staying Pinoy in New York City

Nietzsche on my mind

2011-05-30T09:41:00.003-04:00

two sweaty men, one in a wife-beater
the other shirtless, sucking faces
in the chill of the almost-
summer night
outside the club, Lady Gaga rules
on the side street
i need to believe
each time the couple comes
up for air
the bare chested guy
he with the restless
koi tattoos in both his forearms
ogles the smoking guy in camo
shorts two paces from them
i need to believe but i can’t

Popeye's, Boston Road

2011-05-26T21:50:00.003-04:00

Young, tall, black guy
Flimsy basketball shorts, almost
Besides the point
However much I love words
It was best to get
Out of them

A park in Woodside, Queens

2011-05-11T22:00:00.000-04:00

A girl, two or three, perhaps. Golden under
the sunlight. Her mother, her father
all eyes on her.
Two brown squirrels, one dirty, the other
one scabbed, scamper
toward the sun drenched patch of the grass
like chorus members in an opera
seeking out the light pools
on the stage.

In sleep

2010-12-15T23:15:00.003-05:00

the heart beats
the just
placed stent does
not gurgle
it’s in the teens out
side inside
the radiator insi
nuates itself
to my shor
tened
dreams

afternoon replay (piano competition)

2010-09-08T21:59:00.000-04:00

when was busoni elected
the new rachmaninoff
when did prepubescent asian
men paint better chopins
when did a federer match in
a fiercer looking network
become destitute of grace
when did an arc of
a Bach arpeggio quaver as
sweetly oh no not bitterly
as the low angled sun
of an early September

flair

2010-08-29T20:02:00.002-04:00

it should be a great
day seeing a Goth
couple combing the
busy beach
he in a black
trench sand clinging to
his shoe laces like bur
she dragging their
daughter lugging a pink really
loud pink doll as big and
chipper as she
the kids playing beach
football stopped knocking
about as the couple trundles on
how did i hone
this talent this flair
for gloom and doom
while the sun congenial to
everyone else i with a cold
beer in my hand brew
under the cabana
unexcused unexplained

2010-08-11T22:02:00.000-04:00

Bronx story

twenty four minutes into Yasujiro Ozu’s masterpiece or is it twenty eight it’s all i could take switched over to the news back home another jobless guy tried to jump what dissuaded him not to off quezon bridge in quiapo the news reader racked by a coughing fit drained me had to go out to get coffee it’s half past six in the evening and the strings of sunlight bounces from the terra cotta tiles clinging to the tiredest building in the block hoping for some freshening up an incongruous pile of grey stones in front of the coffee house sponging off the remaining daylight

2010-08-08T02:25:00.001-04:00

Pokemon

Blue the color beguiles
Me today as in
The blue of the sky runs
Into evenfall or
Is it run now
That I am enamored
With as in a
Pink jigglypuff it's
Skin stretchy and rub
Berry runs its lullaby to
Put it's enemy to sleep
A deep blue sleep

2010-08-05T01:22:00.001-04:00

Where

Does love
Go when
You don't need
It anymore
Does it just
Stew there like
The moon when strings
Of clouds
Parade before it
Or does it bruise
Like an exiting
Storm
An otherwise
Perfect afternoon

2010-08-04T01:12:00.000-04:00

Nap

The afternoon heavy
Folds itself
Into the humid
Pocket of a dream
Yellow crested king
Fishers feasting on
A ball of sardines
A newly hatched
Turtle finds its sea
Legs
Lunges towards
The waves before
A lazy eagle decides
To circle above
the salty spray

2010-07-31T12:14:00.000-04:00

Not too deep

All I write
Is all I see
The chair is
Empty
This poem is
Haunted

2010-07-30T23:26:00.000-04:00

commute

the rain
suddenly
the bus
trapped by the traffic
light
two blocks
away
under my three-
dollar umbrella
i remember a boy
friend who told
me then
still
your storm

2010-07-28T22:55:00.000-04:00

midweek evening

hot air
blowing from
the fan
my back spasms
as I sink deeper
in the warm
mattress
the tv sleep button
struggles to blink
awake

spring cleaning

2010-04-27T22:41:00.003-04:00

the table
now shoved by the window
a dirty nick by
its right apron
grins
the urge to write
anything
insistent as the hiss
of the
broken
water closet
remember to speak
to the landlord
the need to forget
in this night
that the cold
comes back
things stuff hurts
the buddha
on the window ledge
plasticky
and shiny
smiles
i have to be writing
i don't know if
i am forgetting

