In Between Spaces and Other Poems


I
In Between Spaces

In between spaces
of cold exhibiting silence
destiny was frenziedly voiceless.

Each hollowed by
the weight of hell catching up…
Soft curses it made

of abstinent lips,
saintly provocative
like saltwater on which

fresh nail-less fingers dip
the timeless
irreverence of hope.

II
Seditions

Brewed talks spill.
The warm dished rim of the cup,
Damped by labile lips, teases
And urges the mouth
To mouth further
The bitter froths,
And make them sing.

Coffee break
Breaks the languor
Like it were brittle bones
Charred to strongest aroma.

Cheek bones are
           to leaf junctures,
Soft petioles
           to idle songs,
Snapped bones
           to chalky shoots,
Dangling leaves
           to weak labial sedition.

But bones—how
Do you mix them
To absurd measures
Of brewed coffee?

Where has your insanity gone?
You teased me.

III
Growing Up

The feathers of Mike.
An angel in posture.
Like begets like.

Game face, Adonis.
Earnest juvenile.
Boys will be boys.

Plumose eyebrows.
Midget, cute flaxen glare.
Solitaire.

Peppermints.
Blackamoor, no.
Endearing mitts.
Yes, peace!

Spears wedge.
Prayers link.
Test Mike.
Three.
Two.
One.

 “Let them off,
   Mike!
   You know it
   to be  the way
   of seedtime.”

Young currish peppermints.
Pungent herbs.
Dark green
Downy leaves.
One.
Two.
Three.
Asawa ni Mari!
(Spouse of Mary!)

IV
Cussing Out Adolescence

Prata-tat! The toy guns rattled.
But, unsheathed: Mine’s a fresh German dagger.
Mary’s seen the red.

Hush, hush… Let us deliberate.
No kicks against the pricks: no hell for leather.
Prata-tat! The toy guns rattled.

Rise Wild Man! But caution: Don’t fret.
No show today the Great Dark Mother.
But Mary--oh my, she can see the red!

Scarab! Yours a scarab! Scarab!
Firm up the grip, cur.
Prata-tat! The toy guns rattled.

Why, these pouches--look, they’ve swelled!
She’s got us all on tether.
Has Mary seen the red?

Mothers just arrived from war.
Fathers, uncles, slipped out from the bower.
Prata-tat! The toy guns rattled.
Mary’s seen the red.

V
A PORTER IN A STRANGE HOUSE

I will tell you what emptiness is if you
can fill me in this room. It’s such time as

at the scheduled hour, men, say the guests,
with a gift of gab must rise to the bait...No

I’m not telling you yet what emptiness is,
only how it feels in here, in this.

Why, no, I was never a guest if that’s
what you’re thinking. I was plumped for my honor, a porter

I am; but it’s uncalled-for to weigh me up lowly
for all I was worth: I, here alone,

(only me), have never been, (has never
seen), outside, this awfully privileged.

I was kept like this for thousands of years.
Men came in, went, hang on, passed

through me, my station. All sorts of surplus brains,
those who fret about tomorrow, squeeze

their hearts in and slander their hands with innocence.
No worries of staples here; not of food, of recognition,

of guiltless acceptance, or lingering sex—everything
about sentimentality is left to its own care.

This house, you’re enthused to learn about,
is not for you to take shelter, not

for you to find a seat to be placed and be honored
with a fresh ball. This sable parting strip

severing, this window riving us in two
like a shriving cabinet’s screen, is more lifelike

than you thought—less mysterious, less dreamlike,
less tempting than the hordes of stories you’d taken in.

In your brain-care centers this house is hauntingly far.
In your priories, I am faceless. Dark

foreboding distance spelled out in pursed lips of saints.
In the shallow waters of consciousness this house

is a windowless atom guzzled in buckets of pain control.
Oh! They bust their guts out to weaken me,
to forget me, to forsake this house in their hearts.

This place I’ve been looking after, is built
of the loneliest stones: solitary, pathetic
from the outside, or, one may say

like a sad timber—the saddest cut
of the loneliest manner of the heart.

And that’s how you see it firmly located.
Let me tell you of an experience:

It was one of my final resting junctures,
the unworried entity that I was, am, and going.
I was like a foam absorbing everything
from the horizontal quiet I laid
that no erring was possible.
When time fell flat and occupying
became independent of the tall black shadows,
getting taller as I aimed flatter on two ends of the world,
until they bent close on the high heavens,
and I, then immovable on a hollow in a cold body,
the globe was created anew.

The tall black shadows: past and future.
I am forever squeezed, sweetly defeated,
in sphericity of time you call ‘present’.
And I remain dead, as alive, as time,
as I could effectively claim a self,
as positive, as fleeting, as becoming,
that only the dead can see.
And therefore, I am,
as a foam, absorbing everything

from the horizontal quiet I lay
that no erring is possible.

Since then, this place was assigned to me.
This place, so close to everyone, so close
to death it took you a whole life to ask me—

Where is everyone?
Isn’t that a question that betrays emptiness?
Loss? The total breakdown of proximity?
Am I your conscience?
Tell me nothing.

