 50-cent rap. i want her to ask him what's his name and then listen to him singsonging sweetly "yo, yo, filipino, yo."

 

advice to a girl

waiting for the afternoon downpour to let up, a friend and i ran into a bar nearest our bus stop. after each ordering the happy hour special, we saw this young girl nursing herself to a tall stein of untouched beer. in the cave light of the bar, we could clearly see tears smearing her cheeks. we drank our cocktails in deferential silence.

halfway through my drink, the girl, in an unflattering t-shirt printed with happy cows grazing, got up and ambled to the ladies' room. i joked to my friend that as a good samaritan, i should leave the lady a note, say, a line from sara teasdale's advice to a girl: "no one worth possessing can be quite possessed."

"you don't know what she's sad about," my friend said. i nodded and that was that.

on her way back, the girl looked neither young, nor angry. she looked-and the first words that came to me were-ripe and relieved.

i imagined her sitting, still skirted, on the dingy bathroom bowl before she went back to the bar. then like a birthing cow, the great weight of her woe heaved out of her. and then instead of licking at the wet thing on floor, this messy thing she had long tried to possess inside her, she just looked at it wobbling at first, then limping, and finally trotting away from her.


 

interesting

got up real early yesterday to queue for free shakespeare in the park tickets. saw this woman in front of me circling select train schedules in a eurail guidebook. suddenly show-offy, told her i backpacked around europe years ago. she was unmoved. asked me instead, "met anyone interesting?" was stumped.

remembered the on-time, antiseptic train rides, the neatly ripped museum tickets, glossy pictures of spotless, unpeopled streets. remembered being in europe and thinking all things not of europe.

that night, during the show (a musical adaptation of shakes' ramshackle five-act, first play "two gentlemen of verona"), the woman sat five rows down from me. thought saw her wince when the hunky valentine yielded his beloved, silvia, to his best friend proteus, a hint, perhaps, at his latent homoerotic desires.

thought of coming up to the woman during the break. on my way down, a latecomer asked me for help finding his seat. looked around for ushers but they were all gone taking breaks. his seat was the empty one beside mine.

 

warm dreams

i must have dozed off for a while because at about four, i wake up to the roar of the rain and this piercing giggle from a little girl. i look out of the window and there she is, drenched, her arms raised, like she is talking to the wet air or declaiming or just playing statue in the rain.

the concrete curbside now rivers with a rushing wet darkness. and the dark haired girl, still smitten with the rain, just stands there. on her feet wrinkles a seemingly plastic spread while the brave scant light of the afternoon insist to curl heavenwards despite the weight of the rain. she looks like a dream or a miracle, which is the same thing, i suppose, in this suddenly rainy, summer afternoon.

in the deafening cloudburst, i imagine a tiny gash in the sky to allow a sudden prayer to seep in. for how can i not pray for this little girl to not grow up fast? this little girl whose head, despite the rain, is still dry, armored with the halo of her warm dreams.


 

waiting for L outside a pet shop across the thai restaurant we are to lunch

an adolescent silver aruwana snakes inside an octagonal aquarium like a metallic barber shop sign. and bands of green light undulate in the air above the wrought iron tables clothed with silky runners the color of sea grass.

at the end of the block, in a cafe' in the sun, a lone woman drinks from a small cup and her hair is sunshiny.

to be able to witness, even for a fraction of a second, a light that is conscious of its breathing, a light that moves like the sea but with all the gravity of earth. this must be it. to live keenly. to vibrate with the pulse of the universe. and i am surprised that i am not embarrassed to entertain such a thought.

then, from the bus stop, i see L smiling, happiness in him flashing, like the acquariumed amazon fish, a sudden fin.

 

strange

as the heat breached the 100 mark the other afternoon, a mother painted her young daughter's toe nails on a bench in the pocket park across the neighborhood's rite aid pharmacy. the mother studiously lifted the nail color brush, skimmed the excess polish against the lip of the vial, and daubed smidgens of scarlet on her daughter's nails. in the deep, intense, almost tropical, shade of yellow of the afternoon light, the cuticle's edges of her half-dozing daughter seemed suppurated.

a friend sneered at the scene. why, on earth, would people do that? at this time? of all places? got to be the heat.

the mother must have heard my friend because she suddenly looked up, then at us passing by the park. she didn't glower at us. maybe because, just in time, a truck carrying two wide panels of tinted windowpanes passed by. the afternoon light bounced against the glass and smeared her. now she had toad green face and her daughter had bleeding toes.

for a moment, everything was strange. and yet, nothing is strange: the tinder dry heat, the yellow of summer afternoon, scarlet on toes, tropical bronx, manicure on the park.

 

making up things

someone incredulous of my posts asked me yesterday where i first learned to imagine things. i took it he meant make up things.

to spite him, i told him it was in an old well behind our house, that yellow clapboarded bungalow sniveling under the armpits of a musky kamachile tree. slimy patches of glistening green lichen bristled in the well walls like dragon scales. our dog that time, a one-balled bullshitter, howled upon its mouth on moonlit nights. and when the monsoon rains lashed, toads dove in, stunning into leaping the slugs mossed in for centuries on the lip of the well.

one time during a storm, manang goring, our toothless washerwoman, tried to cover the well's mouth with a green tarp. the wind blew so hard, crumpled manang goring to the ground then shanghai-rolled her shrieking inside the slick canvas.

and when finally the kanaway flew east ward, signaling the storm was over, toads hopped out of the well, stunned with the invention of light.

