1. for my future plans

    To Whomever,

    This is being written Saturday morning outside of Sto. Nino somewhere, in a nice little café but right on the highway and huge trucks sound like armies. I still have hang-over; last night was nearly boring. Was it for the crowd? I don’t know really. For supposedly a kinky Friday, I went home alone which I wouldn’t mind thinking right now though I suppose I had a pretty good time talking with my closest friend, who’ll move soon to Laguna for good, about some stuff for the future.

    These days, I realize that ‘careless’ fishing and feeding are no good, whether they are for insecurities, compliments, or whatever a sad response to a friend’s heartfelt appeal. These are the sins I want to get off my chest, habits I have lived with that have much preset defenses. Yes, I’ve fished and fed much. I am like a horny cat, a real loudmouth, extending his claws without commenting on his bent of becoming something for the night.

    The bottom line is: I want to change.

    It’s nice to sit by the window and just think. Any person can do this in his own confine, sit and rest his arm on the window, and then he can spit to make a difference. No oral acoustics at all. The idea makes me lightheaded somehow as perhaps as any passerby looking at me can ascertain.

    I need to do that often, more than what I can imagine right now. I’ll listen to myself telling stories all about myself- personas I have gone with conflicts for which I had found better resolves, and the preoccupation and the reality I’m in and whatnot, reconsider the things I never liked before.

    I want to quit smoking and, instead of a couple of slugs on weekends, just have a pint of whiskey during solitary times- just as how my mother saturates loneliness whenever my father is away.

    I want let loose. I want a time to sit alone, back to the wall, and just watch a detail on the floor. Perhaps this habit can eliminate judgment and just leave a neutral impression- like suddenly wanting to stand up because you just need to.

    Also, I need to contemplate my dilemmas and decide which ones to ignore and which to be more patient with and see if they will cure themselves in due time. So much for tolerance and piling things up. I am going to finish editing my thesis before November ends, at least I’ll have a classic reason to celebrate an occasion like a twenty-first birthday.

    This is also a sort of heart regeneration- like growing a new type of nerve endings which are less susceptible to signs of heartaches. Yes, I’ll quit moping around looking for some love, for someone else to make me happy, and accept the fact that the vast crowd of people like me is dreaming for a god to love and find it risky to invest with anyone merely human, which I unlikely happen to be.

    To my beloved, I know I’ll never have you, so I’ll just shape this fact into hope and wait for the next person who can make me blush genuinely. As what a friend of mine said, “Settle with the ordinary, someone to give the hopeless artist a better love.”

    There is indeed a lot more to the world than what I thought before and a lot more perfectly beautiful ways than what I was familiar with, and it was such a mistake to ignore these possibilities. Fortunately, I am happy with my job and somehow enjoying it. And so, I won’t let my former stupidity destroy everything I have now. I can’t imagine a tolerated domestic responsibility without money. My current status is: a brother. In spite of the long suffocating quest for sanity, I have found it through my sister. And it will sadden me if, in the future, I'll fail again in the same way.

    I know I can straighten these out well soon as I’ve straightened out so many things of less importance; but for now, I let this feeling for change ferment, and probably start with what is settled for me.
    Continue reading »
  2. Cordially, Lover

    I heard from a dear friend about your workshop and I can assure you that, considering what I get from your poems, it wasn’t as bad as it could have been.

    I told you back then to continue writing stories. The way you create characters is way better than the way you cut lines, though I can agree it’s hard to create something as effectual as fiction will be. Subject-wise, your poems are all the same. If not, they are monotonous, contrived and of course, always beyond my comprehension. Beyond that, I won’t comment.

    I don’t know what’s happening to you. You’re not responding to my messages. You deleted your facebook account and I don’t know what’s next- what impulse you’ll be acting on again.

    There are times in a writer’s life when his inspiration is paper-thin and he can’t bear loss no matter how richly deserved. Nonetheless, I would suggest you reading some of your old works, perhaps you can get another light for what you need to get into your collection.

    Once I visited the house of our teacher and coincidentally had your adviser over lunch. We talked about you. They, I mean. One said ‘your poetry doesn’t have form’, while the other said ‘what you’re writing is all madness’. I didn’t supply any thought. It was as if I finally learned how to stop feeling concerned about someone’s idiosyncrasy. After all, I couldn’t change anything larger than personal impression.

    As what our closest friend mentioned last night, this must be a hard semester for you, so I will top bothering now. Just keep this little concern to your heart and expect seeing much of it, if required, in the very fast-moving future.
    Continue reading »
  3. Once the Other writes to the Self

    Dearest Madness,

    First let me say how much I miss the old you. I locked myself for almost half a day in my room, that dust-infested room (for which I care no more) and couldn’t even come down for a drink or quick meal.

    I think you are having a hard time there, wherever you are. At any rate, I’m in a little café right now, since going downtown is too early, and while I hate walking in this burning day, I’ve met someone absolutely wonderful whom I want you to meet too, if you can manage to spare a time.

    This guy runs with a clutch of dreadful people- lots of tattoos and unshaven faces. I met him at Durian Bar through a friend’s invitation. Temporarily he’s living alone in a common-looking apartment on the second street near Metrobank, that 3-storey building in which Bon took a room last April. Well, he’s here because he’s hiding from a former lover.

    Yes, I’m afraid that not only have I fallen for the second time, but trapped in the wrong, the inconvenient sort of way; the sad truth is- he’s straight. He reminds me a bit of Kenny, that company commander guy you danced with at the prom. But he’s nicer, more humane and rather calm. We’ve been seeing each other for two weekends- two straight Sundays, probably same time you met that pudgy-faced consultant at Ponce. Our company would have not flourished if it weren’t for a comment thing between us; I think he’s suffered too more than you did, though his manner is very playful, straightforward, and high-spirited.

