altered

the wind suddenly turned vile this afternoon. and with the BX 55 bus as rare as sunshine on third avenue, the strange man and i were forced to take a jam-packed bus that stops two long blocks away from where we were going.

we were straphanging on the same free grip near the bus accordion. and on the empty acrylic ad space above us, i could see him reflected, sniffing out my nape.

as we disembarked, i asked him what that was all about. "that's it," he said, "i remember you. i was with you in a bus." "what? when?" i asked. "long time. we didn't know each other yet," he said.

as i walked behind him, we passed by a pizza place. he looked back at me as if to ask for my permission if he could have a slice. what right do i have to say no to this man?

on the curbside, waiting for him, i touched my nape on the down low. like i was only trying to discipline an unruly collar. but truly, i was expecting to find my scruff altered in some way i could not account for. perhaps, like the wind itself, that had been brutal earlier but now was all balmy and reeking of burnt cheese and pepperoni.

_________________________________________________________________


an unprepossessing restaurant by 187th and crescent avenue. a chair just slightly across the shiny red mahogany stand of the maitre d’. so serene, richly devoid of pouf. could have been a chair pilfered from a mission church. could have been made by a zealous monk or a newly converted native convinced that one day, just one of these days, god, in all of his blinding glory, would come down from his puffed up, sufficiently upholstered cloudy perch and sit on it.

 

sucker

i am just a sucker for stories. this one is not even mine. it was not, like a well thought of gift, told to me either. i just overheard it. last night. on the subway ride back home.

huddled in the two seater cradle near the sliding door to the next car were two slightly rummied gay boys. one was in a nondescript jean jacket. the other one wore this loud canary yellow tight pullover that had a bold print in its chest saying b boy forever. i didn't bother deciphering what that stood for. i was too sucked in to his story.

i used to have a crush on melvin (that's how i heard it), the yellow sweatered guy said. he was just the golden boy of our class. everyone loved him. even the teachers. he had a way with him. so easy. so natural. he could just stand there and the girls would swoon and girl, could he play ball.

no, he continued in a loud voice, i didn't know i was gay yet. at thirteen? you're kidding? all i knew, i suck at ball games. the jean jacketed boy tried to tell him to pipe it down but he ignored him. but he liked me, you know. the highlight of my day was when he'd tell me before math class, after i helped him with his homework, "dude you're a genius."

i don't know how it happened but one day he and his friends just dropped in at the mickey d i worked. he told me they were going to paul's house. you know paul. and suddenly i was just with his crew. at paul's place. without his parents and his nosy sisters.

paul broke open one of his dad's jim beams and started barkeeping. we ended up sitting on the floor of their basement. i leaned against a dusty drawer and melvin was in front of me, his back turned to me. on my third shot, i could suddenly smell melvin. his sweat, dried up, mixed with hints of his bath gel. it smelled like nothing i've ever smelled before. then, he did the most unimaginable thing. he leaned against my shins.

then what? his companion asked. he looked at him, his eyes full of longing, and said, girl, thirteen just sucked.

pretty-pretty

there hasn't been an instance, so far, in my life that prodded me to read pliny. but recently, somebody told me, non sequitor, about this one show elephant, mentioned in the elder's natural history, which was rather slow to learn its tricks. and so, the master thrashed its spine raw. later that night, the master peeked into the tent and found the obtuse mr. dumbo practicing its shtick.

lately, too, (or could only because of the rains) i have been considering again the trick (yes, for that's just what it is, i suppose, a trick.) of picking a pretty-pretty word, say, "dense" instead of "dim witted"- as in "hearing her wildly moan, her dense boyfriend stopped in the heat of fucking her, thinking she was soughing in pain." what is is, perhaps, always hurtful, so fucking full of raw welts.

this morning, in a forlorn laundromat, i was startled to retrieve a batch of mealy grained boxers and undershirts from a cantankerous dryer. i forgot to feed fabric softener to my load. words should, perhaps, like fabric softener, mince the caustic brush of the world against our half-hardy hides.


____________________________________

bronx fall

the cold insinuates itself into the room. outside, the rain slicks up yesterday's grime from the road. the morning, gray as the sun lazes behind the clouds. memory is a fell thing. i remember hating—always—waking up sweating to manila’s mornings. shivering under a flimsy comforter now, i shudder more at the thought of sweat beads dribbling down the little of my back.