Junction Blvd, Queens

2009-09-20T18:34:00.002-04:00

the heaviness of his breaths
i can still hear from the bathroom
he must have said something
i didn’t get
i yell back
i’m okay
giddy
i am so giddy
from just gargling with some stinging
mouthwash
in this man’s sink
i am so besides
myself
that i am almost certain
if I break
out
from my body now
i would burst into a yellow
trembling flower that could not
be wilted
by the portable heater
warming
half
of this room

Main St., Flushing, Queens

2009-09-14T21:44:00.002-04:00

a toil of a lunch
rice and limp vegetables
chinese slapstick on tv
floating inconceivably
atop a not-so-smiling
buddha
the track on my iphone
confounds
me
“comes to the light,
comes to the light,”
the singer wails
“make it stop”
“make it go away”

Wade Square

2009-08-19T21:08:00.000-04:00

a sapling, felled
by the rains
last night,
splayed out its
branches
from the rim
of the park to
the middle of the bike
lane.

the dog
sniffs
its limp leaves
as if it knows
time ends.

a summer afternoon

2009-08-16T22:47:00.002-04:00

in the 7 train,
the lanky guy beside me
reeks of the same
bargain perfume
the ex once insisted
on wearing

at my stop,
the train door,
as it opens,
sucks
in a bald
dandelion clock.

those few times the world seemed right

2009-08-13T21:45:00.001-04:00

the midday breeze napped
sweat rings spreading to my chest
senior high picnic
i was college bound
couldn’t wait to get out of this town
he had to stay for his mother
gripped my hand when
i talked about the university
palm trees still
something told me I just might
stay

sudden rain

2009-08-06T23:16:00.000-04:00

the blue of the sky
seeps through the curtains.
the cat, big blob of grey
by the window, casts
a pink shadow.
the day is not wasted.

late night walk

2009-04-18T22:33:00.005-04:00

my dog keeps on sneezing
stray dogwood flowers fleck his ears
my mind blooms with uninvited memories

in mayan hieroglyphic, the magical verb to conjure is represented with a hand grasping a fish.

truth

2009-03-28T23:18:00.002-04:00

no calls, missed or otherwise, tonight. the blistering honesty of technology.

and so it goes

2009-03-28T08:23:00.004-04:00

another breakup. again.

at the conversation denouement, the bf said "why is it always something about resistance? with you?"

did not get him at the coffee shop.

in the train, amidst the crush of the Friday commute and the debris of this dismantling, i thought maybe, resistance, roughing it up is my inartful way of appreciating the extravagance of a thing that pops up in my universe so few and far between.

spring rushed

2009-03-23T22:24:00.004-04:00

an ice cream truck tweeting at dusk.

a pair of gloves fished out of the closet, again.

take me home

2009-03-17T23:45:00.000-04:00

(last night in Pinoy TV: the flamboyant doppelganger of Rustom Padilla, BB Gandanghari, was asked what he prays for. “Take me home, Lord,” BB said.)

Tonight, walked about for three miles. The mildness of a late winter evening, such a miracle. My rhythmic breathing, like a well memorized prayer.

Waiting for the pedestrian light, a heavy bus, by its stop, unrolled its ramp as it kneeled.

meaning

2009-03-08T22:20:00.004-04:00

don't know how this fight started. just heard myself complaining how we don't do meaningful stuff anymore.

the boyfriend carved out the burnt fringes of his eggs, then pushed them to the lip of his plate. outside the diner, people peeling off their flimsy jackets in the balmy morning.

"this," he made some indiscernible motion with the fork in his right hand, "you, me, eating, together, not meaning enough?"

sinigang

2009-03-04T21:50:00.003-05:00

nothing really to it. just a bowl of pork sinigang. in a kainan in queens. a weak but very sour broth. the elemental fatty goodness of unassuming pork belly.

must be a Pinoy thing. rather, must be an immigrant thing. to pour into a single thing--a definitive dish, a treacly ballad--an entire vision of a lost universe that can never be redeemed.

thoughtful

2009-03-03T20:58:00.004-05:00

this evening, in a mall, in palisades, in jersey--already, so many things wrong with this line--two b-boy crews battled near--where else?--mickey d's.

as the one in a hollister hoodie breezed through his flares, the guy with wild red hair from the competing crew studied his opponent. there was in his regard with his adversary, this thoughtfulness that burned through the paleness of my evening.

