Collected Dreams, Longing and Scattered.

"I dreamt of the cold sweetness of her kiss. Only to wake with darkness on my cheek. And stories where she had slept." Drop a line. Share your sense of mind. Tell me something raw.

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Perhaps I had it all wrong when I asked why a human would so audaciously project itself as God.

Thus, God became man-made and in turn, unauthentic. The better question, I've come to realize is:

Why would God so choose to delimit itself as human?

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When a woman relearns of love...

I want only to fuck you

Not to make love. It is too early.

Only to fuck.

No pretenses. No grace.

No poignancy. No distillation.

I want only to taste you.

This i my womanhood as it ravages

In its most savage form.

I’ve come to realize:

There is no civility in love, my darling.

Only a taking

And a being taken.

Only bullheadedness

And surrender.

I wonder, 

Are my knees ready to kneel?

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Homeless Loveletters. For B.

Fantasy desists in the face of this new delusion: you. To love you. Or perhaps, the fantasy is sharper. Clearer. Touched by reason and thus, enforced by it as Tokien had once claimed. You have taken my imagination away. And yet you have been the pivotal dream, the central image. You. Your face in the darkness. I cannot undo.

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Longing in the -Ber Months, An Excerpt

I miss you the way I miss September:

When monsoons make their way into our beds.

Us, wet between torrents;

Ebbing and flowing chests,

Drunk with rain

But insatiably, helplessly

Thirsty

Still.

I miss you the way I miss October:

When we first said I love you and meant it,

Realizing how beautiful it must be to fall,

Like leaves, old and golden,

Giving way to their natures,

Gracefully,

And if they can- we said to ourselves-

Why can’t we?

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For REX. from The Hands that Guide Me Home. A collection in progress.

Touch had never been the medium of my senses. I was always too calloused and jaded to understand the language of pressure points and softness and goosebumps, erecting. But then, i remember the feel of your hands pressed against the small of my back, fingers tracing the outlines of my hips and I know, then and there, how I, in my fullness, can belong in the palm of your hands.

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In a State of Suspended Un-brokenness

There is a poem stuck in my throat,

Hanging between open lips

And charred lungs,

One that comes with dirty verses:

On endings and beginnings,

Your name,

dangling on the precipice following "I love you"

As well as preceding it.

Darling, we were always on edge, weren't we?

What makes this cliffhanger any different?

The jump is the same

The scars on our knees

The bone-breaks

The sweet wind

And the hard crash that's somehow

softened by a merciless time.

Why now? Of all the days to postpone falling,

Of all the days to misconstrue tastes that used to be so solid.

To confuse love for goodbyes

Simply because tastebuds cannot tell the difference.

Jaded pulses had burnt their capacity for recognition.

"Ay kabaraka, hija" you tell me.

"The ocean can wait for our mouths to learn new languages.

We do not have to dive right in."

So I wait as well.

Preparing my knees

With euphemisms that slowly shed itself,

Revealing bits of an intensity

Distilled in cowardly sentences.

Never the bold declarations

Never the passionate crudeness of

Unrefined, unpolished confessions.

Our throats itch.

We open our mouths…

…

…. ... …

… ………….

Nothing spills--

No scars on our knees.

No broken bones.

No strong winds.

Why, then, do I ache?

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I'm tired of loving with sarcasm...

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Honestly, tell me...

How do you flirt? What is your love language?

I’d like to hear your thoughts:

What turns you on? What makes you break out of this culture of self-confinement? How do you touch, and touch deeply and intensely? How do you love?

I want to understand the mysterious art of coquetry.

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I am not afraid

of my bulging stomach.

I like the way it reminds me of my fullness,

My slopes that turn limb and torso into playground.

I welcome you to play in my swing set. 

There is room enough.

See, I am a whole note. 

Sharp. 

&

Protruding.

I’ve stopped looking at flat lines with such longing.

I know now, 

I’ve got too much pitch. Too much life

And my beat:

My beat is Aretha with her lungs that can breathe in the world

And expel it as a poem.

I am not afraid of my body.

Not anymore.

I welcome my space. 

I welcome my outline.

This is my fearlessness.

My ferocity.

My body is my temple.

I have god inside me.

I am learning to love it.

That is all I need to know about holiness. 

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2/2/2016

Today is a Monday. I’ve just heard news about a relative who never woke up.

Something about dreaming. Or maybe liking the dream too much. Or was it a heart attack? [Synonyms the lot of them].

I began to read a poem by Lourd de Veyra illustrating the sense or senselessness of the word Wasak. (I never could tell which is which).

It touched me deeply without understanding a single thought.

Maybe that’s the thought of it: Wasak. The Onomatopoeia, the fleshy word giving flesh substance.  And at the same time denying it.