 

that room

a maxwell song, that gurgling funk number from mtv unplugged, hissed from the ear phones of a fellow bus rider this morning. ah, quezon city, project 6. 1997. this was the year you fell for the smoothness of a kapampapangan dj-in-training and leased your first apartment in manila, a two-roomer flanked between one sublet by a makati lawyer for her mistress who danced at lexus club and one by a straight playwright who never talked to anybody in the row except the beefy security guard who worked, wearing only white tanks with his indigo regulation pants, at nights. this was the year, in the other room you tried not to clutter with your things, you started hanging his vintage shirts, then some of his stone-washed denims in that needy closet, thinking love can be had that easily as filling up this deprived space with his stuff. this was the year you took, really took, to r & b, soul, new jack, neo-soul, maxwell, d'angelo, bilal, not to forget prince - heavens no! - and enshrined their cds on a shelf you assembled clamorously one saturday morning while that boy, still wasted from a party the night before, slept noiselessly like a serene ivory idol in that room.

 

full of night

since saturday, i've resisted writing about this. after a midnight screening of wong kar-wai's 2046, L and i ran to our favorite japanese all-nighter in st. mark's. sharp-set, nothing occupied me except the golden brown, grilled unagi sushied by a high-strung chef before us. and then, just like that, i smelled my old flame. he wasn't there, of course. some inebriated boy from tokyo, perhaps, with this flaming yellow hair sat humming a coldplay song beside me. but he had that vague citrusy smell of a dirty shirt about to mildew that my ex exuded after a brutal basketball game.

things, some things, i guess, will never stop being. a persistence enduring forever for me. the hunger that can only be sated with rice, white, polished and warm. the moon, the fruity breath of a boy named mario something who stole a kiss from me during a fraternity hazing night. my ex's shirts that smelled sometimes of freshly cut grass and, when all of these between L and i are over, these satiny new york buildings so full of night.

 

fresco natural

after peeling the pineapple in seven smooth slices, the huffing woman gouged out the fruit's black eyes, carving an unbroken yellow helix following the dimples. i knew the fresco natural stall keeper. for a night, she was my patient fruiting stones in her vesicula as lumpy as oversunned grapes.

eight minutes before the next bus, i nursed myself to a fat cup of what must be her version of mango bellini - white wineless, sparkling nonetheless. she didn't recognize me. my smile was wasted on her as the rinds rotting in a slop bin haunted by nattering flies.

maybe she didn't want me to remember her. a coda to a norteno ballad, a half-drunk neighbor insisted on interpreting for me in my first year here at the bronx, treacly pleads "remember me with smiles not with tears."

as she handed me my change, the quarters and the dimes blinked on my palm like leaden eyes.

 

indecorous

too unseemly. how a friend says of my posts about L. and so, always fearful of being called indecorous, the silence about L, so far.

last night, L asked me to stay over. i balked at sleep as if it were an immoral sentence.

this morning, i awoke to the gush of a strident shower and L's sad attempt at singing. in between, perhaps, him lathering his face, L stopped crooning and the silence in the grey hour of dawn was terrible like a drought.




 

pure

woke up from a dreamless sleep this morning. woke up to find a months-unanswered letter - ha! a stamped post in this age - from a friend back in our island. the letter, refusing to deliquesce, crawled its way out under my bed crammed with god knows what other things mildewed and ignored. i tiptoed around it and bolted out of my room insisting things, more pressing ones, need to be done. at once. a long bath. a laundry pick-up. a grocery visit. middle of the day, all these plus a casual walk in to the barber have been accomplished.

as to the letter, tomorrow, perhaps. tomorrow morning, perhaps, after a satisfying sleep - a dream or two remembered - would be a good time to write a letter to a long ignored friend. tomorrow morning, perhaps, when good intentions, like the quality of air beside my window where my desk sits is just so pure, a half full glass of undrank milk from the night before refuses to curdle from neglect.

 

waiting for tripe soup in a dominican take out

on the tv tottering above the cash register, a portly, pompadoured man, bristling in a sharkskin suit, kisses-almost slobbers-the cheek of a cringing woman. recoiling from her shock, the lady, prim in a schoolmistress kind of suit, shoves the tv host back to his spotlighted dais. after sinking into his plush seat, the host offers the now gesticulating woman some consolation prize-dinner for two-for all the chagrin he brought her. the woman, still affecting that moue, bolts towards the host, snatches the dinner certificate and dashes back to her spot in the stadium seating studio. the voluble host looks straight into the camera and gropes for words. the noon time variety show jump cuts to a potato chip ad voice-overed in crackling street spanish.

i, like the host, must be a neat freak. i have trouble blurring the dividing lines i have drawn in my mind. the bashful could never be brash. the beautiful is never demented. after she wangles her swag, the triumphant smile of the prudish lady looks so beautiful and so skewed, almost a bit mad. i must have this little madness or else i would never think of bolting out of my air conditioned certainties and run free under the unhinged sun.

 

taking a leak at a friend's can in his apartment overlooking sound view park

through the half cracked window, the park is empty except for this soft-footed boy, shimmering in his indigo and canary baseball uniform at the edge of a lush green lawn. with a silvery bat glinting like a light saber in the filtered light, the boy is pummeling a makeshift batting practice machine that he grafted on to a low lying branch. every time he hits the trainer real hot, a sweet sound rasps the early morning air. and then, he smiles his very bated smile and went back at it again. so this is how to aim for perfection. first, one must always be light as in the hush that tiptoes around before the sun growls out. but most of all, one must unceasingly aim for that sweetest spot unlike the way i am leing this immaculate white bowl with sallow, wet petals.