lotto

2009-02-17T20:24:00.004-05:00

both the jackpots in new york's megalotto and that of manila have breached records. hundred plus million dollars in the big apple and double that, albeit in pesos, with the lotto in imelda's city of man.

woody allen: "if only god would give me some clear sign! like making a large deposit in my name at a swiss bank."

in front of the nearest deli that sells lotto tickets, saw a dollar, not crinkly, in fact, very crisp--must be from the cold--atop the Daily News bin. a kid, drowning in his over-sized, lint-infested bubble jacket, swiped the dollar just as i decided it was okay for me to adopt this orphaned bill.

sulked away from the lotto queue. went to the chinese, instead. bought hot and sour soup.

the girl at the counter, her facial skin so tight from the radiant heat of the open kitchen, did not drop a fortune cookie in my takeout bag. she must have been instructed, perhaps, to do it only for orders five dollars and up.

nest, angel, snake

2009-02-16T20:28:00.009-05:00

second day of queuing outside east coast's only jollibee.
again, my fretful feet got the better of me. and should i remind myself again of the line? snaking two blocks down from the store's entrance.
just before i left the line, the woman in front of me must have dozed off.
she let go of her pocketbook, her wallet flung out soon as her bag hit the pavement. the credit cards from her billfold scattered like a disturbed nest.
_______

later, accompanied the boyfriend to the laundromat.
on the far end of the folding table, an unkempt woman took time to fold a still damp comforter over and over.
winked at the boyfriend. "leave her be," he said. "that's beautiful," he added.
"why?" I asked. he ignored my question.
vaguely remembered a Merton quote.
the beauty must stem from her belief that an angel might come down and sleep in it.
________

finally at home, writing this entry.
stewing, awaiting the boyfriend's good-night call.
waiting, silent like a snake.

lit

2009-02-14T22:40:00.003-05:00

a character in a french movie asks another, "how beautiful am I today?"
she replies, "as beautiful as my heart."
he smiles and his face is incandescent. as if it is lit from inside.

dream

2009-02-12T23:51:00.004-05:00

the wind howls on. the window by my head rales.
my dog snores.
still heavy with sleep, i get out of bed and do this entry.
and write of what?
i envy my dog. in his sleep, he yelps.
awake, i am devoid of dreams.

eternal

2009-02-12T23:00:00.003-05:00

watch a re-run of ryan-ryan. leo valdez sings that love song from the pop ballet rama-hari.
bango ng champaka, the chorus wells up. nalimbag sa alaala, the song meanders on.
bien lumbera, the librettist, hangs out masterful line after line as casually as a grisly washer woman flings out sheet after sweet, scented sheet of linens on a line.
ang pansamantala, the ephemeral, naging walang hanggang, becomes eternal.

color

2008-08-05T10:34:00.001-04:00

My new iphone application claims there is a nearby subway station. I don’t buy it.

I knew this neighborhood well. I hid my sobbing—yeah, convulsive gasps while weeping—right there under the awning of that Korean produce shop that day I learned my first ever white boyfriend had this other Asian boy on the side.

I am never into white boys. Color always does something in me crazy. But there was something black with this white boy.

It starts to get really dim. A lightning flashes. From a block away, there it is. I can read the subway sign, crimson with the number two logo.

read

2008-07-30T23:28:00.002-04:00

Across me, two Asian looking women sit still. One, with thick glasses, reads a yellowing paper. Microscopic Chinese characters populate the front page. The other woman, lips puckered, closes her eyes every time our train stops at a station.

I have not had a good read since winter. Work pressures, I blame. Too much attention to the boyfriend, a friend tells me, otherwise.

The train surfaces by the Yankee stadium. The surly one gets up and shuffles towards the doors. The bespectacled one folds the paper and leaves it on the bench. She, too, shambles to the exit.

I look again at the paper. I realize it is just a local tabloid. Yesterday’s.

Breathless

2008-07-29T17:51:00.001-04:00

The reflexologist exhales hard then starts working on my heart reflex point. I do not flinch. I squirm in pain as he kneads the point that corresponds to my lungs.

Two girls chat loudly in the next cubicle. “Next year, we should do Tibet.” “I won’t go there. Not unless the Chinese stop oppressing,” the other voice trails off to an ecstatic “ahh.”

I open my eyes and see my Chinese reflexologist intent on my sole. I feel short of breath.

