Komachi on Being Alive

Because life is better lived than dreamed about. 

No. 658 

Ono no Komachi

Though I go to you

ceaselessly along dream paths,

the sum of those trysts

is less than a single glimpse

granted in the waking world.

The other versions of Whitney Houston's Greatest Love of All

Reminder to self: buy a huge mirror so I can hold a staring contest with myself.

  

Image taken from CJ de Silva's website

After Love

Derek Walcott

The time will come

when, with elation

you will greet yourself arriving

at your own door, in your own mirror

and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was your self.

Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart

to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored

for another, who knows you by heart.

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,

peel your own image from the mirror.

Sit. Feast on your life.

 

Mortality

Each day, we die a little. How do we keep some of ourselves from dying?

The Business of Love is Cruelty

Dean Young

It scares me the genius we have

for hurting one another. I’m seven,

as tall as my mother kneeling and

she’s kneeling and somehow I know

exactly how to do it, calmly,

enunciating like a good actor projecting

to the last row, shocking the ones

who’ve come in late, cowering

out of their coats, sleet still sparkling

on their collars, the voice nearly licking

their ears above the swordplay and laments:

I hate you.

Now her hands are rising to her face.

Now the fear done flashing through me,

I wish I could undo it, take it back,

but it’s a question of perfection,

carrying it through, climbing the steps

to my room, chosen banishment, where

I’ll paint the hair of my model

Bride of Frankenstein purple and pink,

heap of rancor, vivacious hair

that will not die. She’s rejected

of course her intended, cathected

the desires of six or seven bodies

onto the wimp Doctor. And Herr Doktor,

what does he want among the burning villages

of his proven theories? Well, he wants

to be a student again, free, drunk,

making the cricket jump, but

his distraught monster’s on the rampage

again, lead-footed, weary, a corrosive

and incommunicable need sputtering

his chest, throwing oil like a fouled-up

motor: how many times do you have to die

before you’re really dead?

Tagorre's Brink of Eternity

To hold forever in my hand. To make time my ally...

Brink of Eternity

Rabindranath Tagorre

In desperate hope I go and search for her 

in all the corners of my room; 

I find her not. 

My house is small 

and what once has gone from it can never be regained. 

But infinite is thy mansion, my lord, 

and seeking her I have to come to thy door. 

I stand under the golden canopy of thine evening sky 

and I lift my eager eyes to thy face. 

I have come to the brink of eternity from which nothing can vanish 

---no hope, no happiness, no vision of a face seen through tears. 

Oh, dip my emptied life into that ocean, 

plunge it into the deepest fullness. 

Let me for once feel that lost sweet touch 

in the allness of the universe. 

Milosz's Faith for the Faithless

To M:

Nights will be darker and starless as more rain comes. But the earth rotates tirelessly no matter how heavy the burden it carries. Rest assured that stars will come out soon. 

Faith

Czeslaw Milosz

The word Faith means when someone sees

A dew-drop or a floating leaf, and knows

That they are, because they have to be.

And even if you dreamed, or closed your eyes

And wished, the world would still be what it was,

And the leaf would still be carried down the river.

It means that when someone’s foot is hurt

By a sharp rock, he also knows that rocks

Are here so they can hurt our feet.

Look, see the long shadow cast by the trees;

And flowers and people throw shadows on the earth:

What has no shadow has no strength to live.

Cummings' Guide to Love

Fear is good. Fear means you have taken a chance, leapt out of your comfort zone. Fear could be an indication of progress. Of crossing over. Of coming alive.

let it go – the

e.e. cummings

let it go – the

smashed word broken

open vow or
the oath cracked length

wise – let it go it

was sworn to

go

let them go – the

truthful liars and

the false fair friends

and the boths and

neithers – you must let them go they

were born

to go

let all go – the

big small middling

tall bigger really
the biggest and all

things – let all go

dear

so comes love



Neruda's Thing about Labels

We struggle everyday. Not so much with the people around us but with ourselves. I'd like to think that we have a huge collection of faces. Some face we leave some place at some point. Some we'd like to keep but can't keep anymore. How many faces have you lost?

Too Many Names

Pablo Neruda

Mondays are meshed with Tuesdays

and the week with the whole year.

Time cannot be cut

with your weary scissors,

and all the names of the day

are washed out by the waters of night.

