boy that i was

knowing the stuck-up college boy i was, i wouldn't have fallen for this one boy who was always begging to sleepover in my dorm room. this i told a college acquaintance who i chanced upon, of all places, in a mall in manhattan yesterday.

"but you liked him, right?" he asked. "no way," i was emphatic. "i could never fall for someone that needy."

truth is, i cared for the boy. how could i not? he gave me a william faulkner reader. and he could hold a coin in his dimple.

ruing over things lost, never a healthy way of spending an otherwise lovely afternoon. but how could i not? i was reminded of this gift. something miraculous. someone who actually needed me more than i did myself. and i squandered it away. what a thankless wretch.

perhaps, he could have been the one for me. one who would tell my girlfriend then that i actually dig boys. or the one who would phone my mom, just out of whimsy, and impassively introduce himself as my boyfriend.

who knew then that someday i would be oldish, huffing and puffing as i catch my bus back to the bronx, remembering this boy, still thinking of him smoking camel after camel on the hallway of my dorm, waiting for me, growing older.

 

nothing

maybe it's the tumult of repair work at the north end of the 2 train line that drove cops to abandon their rounds there lately. the strange man and i took it this afternoon all the way to nereid avenue. and school kid punks ran amok in the cars.

at gun hill station, we changed car to one nearest the conductor. a smattering of unruly kids still held court there. at the end of the car, a solitary boy, unmindful of the din, scratched the graffiti-proof glass pane with a pen knife. he wasn't done yet, but we recognized what he was about to finish etching. i love you babe.

i glanced sideways to find the strange man smiling at me. his smile, almost like a grimace. from embarrassment. of a shared knowledge, perhaps. "something wrong?" i asked. "nothing," he said.

tomorrow, will the boy's girlfriend, on her way to school, recognize his handwriting? would she faint in delight? or would she just blush and say nothing. and just keep all this knowledge of someone celebrating her, loving her all to herself like a precious earring too dear to wear to a knockabout schoolyard?

 

intrusion

a piebald cat - must be of the strange man's reticent neighbor - slinks across the window sill. deciding not to leap down the rusting fire escape below, it pussyfoots back where it came from. but not before hesitating at the middle of the window.

the way the first light of day slants into the room, it could only be fall. already. a sliver of a moon floating just below the window shades. clouds racing towards nowhere.

gentled by dawn, the cat looks like a child peering into a pastry shop. inside, it could only have seen us, covered to our necks in a now thicker blanket. freshly rolled confection.

spooked, the strange man shoos the cat away. still giddy from all the loving, i tell him he's a meanie. he crawls back to bed and grabs the blanket all for himself. i am all naked. and suddenly close to shivering. as i hear the cat purrs. away.

 

shadows

the strange man and i yesterday combed a neighborhood music store for the new alicia keys unplugged album. we ended up sort of arguing-our first-over which album of the mc nas was the most definitive.

illmatic (1994)it is, i claimed. he called it wack the idea of mantling this word onto a work of yet an evolving artist. smarting badly at some point in our argument, i said, "just because i'm not from the street doesn't mean i don't know shit 'bout it." he bristled back, "just because i'm from the ghetto doesn't mean my ass is all ghetto."

we ended up buying nothing. we didn't really talk about it but we just felt like walking the long twelve blocks from the store all the way back to his apartment.

approaching his building, i saw birds, all black under the falling light, larking at the roof's overhang. at various points, some of them left and some of them came. they looked so gratified at their indistinctness.

the elevator was decommissioned, again. we took the less crowded stairwell at the back end of the building. twin shadows swaggered ahead of us. under the sickly yellow lights, it's hard to tell mine from his.

 

dead still

it's always been parlous for me. i mean the writing. something there is in the telling of a personal story, the compulsion, perhaps, to expose oneself, that invites not-so-positive vibes to my insular universe.

once in manila, an editor-friend came up with a book idea-a compendium of love letters written by gay men from, as they say, all walks of life. the cantankerous train conductor, the bored box office boy. not just the adjective/adverb-addicted literary types.

my then boyfriend volunteered one of my shorter letters. we both felt right of his keenness with the project. he, being just dumped three months before, for some sort of vindication of his lover-credentials. i, for the crispness of my prose which i have never since gotten back, for god knows why. and then, just a day after he mailed the manuscript, we both figured in a car accident. for the next three months, i dragged my left foot wrapped in an itchy cast.

thursday, i wrote, cavalierly, of the strange man's travel plans. then, a day after, some friends from canada came and demanded i go with them to visit their relatives in washington dc.

a weekend without the strange man.

on our way to dc, our group took a pit stop at a rest area somewhere before baltimore. a friend told me i needed coffee. i was not being myself, he said.

it was almost four or five in the afternoon. the wind has blown away the sun. some of the leaves of the trees were starting to fall. and in the sky above, a hen hawk, dead still in the air, looked for home.


