Flood

The hours tick like sound of punch cards

in this corporate machine treating

people like ants filed into ranks.

Mountain of paperwork  piled up

into sandbags. Bring it on, breach

my levee and let me drown forgetting.

 

Labor becomes a habit. Of numbness

and enjoying the suffering.

 

Like the sound of water from the tap

during a morning ritual in oblivion-

silence resonates like a hidden bell.

I wait until it fills the tub overflowing

down the rim and the clock raced

to the minutes rushing for the train.

 

Like the way the thinning soap glides

my body and the necessity to wash

away yesterday’s worry-rat smell-

that doomsday spell. A thank you note

and the termination letter. The downsizing

and the news keep rolling off the press.

People pick up some gossips to chew

and I am excited to blab my hunger.

 

Like the constant whining of the weekend

laundry, hoping detergents rinse the stains

and filth of missed deadlines. And overtime.

And I got the time to soak away thinking

about the next line to a poem, capturing it

before it goes down the drain. In limbo.

 

And I hope to keep afloat above it 

like a flotsam of dreams in a stream

carried away in the fading of days.

Figuring it out how to bailout myself 

like a straw in deep water.

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Strange Foreign Beauty

Silence is a little thread that binds the pages to a life-

closed book of chapters, passages, remembrances,

acquaintances, wanderlust, transience, oblivion. No one

speaks about the truth anymore. About

 

long hours. Segments, anecdotes, soliloquies,

echoes, nuances, ennui, memoirs, silhouettes

of things and places. Sights and sounds.

The mind and senses in harmony. Strange

 

foreign. Beauty hidden in a labyrinth frozen

in time. Never to be opened for a reading

and not for sale. Summer, winter, spring.

Fall.

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Paper Cuts

He stares at the frosted window,

dreaming of pigeons in flight.

Probing shadows in his oblivion

while the neighborhood is asleep

on this night bathed in blue light.

 

His heart refuses to surrender

to someone else’s handwriting.

 

He’s an outsider, perhaps a victim.

No one knows how he spent hours

imagining a beautiful world.

Unable to express, struggling

for a line to be understood.

 

An empty love bleeding sentences

that can never be written.

 

Such beauty, a flower in the field

belonging to some lucky bee.

Jealousy hits his innocence

like a knife to a man’s desiring,

leaving his wounds unhealed.

 

For the lady who reads letters

from some scented envelopes.

 

There is blood in the trash bin

and it does belong to him.

Among the crumpled sheets,

the fingerprints and drops of ink-

a memory of his scarred sanity.

 

How he endured the paper cuts;

this man’s life in blank pages.

 

The postman didn’t come today

and the letters were undelivered.

No one has foreseen death’s coming-

such as his knocking on doors

and opening of mailboxes, each morning.

 

They found a fountain pen in his hand,

motionless and still- in cold blood.

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The Bibliophile

His muffled voice breaks

the long stretches of silence

while his hand guided

young and untrained hands

practicing calligraphy.

 

Watchful and demanding precision

of copied texts exacting translation.

As he unbuckles the leathery tome

of secrets in a wooden chest.

Tradition, theology and religion.

Diaries, recipes, scientific notations.

 

Inventories, census, receipts.

Readings of narratives and poetry,

astrology, proverbs and magic spells.

The volumes of letters, last wills,

songs and words of blessings.

 

Spending hours and hours sitting

among the piles of pages digging

for clues and answers to mysteries.

The labyrinth of a culture. A treasure.

Each of the fragile pages a wealth

weightier than silver and the gold.

 

Piecing each fragment in a mosaic

mapping an ancient civilization

long forgotten. He believed, it was

here  in his hands lies the fiber, sinew

and muscle of generations of man-

the society is ought to remember.

 

So he became a warrior, obsessed

with the written word wielding

weapons of passion and wisdom.

With his small army of juvenile scholars

continuing an unpopular legacy.

 

Waging the classic battle against time,

earth bugs, heat, rot and decay

slowly finding its way like marauders

pillaging the essence of our humanity

into oblivion and brink of extinction.

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Burning Ladder Into Oblivion

"When in our lifetime it seems difficult, always say never give up."

I had the chance to visit a friend for their house blessing whose new house I have designed by hand sketches last May.  I am so happy and proud seeing her satisfied and fulfilled by the outcome as she told me that God has answered her prayers for this one.  And here comes the contradiction.  I may see my client’s satisfaction towards realization of their dreams but I am left in awe how my own dreams vanished on the surface.   

I, having no real properties to boast of, no house to improve on, no personal wealth or huge bank accounts to keep, left here sharing other people’s vision for the future.  What I have of me, are responsibilities to help my family knee-deep in debts, maintaining expenses for food and monthly bills such as rent, telephone and the utilities.  With a newly-wed brother who is jobless and having a new baby to feed; and the three kids my sister left for Dubai whose irresponsible husband had another wife.  And my going gets tougher day by day.

Life is a bitter sweet song. And each of us has its own equal share of unhappy events. I never blame these circumstances to other people. But I must have felt that I am predestined to take upon me this role as  a fulcrum for balance.   I am but just a man who have my own set of  dreams to push.  A set of aspirations that I keep tucked in my mind along this life’s rugged path.  And I don’t know where I could see my Howard’s End so sooner than  I can think of.

I have never felt so disappointed as before whenever I read stories on dailies wherein a medical graduate-topnotcher who chose to be a nurse to look for a greener pasture abroad, only to be duped by a recruiter promising them a better life and opportunities for career growth. The malady gets even stronger as I observe our government and intellectual people, powerless and inutile, to take necessary action to elevate our present country’s situation out of the growing bondages of poverty, unemployment and  self-serving opprtunities for only the  few and the privileged. 

I have sensed that its either we accept it or not, it is a senseless struggle.  And it doesn’t make sense dying in the streets protesting where our government cannot be summoned to answer its own wrongdoing.  It doesn’t make sense at all, pinning our hopes that our condition will ever be lifted up.  It is a plain moral and social decay we are now experiencing here.  Where the educated are self- destructing its own belief system and abandoning its long held sense of nationalism and sacrifice for the country. And I am one of them.

And if promises of better life can only be translated into muted words of anguish and hopelessness, I would never stop uttering it to the high heavens.  As our education had led us into a trap of make believe. And it is like a burning ladder into oblivion of only surviving in this self proclaimed game of chance and luck among millions, hoping to land a single decent paying job.

Maybe I cease to hope. That things can be altered in one’s lifetime. I have been one of the many faceless and nameless strangers who had given up. On this country.  On this circumstances.  Who will depart and never will come back. Maybe I can blame it on the weatherman, where sunshine never stops here.  Only rain.

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