 

No one can claim the name of Pedro,

nobody is Rosa or Maria,

all of us are dust or sand,

all of us are rain under rain.

They have spoken to me of Venezuelas,

of Chiles and of Paraguays;

I have no idea what they are saying.

I know only the skin of the earth

and I know it is without a name.

When I lived amongst the roots

they pleased me more than flowers did,

and when I spoke to a stone

it rang like a bell.

 

It is so long, the spring

which goes on all winter.

Time lost its shoes.

A year is four centuries.

When I sleep every night,

what am I called or not called?

And when I wake, who am I

if I was not while I slept?

This means to say that scarcely

have we landed into life

than we come as if new-born;

let us not fill our mouths

with so many faltering names,

with so many sad formallities,

with so many pompous letters,

with so much of yours and mine,

with so much of signing of papers.

I have a mind to confuse things,

unite them, bring them to birth,

mix them up, undress them,

until the light of the world

has the oneness of the ocean,

a generous, vast wholeness,

a crepitant fragrance.

Bashō's hatless rainy days

Have you ever tasted the rain? When did you last get wet and didn't care?
Photo by Vincent Garrucho

It's the time of the year again when the heaven cries buckets and buckets of tears. Bashō's haiku embodies a daredevil attitude towards possibly getting wet defenseless.

“A cold rain starting…”

A cold rain starting

And no hat –

So?

Sulaiman's friend who liked a broken neck

I was looking at another video when the title of this poem caught my eye. Catchy title... Words in it, direct.

Just a backgrounder... this is technically called def poetry. It has its critiques, just as anything that has come to be conceptualized has.

Finally, below is Amir Sulaiman's I Prefer A Broken Neck To Another Broken Heart. Scrolling further down would reveal my favorite lines from it. I admit that I have some contentions with the way the words have been chosen to express the idea as I find it not so consistent with what the title's trying to say. Nevertheless, I did enjoy the lines for their directness.

And it took her some time with herself to discover 

That having love is even more important than having a lover

(...)

She said, "Yeah, I'd like a man to kiss me, I'd like a man to hug me

But he's gotta truly love love before he can truly love me"

I said, "I feel you." She said, "No, you're not feeling me.

We are women bringing up seeds,

Our own sons grow up thinking love is a disease

Ducking and dodging real relationships, and just gonna take what they please

And they treat pregnancy like it's an STD

If the test comes back positive, it's a negative

And they are ghost in the streets,

Drunk in the wind, only a moment is spent and those moments are brief

Our sons' role models are rolling stones unknown or deceased

They figure we can't teach them manhood, so they'll get grown in the streets

So in the cold world they find warmth with the men holding the heat."

(...)

"But when I think about my childhood, I don't think about poverty

I remember how she hugged me, kissed me, taught me, loved me.

And I know you prefer a broken neck to another broken heart

Broken parts that litter the night sky like stars.

But remember, even the beauty of birth leaves its own scars

And know that you will find your home, right where you are

We will find our homes right where we are."

(excerpt of Amir Sulaiman's She'd Prefer A Broken Neck to Another Broken Heart)

Rosemerry's talk with her son

from filipinasoul.com

Motherhood, is simply the most profound way of showing human's capacity to love and probably evidence to love's existence itself. To all mothers out there whose lives are no longer theirs but their child's as well.

"This is the way I want to love: in an idiom stronger

than tongues, I want to love in the way that tides pull

and release, like the moon which holds without touch,

I want to invite the sky to create a bigger space in me

a place spacious enough to hold all the wings

of the passing moment. I want to be buoyant enough

to carry all of love’s weight." 

(excerpt from RW Trommer's Talking To My Son Before Sleep)

Margaret's warning

Margaret Atwood shares the vulnerability to being pained that follows after a seemingly perfect union in You Fit Into Me. 

You Fit Into Me

You fit into me 

like a hook into an eye

a fish hook

an open eye

Bukowski's Laughing Heart

It's Monday and we need something to hold on to to get us through the week until it's Saturday again. The cycle could be vicious and tiresome for many but glorify in the fact that we're given poets like Bukowski to help us see life's beauty.

I attach in here the poem, The Laughing Heart as read by Tom Waits. Scroll a little lower to savor the words.