 

overheard

returning from
work one morning

i saw a neighbor
lingering

in the hallway
he only walked

away
after he heard

his wife yelled
from inside

their apartment
don't forget

the gas bill

 

bronx lyric 2

at the bus stop

three bx 9 buses
have already come

and left
but a number 12

has yet to appear
when another looms

in the distance
a pregnant woman

steps out of the shed
she stabs the air

with her scarlet nails
when she realizes

another 9 coming

 

bronx lyric

from the strange man's window

below, a school child
still heavy with sleep
awaits his bus

looks up
a pair
of black jordans

dangles from
the slack phone line
awaiting

its flying
superhero owner
to redeem it

 

itinerary

overhead, stars are snarled in a gridlock. down webster avenue, way past the cross bronx expressway overpass, car honks ping one another into the distances of the night.

the strange man, fuddled from all that cerveza in the party of one of his neighbors, leans against the bus stop. he presses his right foot against the grimy wall of the shed. but his foot loses grip. to regain balance, he, not self-conscious at all, leans on me. the three other guys waiting for the bus pay us no mind. emboldened, he persists to rest against me.

"wouldn't it be tight," he slightly slurs, "to go to santo domingo?" i smile. "you are really pissed drunk," i said. "no, really," he said, "i'd like to go to santo domingo with you. la playa, el sol, nadie mas." taken unawares, i only manage to say, "you are really fucked up." "aight," he gives up.

he stares at his watch then looks up at me and starts to say something, again. he decides not to while a yellow cab zips by. we watch the cab drive over the ruts until the darkness in the distance swallows its once flashing yellow tail.

 

men

still snoring at eight something in the morning, the strange man looks clueless. of things necessary. of bus schedules. the rigidity of payroll masters.

i touch him, his abs dewing with late morning sweat. the tattoo of the name of his ex girlfriend on his right chest, a wiggling, furry caterpillar. not making any headway. unaware that the sun has risen.

he makes a face at me, then glances sideways at the watch on the wall. beside it, a poster of bruce lee, its right hand corner, fraying, curling. bruce holds aloft a nunchakus. he is an asian moses charging whoever listens to go cross the parted channel. now.

again, i tap the strange man's abs. he stares at me as if asking why do we have to do this? this rising to this alarm, without any snooze button, then dashing on to catch the 9:25 or at worst the 9:45? and for what?

my very same questions. but i can't encourage him. i promised myself i will be someone good for him.

i muster a smile. my way (disingenous, perhaps, but so is this world) of saying, we can take what this world throws our way. no preocupe, mi amor, ningun problema. you and i and bruce lee, we are all men.

 

running out

"running out of stories, huh?" a friend told me yesterday. he meant my recent entries all taken up about the strange man and i.

i suppose i could write about this bird who has made it its habit now to score its breakfast in my window sill every morning. it struts like the jittery bird of my childhood we called burdik. of course, it has its own funny name in east coast english but i don't know it.

or, perhaps, the trees in my neighborhood, all the way to the botanical garden. they are now ready to go to blazes. as a poet said, all downhill into the fire for them from now on. but i don't know them, know them enough to care about their fates. these trees with the sweetest of names: maples, pumpkin birches, honey sycamores.

all i know now, with a certainty that rarely figures in my life, is that with the strange man, i feel i haven't borrowed more than i can return. don't ask me to explain that. i can't.

write only what you know, some short sighted writing instructor once said. with this advice, i am bound to know only the same things forever. perhaps.

but what is so wrong with knowing only this tree, this explosive, edgy tree that is my body, that vibrates easily at this man's touch? what is so wrong with being acquainted only with this easily spooked bird of brown slit eyes and rapidly beating heart? everything else, i believe, is just conjecture.