 

measure

eight days of unremitting rain out here, and it has just been a slip-sliding misery. my neighborhood is one drenched, splashed on, dripped on, dejected hell.

at a 99 cent store this morning, waiting to pay for my three dollar umbrella, (my third for the week) an old lady talking to the young man helping her look for thermals said, "i guess it's time to build the ark now." the mexican looking man looked askance at her and went back to his corner with that funny muzzy look. just meters from the store, a gust whipped my umbrella inside out. by the time i reached my place i felt like a late thinking noah.

had i been noah, no animals would fit my bill of lading. instead, i'd outfit my ark with stories. those worth keeping until the rainbow ribbons out in the clear sky. but as in all of life, 'tis easier said than done. so many of them. so few to whittle down. what is the measure of a story worth building an ark for?

how about this one about a bohemian writer who married a man she barely knew and left him before the wedding night was over because she couldn't stand the pink bedspread?

how about this one?

inconceivable as this may seem, but in dante's inferno, the poet met only one prostitute down there. and instead of being trashed in the milder upper regions of hell, where sinners of the flesh were castigated, she was surprisingly dumped along with the flatterers wallowing in shit. you'd ask why? because, when her lover asked if he had sated her, she would reply baldfaced "beyond all measure."

 

wet

as the rain did its clamory thing out in the dense, powdery darkness of the street, a little girl in a yellow mac lustily sang her dad a song. some childhood ditty about a little girl in a red pair of shoes out on an errand. the father and child and i, we were waiting for our orders to be filled in our neighborhood diner that strangely was inundated with a late afternoon crowd.

the little girl's singing was urgent. nothing else mattered to her - not the rains, nor her order of belgian waffle - but her father's approbation. done, she let out this piercing, almost whistling shriek. the slightly discomfited father gave her a wet buss in her forehead. when her father wasn't looking, the singing girl wiped the spot where he kissed her. and like a devout worshipper, she cupped her hands to her face and inhaled them. a smile moiled her immaculate face.

childhood is such a strange office. strange and simple. bliss, its acquisition, is but a simple matter of amassing, of hoarding up of all new feelings, all new tones. just the full chested inhaling of all these woozy, wet new things.

 

shag

the rains, like an unappeasable curse, lasted for four years, eleven months, and two days in gabo's macondo. a matriarch, watching from her sopped window the cortege of a friend trudging along the mucky street below, its pavement long washed out by rains, had a vision. she now awaits the ceasing of the rains before she, herself, will die.

around here, it had been raining since weekend. (relax, no deathly premonitions here.) but the indolent ways of the rain have insinuated into me. lately, i found it rich just to laze in bed, alone, than be somewhere else. even with the strange man.

never comfortable in my building, the strange man dropped by unannounced this afternoon. peeling off his drenched street clothes, he slipped into one of my track pants. then sockless, he leaped into my bed, his soles stung by the dampness of the uncarpeted parquet. i'm not too hot, i told him, when he started touching me. he faded into sleep like a hungry child.

sleeping, shakespeare in hamlet said, that's all dying is. annoyed by this man making strange sounds while asleep, i don't know, but something, a selfish resolve washed over me. i would not let this man go. to his dreams. to anywhere but here with me.

i touched him and watched him rise, amazed, still, at this resurrection. he woke up and licked and kissed my face until our faces were all sodden. the floor of my apartment now shagged by our moans.

 

argue

"you're toast if you just yank the wheel like this," a childhood friend said while showing me how i was supposedly cranking the wheel of fortune without thought, without deliberation. we were at some carnival ground and by the way the townsfolk were dressed, it could only be a sunday. "but you're golden if you do this," he said while ratcheting the wheel like it was some baseball he was letting go towards the peaked end of the diamond.

i don't know what a shrink would have to tell me about this dream last night. how he would interpret the fact i never played baseball as a child. would he consider the genesis of my teen angst my betting openly in this game of chance knowing in my mind that someone in the crowd would tell my puritan mother, poring over her thick, gilt-edged bible back home, i had been backsliding, and how?

