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Poetry
Unbreakable
Exact is not the word; the hurting is felt in many places. - Joel Toledo
Mending is necessary as these respites from fragility will no longer do.
Mind the volume dial as it floods you with constants and firmitude.
Long before right from wrong: language stolen...
Of Sunrises and Sunsets
1
Night falls
I hear crickets
And the sound of waves
As the sea marks
A quiet day
Towards a somber weekend
2
I have lived with face masks
And face shields
For years
And where did they get me?
I learned to greet
With muffled voice
And learned to smile
With my own eyes
I learned how to...
Kalahig
In memory of the hundreds of trash pickers who perished in the garbage slide at the Payatas dumpsite on July 10, 2000
From the skeleton
Of disemboweled mattresses
Bent scrap of metal
You honed to pointed perfection
To stab at the refuse of the world
In this moment’s defeat
You...
Arranging Furniture at Midnight
I move chairs at midnight,
Adjusting my wife’s preference
Which one is facing which.
The cats are doing football
Banging on tables and walls.
All six of them,
Siamese versus Persian
All team High Maintenance.
My angry wife wakes up,
Reminding us she needs to sleep.
I’d pay for this in the morning,
When...
Patterns
The chisel as creator
Lends shape to wood, to stone.
Shape being the truth of character,
Reality of body and bone,
Sculpted fact of form,
The confidence of matter.
The paintbrush as creator
Draws maps of rainbows,
Contours of celebrations,
Then blends faithful colors
With their reserved spaces.
Spaces being the measure of possibilities
That...
Indignation as Elegy
An elephant without a face greeted me
on Facebook today,
his trunk and tusks
hacked away by poachers eager for ivory.
At first I thought it was a watermelon
sliced in half,
mistaking the pinkish blood
for the pulpy flesh of succulent fruit.
Why bother to extract excessive teeth
and risk being...