 

tongue

sunday was almost done for. and the strange man just came back from the laundromat. outside the window, the moon hanged swollen in the pale, early evening sky.

i was about to leave myself. i was looking for my sneakers and the strange man pointed to them lying under the bed.

as i put them on, it just occurred to me. "why on earth do we have tongues on our shoes? they can't speak, can they?" he just shook his head and started hanging his collared shirts and denims.

i collected my my phone, my keys, my ipod and stuffed them inside my messenger bag and i thought this thing between the strange man and i, this is not going to work. he, there, not talking. i, here, brimming, swollen with words.

loudly, i said goodbye, hoping to get a reward, perhaps, for the courtesy. he walked up to me, then stopped as if shamed by what he planned to do. then he just said, "later."

he went back to arranging his cotton tees in the pull-out clothes drawers. as i walked to the door, i saw him folding my shirts, the ratty ones i've been using during my sleepovers. he cleared a space in the drawers and stacked them in a neat row beside his.

 

like this

while waiting for our take out of dominican roast pork this afternoon, the strange man and i saw this woman, clutching her purse close to her heart, wiped out tears from her eyes. the counter girl asked her if everything was okey. she nodded, not saying a word. i muttered to the strange man, "now it is."

i wonder what it was before we knew about tears, how to use them to tide over our feelings.

walking back to my place, the strange man was silent. as i fished out my keys, i saw him, reflected in the glass door, about to say something. i turned around but he just smiled and said nothing.

we ate our food in silence. he, absorbed in the mets game on tv. i, with my afternoon stuff that passed for thought.

if someone asks me years from now anything that i could particularly remember while living in new york, it would be a day something like this. long afternoon, unmarred by any conversation. a silence, the kind you think will never end.

and then, that someone would ask me, "that's it?" and i'd nod. as if i had lived before we, chattering humans, have yet to find our voices and eons before we could invent language.

 

harvest moon

after sleeping away the entire afternoon yesterday, i climbed out of the strange man's bed just right after sunset. i pulled on my trousers and went to pee in his bathroom. through the slit window, i could already see the moon, a full moon, up in the turquoise september sky.

this was my weekend to work and he knew it. just before i left his apartment, he rolled up out of his bed and pointed something at the window sill.

"what?" i asked. wordless, he continued pointing at the window. "i'll be late," i said. then i saw them. pigeons. three, four of them staring at us from outside the window. their drab plumage rainbowed. they stared at us like they recognized us. knew how we felt. then they flew away leaving us two, awash in moonlight, gawking at the now empty window sill.

sure. no guarantees in this life. i know that. could happen anytime. hurricane in new orleans, the end of corruption in manila, the end of partisan politics in washington, end of songs. it could happen. harvest moon, a thing of staggering beauty in the projects, perhaps, even love.

 

place

this week in new york, the world's heads of states gathered at the united nations. the rolling stones rocked madison square garden. emaciated girls walked the runways in bryant park. and i felt so out of the loop in the bronx.

these past days, i've been shunning my friends. i'm running out of excuses now. last night, the strange man drove me to work. i told him to drop me a block away from the hospital. he simpered but didn't say a word.

walking towards the employees' entrance, i heard my phone rang. it was him. "what?" i said. "you're a punk," he said. "hell no. it's just that." "what?" he cut me off. "it's just icky. what would i tell them?" i said. "you don't have to tell them nothing," he said.

there's the rub. i want to tell them everything. and yet i won't. i can't.

growing up, i was a strange kid. never been able to put across fluidly, fluently to anybody what i truly felt. but ever since hearing my first parable during sunday school, i thought that maybe by telling stories, as jesus did, people would get me. but this thing between the strange man and i, it carries such a great weight that i wonder if people would gladly accept it even if i'd gift wrap it in the flimsy tinsel of a story.

so i walked on towards my place of work, its hallways ablaze with lights. i saw familiar faces milling, hardly talking, by the elevator door. and i knew that what this city requires of me is simply to nod, smile and take my silent place among them.

