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Poetry

Sisyphus, Rockstar

One last time, my forgotten friend, poise your calloused hands and dig your battered heels into the dirt. Left behind by the new world. The others, glam dolls and pulpit idols, have all long gone. I watch as you reach the top, as a slow, hazy blues chord from a...

Another War

I was seven a war marred my hometown Tíyo and the fishermen soldiers the deep sea battlefield a compound of the sea’s little bones of sable sands in a wicked bottle their arsenal made the Earth mumbled in tremulous waves the heavens bled scales of shattered souls to the flesh of my innocence.

Three Poems Before 2025

2024 What do you want to say to a year yet to explain itself? The days are heaving, the hours a diary made meaningful with our ghosts: gray, tenuous, prone to our forgetting. Just tell me something new. Or describe to me freedom as an animal. Show me skin moistened by worship, waterfalls like...

Una oda a la música

May this poem be heard as a testament of Amorsolo’s “History of Philippine Music” and his artistry. Winds already touched the glistening sails of a boat that bears the shadows of blossoming antiquity Playful noises coming from the grasp of the lips, Lines withdrawn in the psalms of...

Cinnamon Rolls

A covenant was made. You trod on my soil. You breathed my air. Here, tonight, I am having dinner. The hall would have fit in Many exuberant guests, But I only see myself And my toddler’s chair. The table is set. Cutleries in their neat order. I sniff the folded serviette. It is your very...

Retrograde

The force of fate couldn’t fight for us.Venus showed me the way to youjust as I pointed her and the Moonfor you to gaze.He smiled down on us, mockingwith his crescent lips, whitened teeth. Time runs backas our shared memories.

Random Pickings

Rainbow’s End

Don’t come runningPanting, gasping, throbbing, weepingOn bended kneesWhen rainbows cease shiningAnd bougainvilleas stop bloomingWhen no pot of gold gleams on the horizonOn the boulevard of...

Illumination

then, when the star-studded skywould brighten our upturned faces,we liked to believe it filledus with real brilliance,gifted down from the layof the galaxy, so...

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...

A Summer Poem for Baguio

As the car was winding down Zigzag roadOne sizzling afternoonI gazed at smoke billowing, spiraling up the sky from a distant mountainGreen turning brown...