I get it. But the taking escapes me.

It doesn’t matter:

The sky is blue and beautiful.

Somewhere overhead, at 10 am, the moon refuses to hide itself.

Perhaps, the sun and the moon have their little getaways when God isn’t looking.

Somewhere, they sneak into a motel and make star babies.

Somewhere, they ride the back of Apollo’s pick up and kiss sloppily, burningly. As is the only way they know how.

The tides are their witness. They run drunk and wild with this antiquarian longing. This fever.

So naturally, somewhere, a house was blown over by a surprise mega wave. 3 were injured.

No one saw the high tide coming, the same way:

Neither of the Capulets nor the Montagues foresaw dying as a consequence of denied love. The way he drank poison. The way she stabbed herself. And the way everybody called it tragically beautiful.

Today, just like any other day. Someone is drilling the ramp to our garage. The sound of metal bashing concrete, now, lulls me.

The feel of shaking Earth and violence, lulls me.

I’ve got to re-watch clockwork orange. I put it in my TO DO LIST:

(Along with other things):

Listen to Coltrane’s In a Sentimental Mood,

Bathe the dog,

Make love,

Read more Lourd de Veyra Poems.

Do the groceries.

My little banalities.

Today, something is sneaking up on me. I wait for it to yell surprise. I look at my corners, double take, keep the door open. Whatever’s suppose to come hasn’t come yet.

I wonder when it will get here. I wonder what shape it will take.

I get a phone call:

The wake is somewhere from Green Meadows to St. Peter Parish or maybe none of those places.

The details loom over me and disappear, like the forgetting of a name, or a word, or something that used to be so close and familiar…

Digging itself beneath other things.

Hiding in the sand.

Laughing cheekily.

Until everyone else forgot about playing hide and seek. Left the word buried, without air or warning or light.

It kept waiting in the dark.

Is that where we all go, you think?

Somewhere on the beach. Our toes pointing out from wet, cool sand beneath dry heat?

Waiting?

With the words and the names and the things we’ve forgotten?

The socks at the far end of the cabinet.

The pen behind the desk.

The toys on the top shelf.

And we said once how we loved them.

Memory and time walk into a bar…

And we all wait for the punch line.

Who comes out triumphant?

Time hits memory over the head with a chilled beer bottle.

Memory laughs.

And the joke still doesn’t reveal itself.

But we all laugh as well.

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Ivy, in the bedroom

Ivy was a childhood friend.  We were two peas that outgrew the pod so we made homes out of other places like windowsills, and rooftops, and the crevices, which light had forgotten about: these spaces between bedsheets, and in the shadows of sweet gardens, and inside old holes you’ve given up to time to fill. She was nature personified and she knew how to play with soft things like flesh and catty eyelashes and lip stains on cheeks. And she did so without mercy, with a harshness like bright flashing light, and thunder and dark storms coming without warning. She was tempestuous that way. See, she can be cruel in her own delicateness, the way roses can be cruel with their thorns, despite the silk of their petals, their hypnotic beauty as you pluck at them, wittingly daring the prick that might follow. She had always known the poisons she came with and yet she was always so eager to grip stones with her tender embrace and love them without reservation. We were in my bedroom one night. Lying like old ghosts that had remembered the warmth of new, crisp blankets. Talking without bashfulness. At ease in our own skins. She said let’s play a game, quite naively, quite innocently. I said okay. You inherently, almost always say okay to any of her whims. That night we wanted to understand boundaries and distance and spaces where only breath can get in between. Her skin was goosebumps away from my lips. It was going to be one of those times I might learn something. The sort of things that make nuns slap rulers around without compassion or mercy– if they ever caught you scribbling them down, the sort that makes principals blush even though they’re the sort of stuff you should really be learning about. She said: Don’t move. Dare me the way you dare your men. Look at me intently. I flinched awkwardly: neck tense, breath heavy. She asked: Am I making you uncomfortable? I laughed a big “fuck yeah” rolling in my laughter. She smiled. She was testing me. She had always been an essay question: short but profound, forcing the smarts right out of you. She said: tell me about space and bodies and the meanings we make with the two of them. I said: You want a lecture on semiotics right now? Thinking back, the statement was worth a thousand face palms. She was just too vixen, too fox that wits become lost names on the top of your tongue. Everything was reflex: impulsive and sharp, kicking and blunt. She laughed again. She said: Teach me daringly the way you teach your lovers. I never knew where she had gotten the idea of my lovers, or the way I used to love so carelessly and generously. I went nearer. Taking the challenge with a clumsiness that put my reputation to shame. Fumbling with my breath, her face an eyelash away from mine. There were gulps in my throat I tried to swallow like hiccups but my throat never knew how to keep secrets. She went closer, wanting to understand the feel of nothing- the elusiveness of closeness, of electrons charging our skins away from each other. Pushing like force because our poles matched too much. See, we never even touched. But that night: My rib cage was a piano and she was nothing but fingers, tracing like sunlight. And breath is a knife that can slice at closed nerves and dormant pulses until they learn the holiness of shy, clumsy gasps. See, I’ve never known how neck hairs could take to breath so sensitively the way some flowers opened at night’s touch—ferocious, hungery and impulsive for the dark. Her throat crackled and laughed at the mockery of my blown kisses. Like tired bones that remembered the taste of water. It was then I learned that there are approximately a thousand miles of skin on my stomach when she traces them with her eyes. And her spine… her spine is a runway that catches the flight of my fingertips. We were a construction process, designing the buildings that rise and crumble between the lines of our skin. We were alleyways and one-ways and traffic jams that wanted to know the map of our nerves: where thighs end, where woman begins. She clung the way ivy clings, the way she was meant to cling. I had always known: There was poison in the way she squeezes you tight and promises never to let go. But there was also a sorry in her poison. A longing to be called a rose or something else in bloom and in wanting. Something pink and ripe. There was something more to her tendrils that coiled and curled: a delicateness, like soft puddles that longed to distill the hues of a vain sky. So I welcomed her weeds in my bedroom and we itched, quite happily, the whole of the night

