Inconsequential, 3am thoughts: 

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3:56 am  •  30 March 2012  •  view comments

I run away from everything that causes me to feel angry, sad, uncomfortable, insecure - in other words, I run away from things that I don’t want. But then, when there’s something that I want, I relentlessly find my own way of getting it. So, I figure, since one compensates for the other, it’s not so bad, is it? Right? FML

I am such a gemini.

6:57 pm  •  26 March 2012  •  view comments

Well Tumblr, we meet again.

On the eve of the fifth month of not posting here, I decide to go through my Tumblr blog. I really didn’t plan it, it just came to me - somehow, it felt like a natural thing for me to do, even when I haven’t been on here since October of last year. 

Yes, I didn’t want to go on here for very particular reasons - but I don’t want to be so honest/revealing here. But to be clear, I’m glad everything’s okay now. I don’t feel so caved in anymore. I’m a lot happier. It’s like, taking out a somatic thorn from…somewhere. Everywhere. 

Admittedly, I feel relieved. But more than that, I’m extremely happy I have the friends I’ve lost back in my life. 

I’m a lot happier.

9:50 pm  •  19 February 2012  •  view comments

Then it is this simple. I felt the unordinary romance of
women who love women for the first time. It burst in
my mouth. Someone said this is your first lover, you
will never want to leave her. I had it in mind that I
would be an old woman with you. But perhaps I
always had it in mind simply to be an old woman,
darkening, somewhere with another old woman,
then, I decided it was you when you found me in that
apartment drinking whisky for breakfast. When I came
back from Grenada and went crazy for two years, that
time when I could hear anything and my skin was
flaming like a nerve and the walls were like paper
and my eyes could not close. I suddenly sensed you
at the end of my room waiting. I saw your back arched
against this city we inhabit like guerillas, I brushed my
hand, conscious, against your soft belly, waking up.

I saw this woman once in another poem, sitting,
throwing water over her head on the rind of a country
beach as she turned toward her century. Seeing her
no part of me was comfortable with itself. I envied her,
so old and set aside, a certain habit washed from her
eyes. I must have recognized her. I know I watched
her along the rim of the surf promising myself, an old
woman is free. In my nerves something there
unravelling, and she was a place to go, believe me,
against gales of masculinity but in that then, she was
masculine, old woman, old bird squinting at the
water’s wing above her head, swearing under her
breath. I had a mind that she would be graceful in me
and she might have been if I had not heard you
laughing in another tense and lifted my head from her
dry charm.

You ripped the world open for me. Someone said this
is your first lover you will never want to leave her. My
lips cannot say old woman darkening anymore, she
is the peace of another life that didn’t happen and
couldn’t happen in my flesh and wasn’t peace but
flight into old woman, prayer, to the saints of my
ancestry, the gourd and bucket carrying women who
stroke their breasts into stone shedding offspring and
smile. I know since that an old woman, darkening,
cuts herself away limb from limb, sucks herself white,
running, skin torn and raw like a ball of bright light,
flying, into old woman. I only know now that my
longing for this old woman was longing to leave the
prisoned gaze of men.

It’s true, you spend the years after thirty turning over
the suggestion that you have been an imbecile,
hearing finally all the words that passed you like air,
like so much fun, or all the words that must have
existed while you were listening to others. What
would I want with this sentence you say flinging it
aside… and then again sometimes you were duped,
poems placed deliberately in your way. At eleven, the
strophe of a yellow dress sat me crosslegged in my
sex. It was a boy’s abrupt birthday party. A yellow
dress for a tomboy, the ritual stab of womanly gathers
at the waist. She look like a boy in a dress, my big
sister say, a lyric and feminine correction from a
watchful aunt, don’t say that, she look nice and pretty.
Nice and pretty, laid out to splinter you, so that never,
until it is almost so late as not to matter do you grasp
some part, something missing like a wing, some
fragment of your real self.

Old woman, that was the fragment that I caught in
your eye, that was the look I fell in love with, the piece
of you that you kept, the piece of you left, the lesbian,
the inviolable, sitting on a beach in a time that did not
hear your name or else it would have thrown you into
the sea, or you, hear that name yourself and walked
willingly into the muting blue. Instead you sat and I
saw your look and pursued one eye until it came to
the end of itself and then I saw the other,
the blazing fragment.

Someone said this is your first lover, you will never
want to leave her. There are saints of this ancestry
too who laugh themselves like jamettes in the
pleasure of their legs and caress their sex in mirrors.
I have become myself. A woman who looks
at a woman and says, here, I have found you,
in this, I am blackening in my way. You ripped the
world raw. It was as if another life exploded in my
face, brightening, so easily the brow of a wing
touching the surf, so easily I saw my own body, that
is, my eyes followed me to myself, touched myself
as a place, another life, terra. They say this place
does not exist, then, my tongue is mythic. I was here
before.

(submitted by locketsandlovehearts) 

8:12 pm  •  9 October 2011  •  view comments

drunkendispatches:

Missed the last train to a gig last night and four cabs turned me down upon hearing of my destination. C’mon, guys, it’s Malugay, not the knife edge of the flat world where the sea pours into endless space.