i've never understood my dreams. not ever. nor i've found it urgent to have it read back to me. but in a way, even before i could articulate it, i've always believed my dreams to be a visual statement, an argument of images that my true self (whatever this phrase means) puts forth that could never be argued with by the very vocal, the very verbal physical life i live in. it's the way, perhaps, my quitely reticent interior self ascertain its own experiences.

say, this afternoon, sometimes, the rain would stop for a while. the clouds would break and let in a little sunshine. and i'd think, wow, this is what the songs, the poems, the literature i have been reading all along are talking about. silver lining, sunshine behind the clouds, eternal hope. but i'm certain, on some cold evening later, i would dream of some circus tents being folded down and readied to be trucked away while an inebriated clown, still with his make-up on, pees in front of a mortified child, unable to argue about the ghastliness of this vision.

 

color

just as the forecast warned, it poured when i got off at the bus stop nearest the strange man's place late this afternoon. he had to fetch me with a substantial umbrella.

as he came, an escalade passed by. a window rolled down and a blubbery faced man yelled, "you goin somewhere, dawg?" the strange man yelled back, "we aight." the suv rolled on, its shiny black skin stained by the gray of the rain.

"who was that?" i asked him as our elevator creaked up. "the block bleeder," he said. "the who?" i asked. "he the big man selling stuff on the block." "what stuff?" "you know, 226, the shit." "oh, drugs, you mean." he rolled his eyes like i blasphemed the holy spirit.

waiting for our chinese delivery, i asked him if he still does business with the bleeder. "nah, i'm all clean," he said. wolfing down his pork lo mein while watching tv, the strange man's face was bathed in the yellow of the newscast. done with his noodles, he went to the sink. from afar, he still looked a washed out yellow, slightly jaundiced.

i pray it's just my eyes. and not how i really look at things. for in my mind now, the strange man is soaked by the ashiness of the rain, his face slightly dimmed by the tincture of old shadows. god rain reason on me. wash away this refusal to release this man from the color of his past.

 

forfeit

naked and half passed out after love, the strange man stretches out and maunders through his breath what he would give for a cold bottle of malta now.

right now, all i know, for sure, is i'd give anything just to stay longer in bed with this man begging, wishing for strange, inappropriate stuff. (of all things, after all we did, he hankers for a carbonated malt beverage brewed from hops and barley much like beer. what gives?)

other than this, everything else is a mystery with him. but the not knowing everything about this man is fine with me. not that i'm saying i'm forfeiting my entitlement to my little jealousies.

for i am jealous, right now, of the boy i do not know and will not ever, the first boy the strange man ever went to bed with. i am jealous of the sweet tentativeness of their touch as it gave way to the breathless clasping, the unheard moaning, the giddy drifting back and forth across the gauzy borders of their consciousness.

i am jealous how, after all these weighted confusion, they floated back together into the realm of thirst.

i am jealous, most of all, how in the eternal memory of the strange man there will never be a drink as cold as the one he and the first boy in his life must have drank that sultry afternoon while they sat on the steps of their apartment building in south bronx, too mortified to talk and look at each other after all they did, oblivious to the glistening wet beads clinging, never letting go like their desires, to the skin of their soda bottles.

 

no understanding

drowning in the chatter at an unplanned dinner among work acquaintances tonight, i suddenly miss a childhood friend.

he took me fishing one day in his father's outrigger. the sun was naked and the sea fulgent. he rowed and rowed without talking. until we reached a cove no map perhaps could name. i was awed by how he knew where he was going, listening only to the songs of the waves.

we dropped our baits and dozed while waiting for fish to bite. i remember the warm water nibbling my left hand, the one i dangled from the side of the boat.

must have been hours later, he patted my head like rousing a crabby child from his siesta. then, he pointed at a fin, a strangely mottled shark's fin, spearing the suddenly glassy surface of the sea.

he shushed me when i must have said something, anything to rinse away the tremble bubbling in my chest. then he rowed and rowed without talking. until we could see their nipa shack on the coast line looming like a green shadow from another world.

and i remember the coldness of sweat sluicing down my back and of my friend saying things i don't have any understanding of.

