you & other hurricanes;

J; letter to your safe house & war zones.  

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some nights i have to drag my feet out of bed, say sorry at least three times to get something right. some nights it’s the storm, you know, that passes for a heart. some nights. what i’m saying is, tonight i want you to know somebody remembered you. how have you been?

[rolainejamela]

Pangil, Laguna PH 2016

Jamela Dabuet

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are we drowning yet

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BY LAND OR BY AIR Hanna Pettyjohn

at Silverlens Gallery, Makati City, PH.

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Jamela Dabuet, foreboding insignificance

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Do you attend spoken word poetry events? Hope we bump into each other some time.

wish i could, but never have. :< oh and i hope so, too!

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Good day J! We are White PH, a new documentary blogazine here at Tumblr. We are seeking for help from notable Tumblr bloggers in promoting our page. Our first issue will be published on July 2015. We hope you will help us in this creative endeavor. Thanks a lot! - White PH Team :)

Hello, dearies! Check these lovelies out! x

[inklustt]

Listen. Today is the day your stories will bleed into a hurricane. The first thing they noticed was this: you write love letters to strangers but never finish them, these apparitions a reminder of the unborn. (Sometimes, ideas remain nothing but.) And then: cracks on the mirror, a study on the silent anguish with which you always saw yourself. And then: your abridged history, packaged into pages and pages of confrontation with wayward trouble. The bullet hole through them, this implication of a soon-dead history. Listen. They call you a recollection of unforeseen anger, stranger to the gentle. What fools: to call the gun a tool, to regard the victim as the trigger. And when is a hurricane’s inward catharsis not a reflection of its shame?

Jamela Dabuet, the morning after

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I carry you like a bonfire ache postcarded into the sharpness of memory. God, the things we set fire to with no time to think (twice and) again. Here, your name, a stinging vagueness to it. A room ringing with suppressed ferocity. There is a familiar unease, ours, a perpetual hunger for the soft and not-burning. Ease into gentle, love, our storms will take care of the folding in on themselves. For now, a kindling. For now, we are undone and yet becoming.

Jamela Dabuet, for the burning

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The dream saw you waltz past the police’s yellow line, hands grasping history imagined. They tell me history is called such because it is his: here, now, a dream sees me named traceless. To speak of irrelevance here would prove irrelevant, all things a conspiracy gathering dust in a somewhere closet. You sit with your back hunched, as if sitting on it is another, a tragedy of the contemporary time. The yellow line breaks and we are again let in: this episode of shapeless things. Yet in all this vagueness we uncover each other like remnants of a poem robbed of form. Which is to say, this is a story when it bows out of beautiful. Which is to say, the dream should have seen us trapped inside the lines. Didn’t I always wish for longer nights?

Jamela Dabuet, decay improvised

[inklustt]

i. And unlike the faces of youth they plastered onto our memory, we remained motionless: drunk on the outline of history, our bodies gleaming with sweat and defeat. ii. There is heaviness here, sitting silently on floorboards that creak only with absence. iii. My heart is a homeless stranger foreseeing the end of the world. Or at least: the end of mine. iv. How do you crawl out of this trembling hunger, how do you grow into something gentler than human? v. Dear love, are we ever worthy. vi. Your body is a familiar landscape I am learning how to get lost in. I touch you and the homeless stranger kneels before a burning church, praying. vii. Child's play: strangers, still staggering strangers still, staggering strangers: still, staggering viii. Dear heavy silence, you make this home collapse into unapologetic stillness. ix. static (n.) My heart and hands pounding on what once was an open door. x. The church burns with hunger, still. Homeless stranger, your prayer digs an excavation in the chest, deep and unforgiving.

Jamela Dabuet, notes on heavy silence

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my words trip over their feet before being let out and i wear my heart like a bullet wound in my throat. this is not easy, but this is only. love, there are parts of me i have no name for, shapeless utterances of the wind. it is always a nameless struggle, a murder of the already dead. you cannot want this, cannot make a vow in a language you have yet to learn. i am the silence of hell's flames, the quiet collapse of a home weathered by time. do not come any closer. i've known drowning long before i set foot on the water.

Jamela Dabuet, ode to murder

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tonight, we are burning holes into a shapeless history, forging our namelessness into an otherwise dull lineage. deserted night, cloak us with your silence-- loud and heavy with impossible hunger, a landscape trembling with apology. for all that is hollow. for all that devours. for all that stings like the first few tears. beloved city, we set fire to comfort and certainty. make room for our loss. acknowledge this lack. let hollow space shake the history of all our pain.

Jamela Dabuet, a space for empty space

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I feel so ungrateful of myself. I feel so small. I feel caged. I feel filthy. I feel like I'm ugly. I feel like a bitch because that was what he told me. I'm becoming less of who I was before I loved him. I don't feel beautiful anymore. I am not happy. I am not myself but I love him so much. Is this okay, Jamela? Is this alright? Is this what loving feels like?

love, you will not be defined by the words that come out of his mouth. you are oceans & storms & skies. you are fire. if he cannot see that, if he cannot dance well around you, then he doesn’t deserve even a glimpse of all the universes inside you.

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3 things that my brain vehemently recognizes first: food, sex and the danger that your words do to my heart

let's be dangerous together. x

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#poetry #blackoutpoetry

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Act I: In the waiting room, heart in between chattering teeth: a prayer crushed before you can say it out loud. In the waiting room, blinding white light you pray would swallow you. In the waiting room, the chairs grow heavy with impatience. In the waiting room, faint footsteps fading. In the waiting room, slow disappearance. In the waiting room, you stir from a deep sleep with the violent trembling of a one-night lover. In the waiting room, desperation. In the waiting room, fleeting company. In the waiting room, gratitude for it. In the waiting room, cold touch mistaken for tenderness. In the waiting room, we are briefly comforted by false assurance. In the waiting room, we let our fingertips kiss cold surfaces in uncertain, hurried drum beats. Act II: In the waiting room, we kiss with certainty, our heartbeats unhurried. In the waiting room, there is assurance in our comfort, no matter how brief. In the waiting room, tenderness despite the cold touch. In the waiting room, gratitude still. Gratitude always. In the waiting room, acceptance of the transitory. In the waiting room, a declaration: In the waiting room are walls trembling before a perpetual lover. In the waiting room, slow recovery. In the waiting room, the sound of staying. In the waiting room, our touch grows heavy with knowledge. In the waiting room, you steal a ray of white light and swallow it. In the waiting room, a prayer heard yet unsaid: heart out in the open, bared to everything that swallows, even death.

Jamela Dabuet, white-walled acts and a palindrome