I was pissed to the point that all I wanted to do was get pissed, and I sized up my savior cabbie to see if he’d let me do my drinking on the road. Because I’m classy like that. He was a small skinny guy who wore around his neck a plastic glow-in-the-dark rosary. I said a mental fuck it all, and asked him to kindly stop at any 7-11 we’d pass.

“Bakit, ma’am?” he asked, “Anong bibilhin niyo?” 
“Kaligayahan,” I said, and we laughed at the joke’s unintentional bawdiness and obvious misery.

That’s how I found myself chilling in the back of a taxi cab, swigging Emperador brandy straight out of a lapad, as my cabbie happily chattered on about his family’s cocaine smuggling business in Samar. I was, quite frankly, disappointed when he decided to talk about me instead. “Bigo ata kayo, ma’am,” he said, as he steered us past Guadalupe.

I took the gulp that officially halved the bottle’s contents and held it up for him to admire in the rearview mirror. “Paano mo alam?” I replied through the dizzying burn, “Kasi umiinom ako?” In the back of your cab. From the bottle. At ten p.m. At 60 kph down EDSA.

“Wala ka kasing chaser. May hagod pa naman sa lalamunan ang brandy.” 

He then put forth his fine theory that it does the heartbroken well to drink their liquor neat. The better to feel the burn, he said, because the more immediate pain rushing down your throat cancels out the one that sits in your chest day after day, gnawing dully inside your ribcage. “O baka masokista lang talaga ang bigo,” he mused to himself as we pulled up in front of my destination. “Parang penitensya, pero inom at hindi latigo.”

Seems about right. 

I handed him the fare, a candy bar, and many many thanks. As I staggered out of his cab, the near-empty lapad in hand, I made a mental note to stop punishing myself.

Thanks for telling me that in so many words, mister cabbie. I owe you gin. Neat, no chaser.

Evidently, Friday night has been eventful for a lot of people. 

I think I need to get myself in a taxi and hopefully find a taxi driver who’s as intelligent as this one. 

4:54 pm  •  11 September 2011  •  view comments

September 9, 2011. 4:35am.  

It’s been 21 days since we had that talk.

I’ve been drinking this whole week. (Hmm. “I’ve been drinking” would be more accurate.)

Today was really just the worst.

Sober three hours later:

Tomorrow (well, today actually) will be the last day that I will be drinking about you. It’s going to be epic. Because it’s going to be the last. It should be the last, I hope. Anyway, I’m going to just - stop it already. I need to do this. I’m just going to stop thinking about it. I need it. I need my life back, and this is just not healthy anymore. I need to be sane again. 

I think I’ve given myself enough time to be stupid, irrational, and pathetic.

Ang tanga tanga ko. 

I really shouldn’t have thought that what we had could be nothing more than being friends. So thank you for reminding me. Thank you.

butthisisnottheendiknow

4:50 am  •  9 September 2011  •  view comments

Kadalasan sa pag-ulan
gawain niyang
ipaguhit sa ‘tin ang isang araw
sa likod ng dinurungaw-ang Bintana
At dadalhin ko naman ang aking lapis,
na nagdurugo sa mga latay
ng aking kagat.
Yaon daw ang mga magpapahele kay Lilang
natatakot
sa kulog at kidlat
Guguhit naman ako ng isang bituing kasin-
liwanag
ng minimithi-mithing Pangarap.

Matapos,
ididikit niya iyon
sa likod ng bintana
at tatahan na si Lila
Habang amin naman itong
pinagmamasdang
unti-unting
nalulusaw
sanhi ng umaampiyas
na ulan;
waring umiiyak
ang papel ng araw.

Ako ngayon sa pagbabalik-tanaw
ay napapatanga
sa hindi inaasahang kalinangang
gumuhit ng aking kinabukasan.

12:58 am  •  31 August 2011  •  view comments

It takes an ocean not to break

4:49 am  •  24 August 2011  •  view comments

5:41 pm  •  21 August 2011  •  view comments

For someone who has a bad memory, I remember a lot of things.

12:27 am  •  15 August 2011  •  view comments

I wish you thought I was different

4:31 am  •  4 August 2011  •  view comments

People have been saying that I feel cold. My hands are frozen, my lips are dry, I shudder. I feel cold. Numb. It must be the weather, I would say, with a smile that suggests pretense. 

3:18 pm  •  31 July 2011  •  view comments

teachingliteracy:

(via ici-marie)

If I had my own apartment, I’m pretty sure it would look like this.

1:56 am  •  25 July 2011  •  view comments

Speaking in songs

12:44 am  •  16 July 2011  •  view comments

I live on the potential of what we could be. I live on the maybe kisses. I thrive off of the too close touches. I only know what we are, but we could be so great. We could change the world, bring the cosmos to our feet. We could be something, everything, nothing, air, blood, wine, insecurity, beauty, tragedy, maybe love. Our potential is my everything because without it, we are nothing.

#afternoonmusings

1:01 pm  •  9 July 2011  •  view comments