Mute. || Dengue Delusions.

There was a spot on my lung.
And it so happened that every wheeze made me
Think of you and I tried hard to stop breathing for a while.

All day long the TV antennae outside tipped from
Side to side, trying to catch every signal,
Line, sound, anything.
Against a sun-bleached sky it was the looks of a
City still trying to find its way in the world.

Where the winds cross, that's where I am.
I'm looking down where you might be walking,
Wishing that somehow, you'd want to be holding my hand
At that moment
Flocks of birds pass my floating thoughts
They don't think twice about what they see.

(You are so vague.
So much so that I write poems about you
Just to see what it would look like.
I want to be able to read something I wrote
And see you instead.
Who are you?)

I pick up where I left off, but
I realize that my old shoes no longer fit.

I want to go to where you are and
Sing you a lullaby.
You'll look at me half-lidded and
I'll still be there after you close your eyes.
But I know that you'll be far away
So far away that the stars can't reach you
And my words will simply be whispers that you
Won't be able to understand
Just by looking at my mouth.

I am at the bottom of a well
And that's where you'll wake up to.

The World Breaks Us Every Moment.

Our lives can be so small,
Scrawled out on wind-blown papers.
Each breath we take
Is a breath like infinite others,
But we forget them just as soon as they go.
What have we done,
Muting ourselves like this.
Spending years like they were seconds.
We should know better.

The dreams we had
Can be crushed underfoot,
And nobody would mind.
We didn't realize that
What we thought were the big things
Were actually the small things,
And we thought we've lost everything.

A Slip of Complaint.

Today I had my plates for breakfast,
With leftover black chicken on the side.
Mechanical drafting is trying very hard
To turn my arm into a robot.
Lectures are trying very hard, too,
To turn it into mush.
It feels like robotic mush.
Either I'll paint my nails pink to cheer it up
Or black to help it express itself.

In class my seatmate put on perfume.
I didn't have the heart to tell her I'm allergic.
My breathing tubes are screaming.
They can't see the point of putting perfume on
Twice in the same hour.
(And neither can I.)

On my way home I realized
That I like the smell of smog.
Well, better than what my seatmate had, anyway.

Notes From Yesterday's Green Yellow-Pad.

Yesterday, I saw a lady jeepney driver.
She braided her long hair back, wore a denim jumpsuit, smoked, and drove like a devil.
I saw her orange jeepney from the bus.
One moment she was right outside my window
and a few seconds later she was gone.
(Like, wow.) I've been waiting for this day to come.

I was on my way to school for an unusual meeting thinking I was late,
but I turned out to be the first one there.
I spent a while rereading memorable parts of my inbox when a groupmate tottered up.

Our task was to eat balot and write a poem about it.
Here's mine:

In our hands lay a river stone
Where inside red rivers coursed through like in maps of old.
We are gods
Moving the world with our tongues
Breaking, destroying, engulfing,
Marveling in the iron taste.
Wanting more.

It was edited to go with all the other people's stanzas, and that group output was awesomer.
We presented it today and everybody was impressed (or so I like to think.)
On the way home, I kept chuckling and smiling to myself on the jeep, bus, and tricycle.
Everybody must think that I'm either in love or retarded.

Thanks to Gino for keeping three-fourths of me un-drenched today and sacrificing one-fourths of yourself. You are a darling. I promise to bring my umbrella from now on and repay you one unsuspecting rainy day.


So here I am in an internet store, because the laptop at home has been kept away from me. I'm trying to concentrate on the mysteries of how floating counters came to be, but I'm just itching to be somewhere else.

Where Do We Go?

We walk hand in hand
In a field of time.
Our cat feet crunch
The ice and frozen grass.
We break off a point
And reel at the numbness.

Onwards, onwards.
It's no place to rest.
The wind howls and urges
Pushing with the weight of the sky.
Nothing to be done,
Yet so much to do.

Who knows where we're heading?
All around is more of the same.
Countless trails,
All meandering and lost.
They mean nothing to us.
We find our own path.

Warm Bodies.

I like your mute gray jeans.
On the bus, a woman regarded me with dark eyes
As she peeled the skin off an orange and
Thoughtlessly dropped it on the metal floor.
I felt something rough and heavy hit my shoulder
And I looked to see a glimpse of blue,
Its carrier struggling to conquer inertia
As we all do.
The bus stopped for a man. Stopped until he reached his seat.
I imagined that this man's life
Would be the kind that the world stops for.
Unlikely, to be honest with you,
But we should stop clinging to the lie
That everything is as it seems.
Sometimes I find myself spending time
Imagining opposites.

The summer days are about to end,
And in my head my thoughts are waking.

____________________________________________
Wrote this today at the registrar's, where I sat beside a man who was applying for his masters. He urged me to take my masters while I'm still young. Endless thanks to Philip for helping me out yesterday. I hope your suede shoes are okay. Today I am finally super officially a student of the College of Home Economics! Boo CRS for resetting my pre-enlistment! Lord help me get my subjects back D:

Someone Must Have Cut the Seconds in Half.

My mum and I went to a piano store the other day. It was owned by a lithe, young man who had music at his fingertips. (He looked a bit like a gangster hero, really, but if you put a bowtie on him, you won't be able to tell.)

Ah, music must be a wonderful thing to own.

After lunch, I turned on a little Satie and nestled in the corner of a cold room. I imagined it was a rainy day and the next thing I knew, it was almost 5. Our days are so fragile. We can kill them instantly.

What if I decided to live my life for myself and imagined that it was how it's supposed to be? Then I might wake up one day and realize that I'm already confined to a wheelchair or something and I can't do a thing about it. I guess in that way, our lives our fragile, too. We shouldn't delude ourselves.