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Rosetta, In the Kitchen

I used to think she could burn toast with her hips: the way she shook it with such abandon, such ruthlessness, such lack of care and grace it was almost, oxymoronically elegant. She had never understood her own voluptuousness. She was too motherly, too thin, too plank to understand how lithe branches can still hold wild, ripe mangoes in the summer, in the heat—the sweetness of her own tenderness evading her.

She said she was too stone to be soft the way young girls were soft, the way they let their hair down, the way they trace their stomachs with their open palms when the music is just right—the beat pumping wildly.

So she cut her hair short, hid her hips and danced just the way she wanted to: in the comfort of the kitchen with roast singing in the background. And no strangers around.

She said: Teach me to be sexy.

I grabbed the mayonnaise from her hands, pretended I knew how. I slid behind her with such bashfulness, my too cool for love façade peeling itself away, the way she peeled potatoes: swiftly and in smooth strokes. As though her hands were knife blade- agile, sharp, and magic.

We made heat that night and if stoves could blush they would—to the drumming in our chests, the frictions in our tango.

Except,

There was no music around: only a different sort of beat, a different sort of humming,

The sort sailor’s sing to in the middle of the night when sirens are awake and the captain is sleeping,

The sort that movies try to bleep out because it was too suggestive

The sort that mothers never understood even though they had invented it in their youth.

Things I learned that night:

(1) The small of her spine was electric.

(2) And my fingers were ice cubes tracing goosebumps, millimeters piling into rolling shoulder blades. Mountains on her collar bones.

(3) She was five feet six inches of sunlight. Too much wave-break. Too much cool. And too much liquid.

(4) I knew. I was always the clumsy one.

(5) She was the fox I kept dreaming about when I thought wet dreams were still sins. And that,

Jam can make the sweetest rhythm when used just right.

She traced me like a children’s book. Her body connecting the dots. Us, making a line out of zigzags and hip-hop and a little bit of blues.

I understood:

How inches of nape can go a long way for fingers that know how to strut.

How knees can grind

How bones can be soft the way eyelashes were soft, and curling.

How calf muscles can flex in the moonlight like no man’s bicep ever could.

And we were strangers to this love song. We were virgins that didn’t know the difference between catcall and flirt. But see, the dance erased the boundaries.

There was only grooving, and swaying.

Only jazz hands and smiling.

Closed eyes and wine glasses, rattling.

She was a tall drink of water in the July heat. I was twin popsies, melting.

As the ice cream man hummed its tune.

We were school girls in the school yard, elapsing time.

My back was her playground. My hips were a seesaw. Hers was a swing.

And we played peek-a-boo until we were children again. Soft again.

And innocent.

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Flowers a.k.a. my future sleeve tattoo once parents approve (upon intercession of cosmic entities, of course)

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Above all these words, perhaps, you are poetry. That is what I think suites you the most. The most adequate endearment- if you can treat it as an endearment. Something abstract, sentimental, and charged: A feeling distilled in the ruse of a verse, that is beyond the language of lips for only pulses know its sacredness, only goose-bumps and skin and tingling spines and other tongues.

Homeless Love Letters, For K.