Invincible

2008-07-24T22:57:00.001-04:00

Four men in wifebeaters play dominos outside the Chinese take out. Bachata blares from the beat- up blue coupe parked nearby.

A silver SUV swooshes by then slams into the light post by the intersection. The boy-driver gets out of his car and fishes out his phone.

I am sore from the gym. I look out of the cab window. The fresh-faced driver is unharmed.

Oblige

2008-07-23T21:11:00.002-04:00

Two rookie cops tell off three kids sitting on red egg crates outside the deli. The boys, in dirty white tank tops, oblige and leave. .

Across the street, an Arab woman—is she?—peers suspiciously from her jewel-colored head scarf. My cab rolls on.

This morning, the boyfriend calls. Always in a hurry. “Can’t talk long. Got no load.” I don’t say anything. “You’re sad?” he asks. I remain silent. “That’s a good thing. Only means you really miss me,” he says.

“Yeah, right,” I snap back. “Right,” I say again.

Heavily

2008-07-20T21:33:00.002-04:00

A dirty moon sits at the end of the number 7 train track. It’s 2:30 in the morning but the heat still sits heavily on my chest.

I can't stop thinking of the boyfriend. I remember Whitman. “For the friend I love lay sleeping by my side. In the stillness his face was inclined toward me, while the moon's clear beams shone.”

Centuries

2008-07-12T04:18:00.000-04:00

Out of whim, borrowed a book from the library today. Not even remotely interested in my loan. Couldn’t resist stepping inside the brand spanking new lib. The one near the shop of this extortionate Korean fishmonger who believes a pound of discard fish heads is as costly as a slab of toro.

Eking out an existence in the world’s financial capital, I am grateful for everything public: public libraries, public radio, public television, and even the spotty public transportation system. I must be a socialist at heart. That if heart is an accepted entry in the lexicon of any self-respecting, card-carrying socialist.

James Joyce famously boasted that in writing his unreadable masterpiece, Ulysses, he had “put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing” over what he meant.

Until now, I yet have to read myself. My life’s a dazzlingly hot mess of inconsistencies. To unpack a single day would keep me busy for centuries. That if I have the time.

Whale-road

2008-07-09T20:48:00.004-04:00

A peeling poster of the movie Beowulf clings to the scratched skin of the old bus stop behind the Bronx Zoo. Some bored kid, perhaps, drew a plump dick kissing the lip of the morose warrior.

Never read this grand epic of Old English. Not even the snippets of mangled translations during high school. Was shocked, though, to have easily remembered what the Beowulf poet--this according to my zealot of a junior high English teacher-- calls the sea. The Beowulf poet names it the whale-road.

Kennings they’re called. These descriptive, almost always short, metaphors that amp up the poet’s descriptions in much of old poetry.

Had the Beowulf poet lived today, how would have he, or perhaps, she called New York? Soul-trap?

galileo

2008-07-08T01:37:00.004-04:00

just caught my eye
on the uptown 4 tonight.
"...only vain
wandering
in a dark labyrinth."
Galileo wrote this,
the poster claimed.

been four days since
the boyfriend flew home.
how to navigate
summer
without him?

awesome

2007-03-23T19:26:00.000-04:00

it was the rustling—like that of a skulking rain—that woke up my neighbor. this was at dawn of the very first day of his costa rican vacation two weeks ago.

outside his thatched bungalow, the air was dry. so he plopped back to bed. but the dry crackling noise, this time like desiccated leaves raked by the wind, went on. and strangely, the susurration seemed to issue forth from the ground.

then he saw it. hordes of fiddle crabs carpeting the beach. a great number of them, as if in a murderous frenzy, brandished their asymmetrical oversized claws. they seemed, my neighbor explained, to be in a great hurry to scurry back to their burrows on the edge of the beach.

my neighbor told me this as we chanced upon each other retrieving our mails the other day. awesome, he kept mumbling as he trudged back up the stairs, his hands clutching his mails, mostly drab fliers.

sea grapes

2007-03-22T22:27:00.000-04:00

had a dream last night. one of the few ones i thought i can summon back the morning after.

in it, i, still the yearling half crazed by this inexplicable urge to tramp around the lilliputian island i grew up in, was combing a parched cove.

