Don’t upset the mainstream, he’d say.
Art for art’s sake, I think out loud.
Unless I end up whoring
at the art house
with rusted springs
at cushioned seat poking
scooped up gossips.
Eavesdropping
some private lives.
I let his copulation of idea
with tried and tested formula
stink like the stench of urine
of those who had chewed
and vomited yesterday’s
mulch of cinematic nostalgia.
And feces too. And fetuses
aborted prematurely
at the conference table.
That goddamn scriptwriter!
He wants a Truman show
for peeping Toms’ and Marilyns’
who think life can fit in a box. Squared
wrapped in a gift, 24/7 in public
with the world half sleeping
and half awake. Eyes wide shut.
Well, everybody wants to be
porn stars. And millionaires too.
Sixty seconds to fame. Or shame.
I twist fate and turn some coincidence.
Making them laugh. Making them cry.
People love some happy ending
but of course, I knew the bitter score.
I’ll reveal on a one-on-one interview.
Facts gyrate around a pole dance.
Truth hides in darkness, so dim the lights.
I clip a scene here and there,
sanitized some bits
like clean sequences of plot
I trim into fairytales-
reality cloaked in dreams.
Then, there’s the director’s cut.
I have hidden something
here in a draft, unpublished.
I create an imaginary character
of the self I would never be.
I plagiarize someone else’s life.
Solitude Amidst the Maddening Crowd
His Past Smells
Posted in Books, Current Affairs, Literature, Memoirs, Philosophy, Poetry, Politics, Relationships, Social Commentary, Society, tagged above, across, air, all, angel, armpit, ashame, bad, belong, broken, buses, buy, care, cars, childhood, churn, clothesline, complain, cough, cover, cranny, crowd, cruel, detergent, ditch, dreams, dry, dump, earth, else, emanate, empty, every bone, exhale, fart, feeling, fish, flag, flap, fly, fortune, garbage, gift, grease, grime, he, heaven, hill, hope, hopping, hours, images, innocence, life, line, linger, little, locomotion, long, memory, money, mound, mud, neighborhood, nook, nor, occasional, odor, One, past, pavement, perfume, pierce, poem, poetry, poison, poverty, promise, putrid, rag, rice, rise, sanitize, sauce, scavenged, scent, sewer, skin, slow, smear, smell, smog, sniff, someone, sour, squeeze, stale, steam, sting, stink, stomach, street, suds, sun inhale, survival, swarm, tatter, throb, today, trash, turn, urchin, walk, wet, whiff, yesterday on March 11, 2012| 4 Comments »
His past smells of a ditch
drying up its putrid stink
as stale as the street air.
It belongs to a smoggy neighborhood.
In the memory of tattered rags
flapping like flags on the clothesline.
As if dreams can be scavenged
out of the hilly mounds
of garbage, dumping its gifts
of someone else’s trash turning
into someone else’s fortune.
No one cared about armpits
getting wet and sour for hours,
as long as the bad odors
can promise him little money
to buy fish sauce for rice.
Sniffing heaven on earth-
little angel never complaining
about life, about the linger-
of those occasional whiffs
from the broken sewer.
Nor the rising sting of steam
emanating from his broken skin
pierced by the cruel sun.
Nor inhaling the dry cough of cars
and buses farted poison.
The way he exhaled yesterday
walking on a pavement slow,
feeling the throbbing locomotion
churn on his empty stomach.
A street urchin squeezing the crowd
like a fly hopping on a hope
above the grease and grime
that smeared a childhood.
He won’t cover the past
with today’s perfume
nor sanitize its images
in suds of detergent.
He’s not ashamed
of the scent of his past-
the smell of poverty
that swarmed his innocence
and have walked
the muddy line across
the nook and cranny
of his every bones.
He survived them all.
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