The Laughing Heart

Charles Bukowski

your life is your life

don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.

be on the watch.

there are ways out.

there is a light somewhere.

it may not be much light but

it beats the darkness.

be on the watch.

the gods will offer you chances.

know them.

take them.

you can’t beat death but

you can beat death in life, sometimes.

and the more often you learn to do it,

the more light there will be.

your life is your life.

know it while you have it.

you are marvelous

the gods wait to delight

in you.

Nice

By the bench where my friend and I sat, we got into talking about the word 'nice' and how its meaning can be construed in various situations.

We talked about how it probably is just a word to use for lack of anything better to say. It connotes that lukewarm treatment and careful detachment. We came up with several situations to illustrate our point.

photo lifted from here

Case 1. A girl who is going out with a guy carefully planned her outfit for the night. As she descends the stairs and approaches the guy, the guy tells her 'you look nice'. It actually could be the worst thing in the world to hear. Nice is used to coat any unpleasant feeling without really overcoating it.

Case 2. When a professor says that an idea I just shared in class was nice, I feel queasy. It meant to me like it never really means anything. Something the professor says out of courtesy of my effort to participate in the class discussion. 

Case 3. That nice feeling. Nice feelings aren't the ones that make you blush. A nice feeling is that comfortable feeling you get when you think you have done something right but wished to do otherwise. 

Case 4. A nice poem. A nice poem is neither ugly nor beautiful. A nice poem neither wins a Palanca nor gets published in a legitimate literary journal. A nice poem is placed on something irrelevant to be talked about for a while then forgotten. That's a nice poem.

Case 5. A nice person. Same with the nice poem, a nice person doesn't become a despot or a Ramon Magsaysay awardee. A nice person is someone you hang out with sometimes to feel... nice. Nice person doesn't challenge your opinion. Nice person is just there when you need someone who would be... nice with you coz nice person always says nice things. The moment you figure things out, you hang out with nice person less. That's a nice person's fate. Oh... and you don't really fall headlessly in love with nice people, you just settle into that nice stability that only nice people can give. If it's a good thing or a bad thing, only time can tell.

I'm pretty sure nice isn't intended to mean this way but when used in certain situations, it certainly appears to be this distant. Like how little something is thought of. An absent regard for something one has done would get this remark. 

More often than not, nice is only just another way to say that a person (or an idea) is second-rate and... much as I hate to use this word...dispensable.

Rizal lifeline

Rizal is such a versatile personality that anyone, for any purpose, reinterpret his life, decisions, and writings based on intended effects. I am subject to that now. I haven't done 'reinterpretations' yet but I'm afraid I'm being utilitarian by reading him (or things about him) like a lifeline.

I am aware that a lot of people have it worse than I do, like those kids from Norway scarred by that crazy man who gunned down everyone that he saw or those children in conflict-affected areas who are not sure if they can see the light of day by tomorrow (I doubt if they want morning to ever come). Reading Rizal is therapeutic. It gives me a great sense of relief that great people like him were in a way or another just like me.

It's really great that Rizal kept his diaries, letters, etc. for the world to see. If not for that, we will be left to speculate about his life. But then, even if we have it, we still speculate and spin away so many theories about how he is as a son, friend, lover. All that he has left were really helpful to craft an image of a Rizal that we like to imagine.

Looking at him now through the eyes of my professor make my Saturdays easily the best and the only day I look forward for in the week. Things aren't going so well for me these days that I am comforted to be transported into Rizal's world, at least for a couple of hours.

Repost

I forgot how words taste. I need some re-remembering done. :| 


unfamiliar places
are dark alleys that stretch towards the unknown
   never friendly, never bright
they smell of cat's waste after days of neglect
   sitting sick on the ground with hovering flies


if you're lucky you chance upon a guiding light
if not, you continue to walk 
   until you find the power switch on your own

Bambi's lament

Dum dum, my heart
as I hear
Dumb dumb, the crowd
jeers

Flashing
lights my face's
practiced
stretch my cheek's
almost cracking - my diaphanous
life

Boss up there
frapping his gem
around legalities -documents
contracts, to me strangers

Do this and you'll be free - my boss
all's a glibido, a game
we've played for fifteen years

A certain angle,
a certain
pose I flash
my long legs,
men's fantasy

I close
my eyes to flashing
lights and even that
is headline

Late night delusions

when i find it hard to fall asleep, i think of love
like when i used to count sheeps
or goats.

in my head images
come alive. love.


decades ago when
the scoutmaster said
i should keep it shut
my mouth, i did for several years
singing when walking towards home
or when the rain's spatter silences
my voice. an act of love
by mother herself, forcing me
locking me in a karaoke room
with mic, my enemy
more so the notes when words turn blue.

then to writing i took
unsung melodies only my head
understands anyway.