    Yes, life is a bit tiring now- for you, I mean- so empty that all that counts to you, more and more, is being with someone. I suppose you’re right, but in spite of your disappointments, I have managed to meet people and ended up with this kind of person. If you only knew how happy I was when he bid me to spend the night with him. I didn’t expect him to choose me, or was I chosen because others were too much for a night? That, I’m not really certain. I was pretty comfortable with him, at his plaints, so was he. And there, in his solitary room, I noticed how strangely clattered his things were, how strangely lost he had been. I know behind his sweet-natured responses lies the greater weight of a former love. I never provoked him to share any detail but rather met him on the other way by the pleasure of liquored words- God! the vulgarity of some of them.

    He’s probably the kind you’d love to talk until dawn, someone who still laughs at every crack joke the second time you him. I’m so happy when he just smiles at me. His smile is so extraordinary though oftentimes I feel so small and vulnerable to self-pity or envy, I’ve never been into this kind of confine, though somehow I can say that there’s really a great difference when a straight guy, who seems to like you on emotional basis, looks at you and ends that particular act by a sweet-enduring smile. As you can imagine, it’s like living in a kind of dream.

    I’ll be at his apartment later this day and then will probably stay there until dinner. He said we’ll watch cartoon movies, eat whatever is in there, and explore the possibilities of the moment. That’s what we did last Sunday.

    He’ll fly back to Cebu next week and make amends with his ex. I don’t know much about his future plans, though at the moment, all he cares is to continue talking with me about some stuff- my four-year stay here, his stay so far, my relatives in Cebu, his father’s paper company, and to whatever the conversation goes. I have to simply go with the stream of our lives. Probably this is the only chance I have to revive the zest for genuine connection. I knew you’ve failed a lot of times in this way but I have to know him more, take a few risks, and for once be happy.

    So far I’m learning his positive views in life and it’s pretty overwhelming when he considers my views- some kind of practical sentiments.

    Missing you fiercely,
    Melon
    Continue reading »
  4. Quite Something


    October excites happiness- especially these clear white postcard mornings when the sun rises and beckons east, as if pointing to a lovely place I’ve never known yet.

    There’s a photo I see on the cover insert of my sister’s newly-purchased sandals. It shows a dazzling white terrace and a beautiful blue sea that I take to be somewhere in Dinagat Island. Then I imagine myself as one of these two guys draping themselves and their skinny colored swimsuits across the wicker chairs in the sunshine of the Pacific, and sipping a glass of coco juice. And then, I imagine sitting on that huge rock, looking across the vastness of the ocean, mesmerized.
    But it isn’t such illusion I’m happy for.

    October makes me remember someone and think about our quick weekend frolic. We took his uncle's black Honda motorcycle and drove eighty miles per hour along the coastal edges of Surigao, heading up north, with only a pack of siopao and extra shirts in hand. He loved Bon Jovi and so proceeded driving while singing ‘Someday I’ll Be Saturday Night’ until we came to the most beautiful stretches of Cantilan. Then we flopped down around the coconut tree and spent the whole afternoon throwing stones into the trees by the cliff, into the sparkling water.

    That was 0ctober 10, 2003. The date of someone’s first, so far memorable kiss. The day when the lives of two boys seemed to appear sedentary, happy as they were, that their only contentment was to devout to the extension of time, without knowing if it's quite something.

    Continue reading »
  5. Sunday Blues


    I’m starting to think of this: Davao is a restrictive place to reside in and there are a few things to which I’ve given vent, even as I think about my sunny college years in Mintal. The fear of being different restrains, paralyzes, or shuts every person I know, and there’s so little room for connection (affection, I mean), so much space for separate lives and personal hard work, so much roads for countless yet empty jeepneys.

    And so, I’ve learned to hold in the urge to be ambitious, to achieve something beyond description, because the punishment for being different is inevitable and heavy. It might come by accident or be postponed for a little while, but when it falls on you, it falls hard, as when I took BA English Creative Writing and the privileges it afforded me, right after I quit the plan of finishing the last semester, put me in my place. (And I know not a single cue of difference this place makes, if the stay is getting better or worse either.)

    The owner of the house I’m renting marked the door with stamped guidelines, such as “Please keep our house neat and clean…God Bless” and pinned “Carry your shoes and slippers” into the edge of the stairs. Regardless of these colored handwritings, the house is old and filled with wandering sadness. Or ignorance, that I’m really uncertain.

    For nearly seven months, I have entertained the possibility of leaving for someplace like Cebu, the farthest away I can go and still speak Bisaya, and wonder if, in such a short flight, I can sleep and wake up as the genuine person I’ve longed to be, a fine sweet-tempered 20 year old boy who can just sing, laugh, or cry ecstatically whenever he feels like it, to hell with the shrinking world.
    Continue reading »
POR PABOR PAPA Journal of Arian Rey Tejano Avatar Logo "Sometimes he speaks in a kind of tender dialect of the death which causes repentence, of the unhappy men who certainly exist, of painful tasks and heartrending departures. In the hovels where we got drunk he wept looking at those who surrounded us, the cattle of poverty. He lifted up drunks in the black streets. He had the pity a bad mother has for small children. He moved with the grace of a little girl at catechism. He pretended to know about everything, business, art, medicine. I followed him, I had to!" - Christopher Hampton

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