(in my dreams, the beach is always pristine. why?) and my feet kept getting snarled by the beached vines of sea grapes.

it was such a beautiful spring day today in new york. i forgot again to scout online for a decently priced airfare for my trip back home next month.

sea grapes. what a lovely name. beauty, in whatever incarnation, is, sometimes, just enough.

i lost track of the rest of my dream. perhaps, i must have seen later a sail sighing through the swell of the afternoon riptide.

altered

2005-10-17T00:44:00.000-04:00

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

2005-10-16T21:53:00.000-04:00

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

2005-10-15T17:52:00.000-04:00

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

2005-10-14T21:08:00.000-04:00

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

2005-10-13T01:32:00.000-04:00

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

2005-10-12T19:33:00.000-04:00

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

2005-10-11T21:58:00.000-04:00

"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

2005-10-10T21:57:00.000-04:00

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

2005-10-09T23:30:00.000-04:00

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

2005-10-08T02:40:00.000-04:00

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

2005-10-07T18:59:00.000-04:00

"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

2005-10-06T21:04:00.000-04:00

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

2005-10-05T02:17:00.000-04:00

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

2005-10-04T07:47:00.000-04:00

"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

2005-10-03T08:11:00.000-04:00

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

2005-10-02T14:47:00.000-04:00

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

2005-10-01T10:27:00.000-04:00

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.

boy that i was

2005-09-30T14:38:00.000-04:00

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

2005-09-29T20:10:00.000-04:00

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

2005-09-28T11:30:00.000-04:00

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

2005-09-27T21:17:00.000-04:00

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

2005-09-26T12:30:00.000-04:00

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

2005-09-25T21:00:00.000-04:00

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

2005-09-24T20:46:00.000-04:00

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

2005-09-23T20:28:00.000-04:00

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

2005-09-22T18:56:00.000-04:00

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

2005-09-21T20:49:00.000-04:00

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

2005-09-20T14:41:00.000-04:00

"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

2005-09-19T15:49:00.000-04:00

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

2005-09-18T21:54:00.000-04:00

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

2005-09-17T21:34:00.000-04:00

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

2005-09-16T08:45:00.000-04:00

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

2005-09-15T20:13:00.000-04:00

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

2005-09-14T21:12:00.000-04:00

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

2005-09-13T22:02:00.000-04:00

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

2005-09-12T21:52:00.000-04:00

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)

2005-09-11T04:14:00.000-04:00

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

2005-09-10T14:29:00.000-04:00

"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

2005-09-09T22:16:00.000-04:00

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

2005-09-08T21:51:00.000-04:00

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

2005-09-07T21:48:00.000-04:00

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

2005-09-06T21:44:00.000-04:00

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.

shifting iridescence

2005-09-05T21:38:00.000-04:00

this could just be guilt working. but i think i saw cumulus steam billowing from the boiler stack of the building across that of the strange man. i was again in his apartment this afternoon. in this still perfect summer day, the purring of his ac sounded out of season, so misplaced. as i lolled shirtless in his bed, he busied himself pulling out his hoodies and sweaters from another closet.

something in the way he fished out his cold weather stuff that made him look like an extra hand in a squidding crew of my childhood days. one time i saw him leaned against the closet door, the rumpled clothes on his feet like waves.

"you'll never amount to nothing," a relation told me once. "you are such a dreamer." he could be right.

i looked at this man who i swore just days ago i would never see again and i see a person making art. there was this control of the sweep of the line of his movements. he brought objects from the plane of sensuous pleasure into a spiritual sphere.

as he was about done, he gathered all his clothes and dumped them in a wide mouthed trash bag. "i'm going to the laundromat," he said. i looked up at him with a look that made him immediately say, "you don't have to go. just stay."

as he left the apartment--his apartment--the black bag of his dirty clothes spasmed with a weak and tremulous light like a deep sea squid shifting iridescence.

is this?

2005-09-04T22:01:00.000-04:00

a new family must have moved into the building while i was away. or asleep. this morning, a phlegmatic man huffed and puffed while climbing the stairs. he carried a spotless gunmetal bucket. plump yellow sponges bobbed on the sudsy water.

later, i saw the man hosing down their family van parked in front of the building. when much of the water dripped dry, the man began waxing the van's dull snout. a dark haired boy came running down the staircase. he pelted the man with questions. or he looked like he was begging him for something.

of what mind must one have to be a father? for me and maybe for most of the fatherless tribe, this is esoterica. i guess, i would never ever know if fathering, like great art, is purely accidental and perfected with no apparent effort at all. or, like the making of great art as well, can consume a life.

