Love Has Wings

You live in the east of the ocean
And I, west of the mountains
And yet with a providential swiftness
We are lead willingly by glad wings
Across the vast continental
expanse

Weaving through latitudes and longitudes
Crossing antemeridians, past post meridians
Through the portals of datelines
With unerring precision speeding
Towards an appointment of kindred hearts

Oceans and mountains made near
By mystic signals winging through space
Hearing familiar and loved voices clearly
Seeing with fond heart a loving face
Oh how fortunate man is for such cleverness

Erewhon

The roads we have trod
Never become familiar
The dusts of alleys remain
Pasted on our worn out sandals
Unknown and unnamed lanes
With signs marred by graffiti
All market places have fetid smells
Cemeteries grow same crosses
Churches mere crumbling stone
People with gauzed-up faces
Meet you with whitened eyes
It's frightening to feel silent footfalls
And hear blankness of corners
As we walk past shadowy gaps
In a broad avenue of blurs
Nowhere in time nor place

Glass Walls

I'm always a pace behind
Can't seem to get going
Each step is one taken back
My nose is pressed on the present
A moth fluttering against a glass pane
Behind a flickering, tantalizing flame

The wind blows hard behind me
I feel it prod and urge me forward
Yet with all its gale-like impetus
Nary an inch did it move me on
Oh what a cruel destiny decreed
To be denied even just a step ahead

How sad not to know tomorrow
Only the past to be relived over
Like a seascape without horizons
Or a flourish of buds never to bloom
Refused the solace of improving one's lot
How tiresome to know that it will be
Yesterday again and yet again

Love's Road Map

How familiar the road towards my affection,
A clearly mapped out route without meanders.
The stately mango tree starts the walk,
Then the old stone house before making a left
Past the ancient stone-walled well by the gate,
The moss covered azotea will loom into view and
I will be there, waving to greet your coming.
How unerringly we find each other in familiar
Country lanes and land marks constant as the sun.

A Midsummer Reverie

A tower jutted out from a sun-browned hill,
Seemed like miles from where I walked,
Yet its shimmer beckoned with an alluring light
Daring me on to venture the daunting climb.

What awaits in yonder hill? A rampart of historic note
An ancient ruin wherein mystic runes may be found,
Or maybe just a pile of crumbled relics in dire neglect?
Curiosity and fancy took the better of me so I trod.

On a child's delightful wings I climbed,
Tortuous trek towards a goal of uncertain discoveries.
Finding the Grail, or an infidel king's scimitar seized.
Oh what noble finds and deeds atop a sun-browned hill

But at the top nothing but the mockery of small birds and
The harsh sting of hot dust borne by a midsummer wind

Somnolence

It's the fourth time he woke up today
His pillow flattened and streaked with silver gray
Groping for his glasses relying more on touch than sight
He reached his chair now rocking, and he tottering


I remember his manly poise, the arrogant strut
Acclaimed by those who sought favor and gain
I wondered if anyone then was truthful in praise
Would there be a man now to show a similar faith?


As he bent to pull up the warmer to his lap
Cursed a little the pain that stabbed his side
Finding relief and sliding into oblivion again
His fifth even before the dark of twilight came

A Crying Sham

A woman weeps and intones a harrowing dirge
A loved one lost, she holds on to flitting images
Suffering more than she can weep, needing more tears
To wash away memories now encircling like gadflies

Others obliged and shed tears in sympathy
Rubbed their eyes out of conventional propriety
Snorting and clearing noses from welling mucus
Scented hankies now mushed and dampened

Teardrops cause ripples on Niobe's pool
Rush like tidal swells on indifferent strands
Surprising sand dunes helpless from the rush
Useless wrath for an unknown woman grieving

Unfounded tears gather into streams and torrents
Furious and raging, Oh what sham! Oh what hypocrisy!

Dear Heart

Today I conspired with my heart
To erase the memories, the thoughts
Of the thrill that quivered my toes
The benign warmth that filled my chest
At the sound of her distinct footfalls
And the electric aura of her presence
That sent my heart and I in panic

No more of these, dear heart
My mind will not be addled
And my knees will not buckle
But heart, promise me to keep your cool
As for me, my instincts are not to be trusted

How Little We Know

Like the storied boy combing the strand of a vast ocean,
With the shoreward Habagat slamming my blushed cheeks,
I wondered about the precise undulation of tidal waters.
In my palm shifty sands fall off between my fingers,
Calculating how many handfuls of these make creation,
Determinedly guessing, trying to grasp reasons for it all.