(to be cont.)

dili lalim

dili lalim mumata ug sayo para mamahaw kung ang sud-an kay ang baho sa sud-an sa silingan.
dili lalim maligo kung ang sabon hinakot nga bula gikan sa nilabhan.

dili lalim muadto sa tarbahuan kung ang serbis kay wa nagparis nga swalo nga napunitan sa dalan.

dili lalim musulod sa iskwilahan kung silupin, lapis ug kinit-ang kukumban ang saligan.

dili lalim mamalit ug tambal kung ang kwarta igo ra sa midya kilong bugas ang kaabtan.

dili lalim matug sa balay nga kagutom, katugnaw, ug kawad-on ang higdaan.

-----
hindi madaling gumising ng maaga kung ang agaha'y amoy ng ulam ng kapit-bahay.

hindi madaling maligo kung ang sabon ay inipong bula mula sa pinaglabhan.

hindi madaling pumunta sa trabaho gamit ang pares ng napulot na tsinelas sa daan

hindi madaling pumasok sa eskwelahan kung plastik, lapis, at bondpaper lang ang gamit.

hindi madaling bumili ng gamot kung ang pera'y kasya lang pambili kalahating kilo ng bigas.

hindi madaling matulog sa bahay kung gutom, kakulangan, at kahirapan ang higaan.

codeswitching: the girl na hinugot from his tadyang

sino ang nagsabi na hindi mo kaya?



upakan natin, you want?


of course hindi yan true…


alam ba niya na kaya mo naman talagang magsplit kung walang tumitingin?


hindi, diba?


i’m sure di rin nya alam na kaya mong iperform ang fundamental math operations kahit nakapikit pa.


kasi naman ikaw e. sinanay mo ang sarili mong nandiyan siya.


di mo naman talaga kailangang magmukhang helpless kung keri mo naman. ayan tuloy, eh di nakalimutan mong kaya mo pala.






pano yan ngayon? nagka-amnesia ka na.


start tayo sa uno, ano pa ba?


mangangapa ka. siyempre sa umpisa lang yan. dati mo namang alam yan e.
ikaw pa!
o ano. you want to call it a day na?
huwag muna… tingnan mo, nakapag half-split ka na.
huwag kasing laging nakapikit kung nakakakita ka naman.
baka tuluyan kang mabulag. ikaw din. sayang kung di mo makikita ang transformation mo.
see… ok ka naman pala! fast-learner pa!
sino ba ang nagsabing di mo pwedeng aralin yan?
seryoso ba siya? pareho naman kayong may utak a.


aba! di porket kumokopya ka lang dati sa kanya ay di mo na kayang gumawa ng iyo.

siyempre di like that ang things no.
sino na naman ba kasi ang pasimuno na like that ang things?
ikaw naman kasi… kung di pa nasira yung silya’y di mo alam na kaya mo naman palang kumpunihin.


nag-antay ka pa.


kung kumuha ka na lang sana ng martilyo at pinukpok to sa gumegeang na paa e di tapos na yan. duh…


nakakatawa ka naman kasi e. nagpapani-paniwala ka sa mga joketime mong naririnig.


wag kasing gullible tsong.


di dahil may tsek ay tama na.


at di rin dahil may ekis ay mali na.


kaya nga dinodouble check yung mga eksam results natin, diba?


wag kasing tanggapin ang things on face value.
tsong naman! kaya mo e!konting kompidens lang kumbaga.

susmaryosep. takot ka?
takot kang malaman niyang kaya mo naman pala?
o takot kang matuklasang kaya mo naman palang mag-isa?

unfamiliar places
are dark alleys that stretch towards the unknown
   never friendly, never bright
they smell of cat's waste after days of neglect
   sitiing sick on the ground with hovering flies


if you're lucky you chance upon a guiding light
if not, you continue to walk
   until you find the power switch on your own

(note:poetry. trying again to taste the words. almost forgotten how it tasted)