 

no luggage required

"who'd want to blow up the ghetto?" wisecracked the guy behind me. we were stuck in a surprisingly short queue of those carrying what, in these parlous times, could be legitimately considered significant carry on luggage at the fordham station of the d train this morning.

a police officer, lushly sweating in a uniform two sizes small for him, lavished time in inspecting a rickety baby stroller pushed by a short tempered mother. there was no baby in the pram. the steamed mother crammed the baby buggy with grocery flyers and coupons.

when it was my turn, the officer rifled through my oversized messenger bag stuffed with a spare running shorts, a pair of thankfully unfunky shoes, a sealed bottle of mouthwash, a half empty deodorant spray canister, a camille paglia hardcover, loose change, among other things. "you're moving, buddy?" the officer deadpanned. i just shrugged and padded through the turnstile after he cleared me.

on the train, the woman to my right pored over what looked to me a very detailed tour itinerary. underscored and boldly printed in the middle of the page was the instruction "no carry on item may exceed 55 inches." that's it? all of life's essentials in one carry all no bigger than a school kid's backpack?

other than fear, this damoclean threat of random annihilation ushers in this coerced narrowing of focus, this almost epiphanic instruction one suddenly hears: pare down to what's absolute. no need for unused gym outfits, for expired oral swishes, for dangling modifiers, for run on sentences, for cloggy adverbs.

and one gratefully finds that what one's heart beats loudest for are one or two or, at most, three things. and these, one could cram into one's pockets. no luggage required.

 

news alert

news alert this evening: police have uncovered a specific but unconfirmed terrorist threat to the city's mass transit system. "people should live their lives as they always do," the mayor, however, exhorted new yorkers.

and so i did. decided to eat out, of all nights, tonight. prepped myself only to find a roach in the bowl, its blackish brown, wilted wings puckered into a neat little bow bobbing on the water stained blue by a toilet disinfectant.

half drowned, it thrashed, (jactitate, the word i so wanted to use, but then again...), hoping against hope, that the sleepy dope who lives in this not-so-hygienic apartment, perhaps, might suddenly appear, heavy with sympathy and an imbecility to flush the water slowly, giving it enough time to dash on its spindly, water logged legs towards the more hospitable side of the bowl.

down here in the island most scarred by terrorism in the new century, fear driving against its shore is just one layer of wave spread thin inside another. and small things, small people, who have never questioned the unappeasing nature of the times, wish--betting against all odds, like a birthright--for always another chance.

 

bulalo

trying so hard to be nonchalant in his first ever visit to a pinoy restaurant in queens yesterday, the strange man ended up ordering bulalo, the pinoy pot-au-feau. he winced, then exclaimed "dang" when the humungous bowl flowering with sawed bone-in beef shanks arrived.

as he studied the bowl, he said he thought he ordered for some beef shank broth. which, i said, he got. he squinted and pointed at the marrow. "and should i eat this, too?" "esta loco? that's the best part," i said. he looked at me like i was a snake oil salesman.

"do you want me to help you with that?" i was sincere. two geriatric couples from our neighboring table started whispering something to each other. "how?" he asked, "order for a saw?" "now, you're dissing my people's food," i said. i told him the french has a similar dish, only that the meat, the bones, the broth are served as separate courses. he was not mollified. i ended up ordering broiled pork belly for him.

mostly in silence, we negotiated our meal. and when we were almost over, a crash from behind one of the unmarked closed doors startled us. unwashed dishes fell. the clang of bouncing silver, pronging through my bones.

growing up, i was a finicky child. even at five, or six years old, i remember i would never go out of the house without combing my easily tousled hair. mother would always upbraid me. it’s what you have inside that counts, she’d say. and her reproach was chilling. because other than being fussy, i was a hopelessly unassured child. i always thought something in me, something in the center of things inside me, was putrid, unlovable.

the strange man and i went on with our meal. the bowl of neatly sawed bones, otiose at the corner of our table. the marrow half extruded out of the bones, like some childhood memory, curdling white in the autumnal air of this city that has no use, no taste, somehow, of things interior.

 

old fool

"you smell like rain," an agency nurse i worked with last night told me as soon she came to the unit. she filled in for one of the regulars who had to rush her unemployed husband to an emergency room in jersey. rumor has it he was binge drinking again. that parasite.