 

row

none of my friends know yet about the strange man and i. only this nosy single mother from work who lives in the same building with him. she saw me scurrying from his apartment one early morning. she's perceptive enough.

on our break the other day, my new confidante claimed that she understood why i'm drawn to the strange man. it's because i'm a goody two-shoes (her word). "and bitches always go for them bad boys," she said. "but i ain't his bitch," i said. "right," she dead panned. "i resent that," i half-jokingly told her. she said "uh, hmm," snapped her fingers, and walked right back to her unit.

then, she turned around and asked me, "you know that he served time, aight?" i nodded. i asked the strange man before about this crudely inked tattoo in his nape. he told me, without a tinge of shame or rancor, that he got it while he was at a juvenile correction facility in upstate new york. he was sixteen. the tattoo says mama. a flaming heart hovers atop the now fading red letters.

last night, my night off, i intimated to the strange man that maybe i could sleep over at his place again. no problem, he said. only that he's going to be home late as one of his work crew was celebrating his birthday.

it was already two in the morning when i hear the click of his key in the lock. i feigned sleeping, bottling up my simmering rage. i heard him tiptoe slickly around the couch. then he bumped into the tv stand. he suppressed a curse. i couldn't help but smile.

after stripping down to just his boxers, he slithered next to me. i could still smell the alcohol in his breath. i should still be inflamed. but i wasn't. i turned around and ran my hand along his cornrows. they felt like damp rosary beads.

 

silence

i've never been to a desert before. but it must be the silence there, not the scorching heat, that terrorizes people. unending stretch of silent sand broken only by a clump of dried bones here, there, a bush of mute mesquite.

last night, i listened to L's message over and over. i still don't get him. his rambling, so spare. i fear the spartanness of his valedictory.

at one point, i was convinced i got him. but, i'm not so certain now. i thought he talked about my cavalier disregard of other people's emotions. L, being L, could not bring himself to use the word heart.

in a willa cather's novel, a frontier girl, realizing for the first time how the country meant to her, believed her heart belonged together with the other things that buzz and croon out there in the sand.

i am gripped by fear of this silence between L and i. the cultivated silence of a buzzard, circling above, before swooping down on a furry ball too late to lunge back into its dusty hole.

 

slip away

sometimes, on a very respectable day, sun and all, i just slip away. unhook the phone, shun the internet, and read. aloud. to myself. in the meantime, keeping an attic crammed with people ignored, things, big ones, undone.

this morning, i read, reread, aloud, to myself, portions of gabriel garcia marquez' one hundred years of solitude. i've been through this before. many times. and yet, again, it felt strange. like watching shadows of buildings, familiar ones in my neighborhood. who knows these structures, tall and steady, throw uneasy shadows? like temper tantrums one never knows one has.

this morning, too, after many days of not seeing him, L called. his voice in the mailbox, wrinkly. i couldn't follow him. he was sort of asking me a question. sort of his way, perhaps, of asking me what now?

i wonder if L, at some times in his very orderly life, just decide to slip away. say on a perfect september day. would he just, without calling the secretary, not show up at work. then drive. just drive south, passing near abandoned farms. would he hear the silence? of redstarts absent from the alders? would he notice an old man, a pail of fresh milk in his bowed right hand, tottering home along a dirt road winding through maples, their leaves blazing?

 

bliss

here is one poet's idea of bliss: "one grand boulevard with trees, with one grand cafe in sun, with strong black coffee in very small cups. one not necessarily very beautiful man or woman who loves you. one fine day."

for me, for now, this is how it would be: you, having just showered, towel around your slight waist, cracks open the window. morning light spilling into the room. i, pretending to still sleep.

you would creep into the bed. your still wet torso drying up as you'd rub against my fevered body. a morning breeze sings and we'd hear cars crushing leaves on the road.

you'd seek out my lips and i'd turn away, smelling toothpaste in your breath. i'd hear you snicker and give up, just plop down beside me. then, i'd listen to your heavy breathing as you ponder on calling in sick for the day.


 

early morning entries (3 tanka)

groping each other
in the dark, we hear our breaths
curl out the windows
i imagine trees outside
full of night, silk-shawled with frost


"what now?" i dared ask
he half-opened the window
a draft wafted in
smelling of street bleached by sun
then he touched me, his palms warm


in my dream - before
i wake up to his breathing
softly on my nape-
the blurry stars blazed and burned
their glare fell like rain on us

 

the smell of detergent

"someone got lucky last night," a friend snickered. he meant the sonsy pharmacy counter girl helping me refill my nasal spray prescription.

this is trite. but the lady, so much happiness welled up in her, she could not contain it. she giggled, she stabbed the air with her manicured nails, she pawed her pharmacist. touched me.