i imagined the man to be me. i'm waist deep into this story i'm trying to finish during the most precious of times. when parlous peace reigns in the household. when my boy is still consumed, not by his interminable questions, but by his dreams that make perfect sense to him alone.

then, the wifey tiptoes close (shh, you'll wake him up) to tell me the car needs to be cleaned today. and so i get up, leave the lives of my characters hanging, and go wax the car. is this fathering? how about when the son wakes up and comes down-his eyes still full of sleep-to see me, just watch me and doesn't ask me anything yet, make obsessive and asinine circular motions on the car skin. is this?

edge

2005-09-03T20:50:00.000-04:00

"he died of heartbreak," a resident told me this morning. he meant his fellow doctor who popped one too many sleeping pills two months ago(7/14/05 post). "his boyfriend since medical school," this blabby resident said, "shacked up with another man."

more die of heartbreak, so said saul bellow, than, perhaps, fulminant consumption or raging herpes. but what pushes one heartbroken soul over the edge and annihilate oneself? does, say, witnessing a lifeless pigeon on a train track make one wish to rot oneself and think of growing, perhaps, a pale headed mushroom on one's stomach like a still born fetus?

this afternoon, i woke up to someone making a racket out of my window. i looked out to see nobody below only the late summer sun on the deep, horizonless, afternoon sky still throbbing and smearing yellow stains on my room.

in the early evening, a cool salsa tune wafts in with the breeze from the other building. i saw the neighborhood blazed with lights like an airport runway to be left behind.

absence

2005-09-02T12:57:00.000-04:00

a pair of denims, fresh from laundry, made dry and crackling sounds as i put on it last night. friends called up earlier for a spur of the moment dinner date. then finishing dressing up, i just heard myself singing. faintly. tentatively. some execrable 80's pop ditty.

i realized it has been that long since i stopped singing. i used to sing all the time. i mean, just sing. while bathing. while scrubbing the sink. while waiting for a mere phone call.

growing up, i couldn't wait for sunday afternoons. a talent show bristling with mostly belters capped my week. aping the winner, i'd croon myself to sleep. my mother, hollering from her room, would shush me. "you just don't have the timbre."

i used to think mother meant i didn't have the hutzpah. timber, was to me, something hard. harder than balls.

i don't really remember when i gave up singing. it's like asking, perhaps, a ghost when he first started haunting.

our loud party finished dinner and innumerable one-for-the-road toasts early morning. one grows old and tone deaf at the same time, perhaps. old and songless. like a street corner at two in the morning. a haunting absence of color.

unseen divinity

2005-09-01T21:36:00.000-04:00

a bush flowering cottony white blooms leans against the red brick wall near the hospital's back entrance and throws off its caustic scent. but most of the night shift people coming in noticed only the stench wafting from the morgue, its loading bay slightly ajar. the rotund security officer stationed nearby fended off politely all questions about the fetor. some refrigeration malfunction, later i heard.

on my initial rounds, an 18-year-old trauma patient - he punched raw a concrete wall after breaking up with his baby mama - asked me, just out of the blue, (bedbound as he is, he could not have known of the malodorous morgue) if we hospital people could smell the impending death of our patients. i brushed him off, promising, instead, to bring his pain medication an hour earlier. he smiled and corked on back his ear phones.

something about smelling that is so immediate. something, perhaps, about the nose close to the brain. but so are the eyes, and the ears, and the tongue. something, perhaps, about the lack of any mediation against the world's onslaught at this most direct of senses.

when i got home, my tivo has, on its own, recorded a documentary about the life of some kyoto geishas. in a segment, an older geiko was training her teen-age protegee (a maiko) on a centuries-old song and dance number. the non-smiling apprentice tried over and over in perfecting the slight move to cover her nose with her silk fan. this is to hide her awe, her fright, upon smelling the scent of lotus blossoms, an unmistakable signal of the presence of an unseen divinity.

license

2005-08-31T20:47:00.000-04:00

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

2005-08-30T19:21:00.000-04:00

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

2005-08-29T03:19:00.000-04:00

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)

2005-08-28T03:07:00.000-04:00

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

2005-08-27T11:47:00.000-04:00

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

2005-08-26T15:41:00.000-04:00

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

2005-08-25T13:40:00.000-04:00

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

2005-08-24T17:58:00.000-04:00

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

2005-08-23T17:26:00.000-04:00

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.