"that a good thing?," i asked. sensing i may have been piqued, she burbled, "yes, yes, that's a very good thing. fresh." she groped for words. "tingly fresh."

later in the shift, she told me the guy long immobile in a fancy rotating bed in room xxx would soon die. a rival gang member shot him five times in his derriere. "i have a nose for this," she said. "oh you're like a priest, an exorcist, who could smell out the possessed from a queue of pious communion takers." she giggled at my lame analogy.

growing up, we had a neighbor, a crack fisherman, who was renowned for his knack to smell out schools of fish. even on a stormy night, he would just breathe in the essence of the sea from the prow of his boat and then he would tell his crew where to cast the nets.

after endorsement, i took a call from the strange man. while on the phone, the agency nurse tapped me on my shoulder and whispered it was fun working with me. "you are such a loving person," she said. "what?" i was taken aback. she said, "never mind, you know it." then she left.

on the bus stop, i was with a girl cooing to somebody on her phone. she smelled of waves and something which could only be the essence of love. and i thought, i may have a nose for things, too. but later on the bus, i realized, any old fool can smell love.

 

rodeo

half awake, i nuzzled closer to the snoring strange man. not content, i pillowed my right cheek against his chest. i am startled by the fierceness of the beating of his heart.

i must have exclaimed something because he woke up. "what," he said. "there are wild horses in your heart," i said. then, i realized how lame it was. what i said about the horses.

he ignored me and thankfully went back to sleeping. when i closed my eyes again, he told me he had a "heart thing" when he was a child. "what thing?" i asked. "you should know," he said, "you work in a hospital." "no, i don't know," i said. "some congenital heart failure," his voice edgier.

early dawn, i felt him got up to pee. when he crawled back, he asked me if i was awake. "no," i said. "mama," the strange man said, "used to tell me i wish for too many things. that's how my heart got fucked up."

in a heartbeat, he went back to snoring. his face, that of a wise man. acutely insightful. i wanted to wake him up and tell him his mother is so full of it. but i didn't. i must have been lulled quickly into this dream of a wild stallion, untamed like the strange man's fervid wishes, kicking his heart in some surreal rodeo. he was thrown off the saddle and yet the horse asked him again if he'd like another ride. true to form, he said yes. and i, like his mother, screamed from the stands, "no, idiot, no."

 

how could this be

twenty old men and women, out on a postcard perfect day of sailing on lake george, drown after their boat flips over so quickly none of them could put on a life jacket. bombs explode almost simultaneously in two tourist spots in bali. twenty two die. american marines continue with their operations to root out insurgents who they claim have infiltrated remote towns along the syrian border. many more will die.

in the meantime, the dog of my friend-an unprovenanced dirty white mutt-sulks by the door of my apartment. it is adamant to be cozy with me at the sofa. its master went to upstate new york this weekend to visit his sister who just had her first week of chemo.

i am lounging in my uncovered sofa, the rough cotton upholstery not bothering my legs. i am in awe of this tranquil silence. the only sound, beside the whir of my laptop, is the mutt's occasional muted yelp during its sleep. is it dreaming of an afternoon in the country where the sky is white and nerveless? and its master, by the edge of the field, under the weeping willows, beckoning at it noiselessly?

this could not be right. such quiet, such tranquility in this world of woe.

 

i could have danced all night

last night, the strange man and i went clubbing. to a straight club. hardly acknowledging each other, we chilled in the bar like hustlers scoping out for girls.

when the dj dropped a kanye west joint, the one with adam levine singing the melodic riff, we couldn't help but bob our heads to its syncopated beat.

a poet was once asked the difference between poetry and prose. she said it's something like walking and dancing. walking leads one to somewhere; dancing doesn't. one dances to describe one's joy. and one could go on and on doing it. just being in the same place. exactly where one wants to be.

she calls poetry a danced language.

many drinks later, i took a leak in this washroom that had a busted bulb. after, i walked right back into the bar ablaze with psychedelic lights and saw the strange man tapping his fingers to the beat of this new 50 cent track. i took my seat behind him. and he just sat there, gathering light.

there was only one thing, i thought, i wanted to do that night. and that was to ask him to dance with me. but that was not going to happen. so i just sat there, bobbed my head to the beat, and stared at him. and i realized i could do that all night long.