"boy, am i glad to have you help me," i small-talked her. "oh," she gushed, unable to do anything with all the happiness in her. my emotionally dyslexic friend had to look away.

outside the pharmacy, the rain last night left weird prints on the roadside. like foot prints of some phantom animal. the air felt autumny already. and the two of us, unwilling to talk, walked like something befell us. a pentecost.

how does one explain happiness? that girl, she was happy. because she was, so then was i. arguably, my friend, too. can she take credit for how we look at the day now? can this late summer morning take credit for the blazing color of the soon to fall leaves?

my friend and i, we walked and walked. still not talking. until we reached the bus stop. he to take number 9. i, the 12. mine came first. i got on it, filled with expectations. of possibilities. of ripe mangoes. pitted, sliced. of steaming white rice topped with braised pulled pork. of intimacy. even of the smell of detergent clinging to freshly spinned shirts.

 

the trick

over lunch of take out chinese, a friend told me he was over his ex. it has been decently long - about a year - since he and his boyfriend broke up. "i thought you were long over him," i said. "this time," he said, "i'm really over him."

we had similar conversations before. i just humored him by asking what was it this time that did the trick. "i threw away all his stuff," he said. "the letters, the ratty shirts."

this is maybe why we are such friends. we are such fools to think this does it:discarding away stuff, once holy relics.

i remember, he and his boyfriend took this long weekend to vermont once. when he got back, he talked about the trip like they went on a pilgrimage to Lourdes. the chiming of the train wheels grinding on the track as they slowed towards the town like prayer bells tinkling at communion.

i watched my friend down his egg drop soup without relish. the once plump yolk, fork-pierced then bled into the soup. its yellow, persistent in the sallow broth.

 

tired

a tiredness seized me this morning. a weariness for stories. the bus i took home passed by the strange man's building. and i saw how the sun stained the red bricks into fiery orange. the way it will ignite the leaves of maple red then yellow days from now.

how can i truthfully tell myself a story about all these? should i include the big hairy dog impatient for its walk, yanking its owner to a trot? how about the smell of singeing eggs and bacon and home fries beckoning from an opened window?

i want to sing a song, instead. or, if courage afflicts me, write a poem. just no pedestrian story. no more bus stories.

warm sun, quiet air. the sky was fleckless and wound with color. i was one of three people sitting on a park across the strange man's building. i forgot when i got off the bus.

a cup of coffee biting my left palm. in my right, my ipod, a white and silvery flame. a firetruck, a police car, or an ambulance wailed in the distance. perhaps, on its way to corral the drunks, the parole breakers, the junkies, as well as those fatigued of stories, of yellow daisies hemming the park, of the uninventive morning breeze, and even the occasional rainbow, resplendent but always cold.

 

beauty, midnight, vision dies

beauty, midnight, vision dies, mr. auden said. but i want to remember this.

here in this city, in this neighborhood, on this street. where all the houses from the outside look the same. and sometimes, so are the people. i hope i can remember this.

the strange man's bed room.

sunlight unsplintered by any blinds. a comics of a justice-upholding green faced man turned facedown on the sill. the cloying smell of fabric softener from an unopened bag of freshly washed clothes.

a reggaeton track nostalgic of the island life in puerto rico blaring from the apartment across the hallway. a half empty 2-liter diet pepsi bottle on the floor, its top part puckered.

the strange man's bunch of keys silent on the side table. beside it, my wallet containing my set of three.

and the unforgiving mirror just across the bed reflecting the emptiness of the late summer sky.

 

undeniable light

i overslept at the stange man's place. my mind, never unblushing, must have schemed it that i would.

and so, the strange man already work-overalled, woke me up at around ten, saying he had to go. i jumped into my pants, coiled like an indigo serpent by the foot of the bed, and told him i'm coming with him.

it was a holiday morning, and the streets were stark and long. we waited for the bus in front of an old building with turrets shooting out of its sides. "why, you've only seen this now?" the strange man asked. i ignored him. in the flecked morning light of this late summer day, the building preened there like a wedding cake begging to be sliced.

in the bus, there was only the driver besides us. as the strange man dipped twice his fare card for the both of us, the driver smiled at him. i scurried to the back of the bus unable to converse with the driver's recognition of the things we did last night that was so long and almost without end. of the undeniable light that was now all our own.