It is enough that I was a witness to God's grandeur
All the beauty of this world streamed through my eyes
It sufficed that I sensed His majesty, not thought it,
Felt His love rather than understood it.
He made an awesome and glorious world in my time,
But, then the world was not that beautiful at all times
I do not need to know why, really I don't. Do you?

Garden of Evil

Little kernels, hard and rough
I planted them in the shade of the stone heap
They were seeds of spite sown to cling
On walls of old hurts and unforgiven wrongs

The little stalks pushed their bulbous heads
Unsightly growths on hard ground
Grotty green brown stains on the garden floor
Malevolent seedlings with haughty bearings

The fiendish vegetation thrived in dark nooks
Unhappy for the sun to touch its leaves
The tiny branches had threatening spines
And oh, a redolence not known by any man

Each morning I went out to see
How the dark of night have nurtured
The budding menaces they were to be
Verdant mottled green now covered the wall

I espied little beady growths in between
Hairy spines, crinkly leaves and rough branches
The evil flora was in bloom and I was appalled
A disgusting sight of clustered monstrosities

There I stood unmoving, scared of what I have sown
Primal evil seem to creep out of the crevices
As if taken by a demonic spell, knees weak, I knelt
And pondered on what I have sown and reared

Hours passed and like a mesmerized prey
I suffused a panic burgeoning from my chest
And sought help in prayer firmly resolving
A change of heart and to uproot the evil sown

I uttered a fervent penitent's prayer
Determined to stunt the evil growth spawned
Before the coming of the dark of night
Where it finds sustenance for evil to evolve

With desperate haste I took a rusty hoe from the shed
Strong determined arms struck with impunity
At the evil plant of my own design and doing
Minced and crushed before the fading of the light

A Mariner's Homecoming

Be ready for some rough and tumble, my love.
Tonight I come as the wild man
Home from the mythic seas of yore.
I sailed the Doldrums and the dreaded triangle
Through the Somalian pirates' trapping lanes
Have survived the harshness of tropical storms
And the numbing cold of the Arctic waters.

Be ready for some rough and tumble, my love.
The wild man from the bowels of Neptune's depths
Will be back from perilous peregrinations.
I have crossed the River Styx on credit,
Navigated the perilous gap of Scylla and Charybdis,
Braved the inhospitable Eastern ports of call
Denying the clawing allure of the seediest fleshpots

Be ready for some rough and tumble, my love.
Home is the mariner from the wind tossed seas
Escaped the insidious curse of the Albatross
Enduring the loneliness of being in distant climes
Away from the comforts of connubial and familial bliss
Steeling the heart from the gnawing anxieties of absence

Be ready for some rough and tumble, my love.
Forgive me for I will be a wild and lusty Golem
Deprived of the heat of your torrid embrace.
The fury of my pent up desires will rise to the brim
And will hiss like a flaming caldera, a crucible to weld
Anew the ardor of our love made cold by callous seas

A Lover's Complaint

Never have I scrimped on the love
I bestowed on you from the start.
How now you doubt my ardor?
Even the gods would have envied
The delights I have placed by your side,
They were no less than the fealty they exacted.
Would you have asked for my soul?
But it was yours before you thought of it
The residue of my being willingly ceded
All for the dream that I might dwell
With you in an uncertain Paradise
Only fools are destined to know.

Mortal Notions

My cousin Del was obsessed by death
Saw maggots playing on tattered shrouds
And scattered rib cages topped by meatless skulls
Feigning smiles to those who looked
Tulip blooms growing from the eye holes
Searching intently at a seemingly infinite sky
Relishing morbid scene after morbid scene
Enjoying the thought of lying in state
Amidst mourning kin and friends

A moment of recognition to be seized
A time to be honored and praised, no matter
Dispel the fear to be hollow of bone,
The dreaded loneliness of insensate existence,
The hardness of the fleshless,
The disconsolation of the ungrieved

Good Morning Vietnam

On the curb of Don Du Street
Sprawled early breakfast eaters
Men in undershirts, women in crumpled aodai
Slurping urgently at blue and white pho bowls
I am reminded of young urchins in Rizal Avenue
With scavenged sustenance and relief in plastic bags
On the moist pavements, shivering, relief, shivering again

The early yellow fog in Saigon is no different
From the Manila one, only clammier, heavier
It rises from the ground assailing the nostrils
Faces of curb people anywhere have the same blankness
A look of silent desperation and fatalistic resignation
Slurping pho, refilling blue and white bowls
Spitting out blobs of unwanted off-taste morsels
Missing my newly shined shoes as I jumped
They laughed at my surprise and at seeing such sport
The hilarity of the scene evaporated into the damp air
Rose and vanished into the skyline of electric posts
And into the row of rusted shop awnings
In an early morning stroll in Don Du Street in Saigon