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7 Dirty Words, an excerpt

She left me without the promise of return. I couldn’t help but remember Anaïs Nin, her diaries, the way she talked about this writer: Henry. He was angry and vivacious and brutally honest. He wrote that way too, with caricatures. Anaïs Nin said it took a soft and yet stirring anger, a pain to make caricatures. She could not do them simply because she was full only of compassion. He wrote caricatures the way madmen would rave about worlds ending. He used to caricature his wife. This seemingly gypsy woman he could not posses. Her mystery sustains perhaps his displeasure and yet I believe it strengthens his love, keeps the courtship alive, although to him it diminishes it—places a wedge between them. He spoke of her like a cartoon: something twisted and fictitious, multicolored and phantasm-like: something he could not gauge or capture, which was pure torture for a man who wanted to unravel and know the answers to everything. It takes anger to caricature. I thought perhaps, I wanted to caricature her. Describe her as over-calloused, as misleading and toxic. I wanted to expound her, distort her into something: a thorn that barges in when roses are at their ripest bloom. I tried to write her like a villain. But every time I constructed the memory of her leaving: her hips swinging like the door, her slender legs strutting, the line of her back flowing tenderly and yet with heaviness as she moved towards something else… someone else… She was no villain. She was a woman. And I could not caricature her simply because of my anger and its fullness. Anger after all is a hardened affection that had misplaced itself. Anger is a softness, a vulnerability, a sorrow that tries to stand tall, that tries to remain strong in the vestiges of a crumbling home. And there was still love in my anger. Nevertheless, dissolution must come. It is, after all, inevitable simply because our love can only mimic our condition and we are innately mortal. So dissolution came and it struck without warning. Losing someone tastes like stale cigarettes and bitter gourd. It feels like a hole being drilled inside your teeth, this gnawing sensitivity, this liminal, transient hollowness. Like there are spaces where soft, lovely things used to be. Like there are no more flowers and you notice the lack of color and spring everywhere. We’ve come to our end. The end is essentially harmless. The phrase is a trope, a ruse. It does not sting or throb or leave marks. It’s not the end that leaves an aftertaste, a dryness in your mouth. No. The last and dirtiest word of all was goodbye. She had said it first. And I didn’t know how to say it back. At first, I evaded the word, circled around it, said other things like: I’ll see you around. But eventually, the word grew on me, the way bitter tastes and heat becomes second nature to an adventurous tongue. Time filled it with meaning until I no longer had to say it over and over through different euphemisms. I stuck to the word and I committed to its meaning. I remember the shapes of her body as it moved away. I remember the hole she had left, the waves of her scent, her stains on my poems… And I said goodbye with finality. Without promise. And then, I washed my mouth clean. 

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Dear Stranger (self included),

These are some things I’ve come to realize recently and perhaps it is time for them to breathe air in public space simply so they can realize new shapes:

Living is elusive because of our tendency to misconstrue time. How we postpone now because we think it can potentially repeat itself. How there are a thousand now’s that are spread before us simply waiting for us to choose them, how they are always, always ours—within reach and therefore not worth the effort of extensors unfolding themselves to grasp moments that may or may not present itself tomorrow. There’s no immediacy for it.

We can be so farsighted for a people that often fear this distance and yet create a culture out of it.

How we can be so private and contained disallowing the expansion of living fully because of our apprehensions of the future.

For the record: You’re fine. Your past, present and future selves are all doing fine.

See, the same childhood myth applies: You can be anything and everything you want to be, no matter where you stand now (this wobbly, flimsy space of wishful thinking). We are that malleable-- despite our fears of everything and anything seeming too big and too loose for us to fit in.

Being too heavy. Too this and too that: Our miscalculated estimates of excesses and lacking.

Just take it one step at a time. Simple steps. Clumsy feet can still fill shoes with a fierce resourcefulness. And we are, perhaps, as a species, resourceful.

Fill your dreams and allow yourself to feel the expansion of yourself as you begin to realize a deeper understanding of life’s fullness. We can breathe in a lot of the world despite being- essentially- specs floating within the sands of time, unraveling and rolling in the patterns of this sand.

Also keep in mind that taking steps may seem linear but they’re not. Take these small steps. Take them with patience and determination. Take them with a ferocity that dares the discomfort of ambiguity. Take them slowly if you must but take them with an unyielding conviction. Because in the taking, one moment just might surprise you—this moment where you will suddenly realize that you have become these everythings and anythings you’ve initially set out to be. Because our feet can be elusive as well and the distance they can walk, the manner in which they choose to walk it. It just takes this moment wherein we finally see the transformation: this before and after: these selves merging and disappearing into a new form: one which you’ve chosen for yourself hopefully with a savage contentment.

My darling, with a firm resolve and a habituated tenderness, I dare you: expand. Shed the skins you’ve once thought of as protection. New ones will grow. Your soul will not be naked or cold.

After all: YOLO.

Might as well live up to the hype of the trending abbreviation. But do so with presence. Do so with care.

Sincerely.