I knew it before you motioned to confide with me—
there from your heart, humming from the Song of Songs;
there from a floating distance, bliss-like wedge
between high and low, wobbling, begetting
obliviously sentimental, remembering loss. 

You can’t talk to anyone but me,
a freeloader that you are, shifting
from bread to bread,
from meat to meat,
bone to bone,
from one idea to another,
never learned to put a foot down on one.

Then, you asked me what emptiness  is.

I wonder why it seemed to hold you up
since you learned to wander through the labyrinths of wisdom,
food, sex, all told—the more important things
you pushed the ringer for—there on the porch
from where you plead for an answer.

This house, a coffin,
a barrow, a cairn,

a marker, a tomb.
I, a gatekeeper of death.

Singly told,
I would need to die

many times to slake
your finite curiosity.

But give and take—
we are a circle of undivided hands.

Fill yourself out, fill me in here.
Be my guest

for even what it takes
eternity to blink,

singly perspiring.


VI
BATTLE OF MANILA BAY

Strange roots can’t grow, not
by a long chalk on our rocks.

Oh, they’ll putt off the hurtling
Sea waves’ stride from the rough Pacific!

Black was chipping away
at the sky…Waves, edgy shadows

Mounting up on the battle crests
Against the unsuspecting eye of the sea;

Conning the haze to even out
The credulous ramparts of May—
Oh, our self-effacing comrades!

Roots ferried across the sea.
The waves on the sea.

It seems, by God,
Growing and flailing

Are foreign to our ocean.
Roused, our native waters steered

A tired fleet of courage, then
Faced a knobby line of prows

Whose snooty crusts annulled
The quiet fairness of the seabed.

The waters of our sea  in showy heady tack!

For a while at the seaboard’s end—
Where rocks are mounted
By the firm hands of God—

We waited with anxious eyes:
At the bay the sound of sirens
Locked our thrilled ears.

Then silence tagged on…
Little involved silences
Only God could gather

In whams of booms and plunks!
And then silence again
Such as heard like stiff

Plops in the bowers
As perfect divers did like fish…
Sooner our eyes would tail

The ones who took an early mark.

              ……………….

Strange roots
Can’t grow on rocks.
The stovepipe hat

With a band of stars
Was full of better tricks.
Grow roots.

Then, strain our breed.
Planting is never fun!
The blue tailcoat flutters

Above the marching band.
…and before long the striped
Trousers would be rigged

Out as salopettes to warm
The cold roots of our farms.
Cursed, they never warmed!


VII
Poetry Lesson

“Poetry, her border of ideas,
The edge, uncertain, but a means of blending
With other strata
Where the lower and higher have ending.”
~Ezra Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley

Why not philosophy too? Why not the calling together to the spheres?
The chair sits beneath a curious ceiling where life, transpiercing,
drips the random miniscules of oneness…Feinting presence, a runaway

gets around the watch until perhaps the chair is pressed down to confirm
the gravity beneath the earth. See how its legs keep up
on both ends of the universe where sometimes discretion caves in to speech.
And so, you become then a visible occupant, half-starved of fantasy,
and I, a tagged wanderer in the colony of hives, hearkening to sweet calls
            of sifting bees.

Beyond the public enterprise we assume our dialectic.
Dwellers of silence and verses. One wanders, the other sits
in the center of an asexual world of gravidity. I am of vanishing
act, of incubation you are. How we manage to hold out
in this private tongue is just about what art neatly allows
for the solemnity of errors.

Oh, art!—she can weave loose ends into one biddable crotch;
interest defined, words chiseled into shapely recognizability.
           She will hunt those
who can name themselves in poetry.
Our poetry’s eclampsia of a mother who speaks clamantly
of attention to pregnancy over which kids shall wonder,
leaving the true slower details to our hole-and-corner game.

A chair, your fantasy, my casuality. The mute seat. Oh,
 gravidity and chance! Outside of the tedious weary world
we made a pact to oversized ennui. The tawdry conceits we share.
Our conceits overweighing, self-important as an occupied chair;
gladly naïve as a tourist inflecting stories with historical précis,
bloated in our capricious uses.

In my private library, we possess the total centrifugal
gravity of silence, closing in on our slowly trimming untutoredness.
Pages to pages, the leaves of our tongues untangled from stalks of bare speech
are the hands that give voice to curious ceremonial.

Our roving, muffled conversations about the drawing-room of schooled
guests, they can turn into statutory crimes.
We, eighty-sixing sublimation.
Of course, we can hear them, they can’t gather our intention;
shadows on the wall, smudged of our patinas we put in to gloat
their powers of detection, and how crazy they could become over these finds!
Should we be
            wondering
how they can’t see their own shoulders
            hunched
beneath these cloaks we wear called poetry?
Pert, awesome, queasy, finicky to verse.
We space out against chic to force home
our fraternity in the same womb.
            Jabbering
frustration—and how some mothers
are wont to encourage this war,
as long as murder can be as graceful as words!
Jabbering words,
hunched, wondering
statutory crimes.

Silence. Now.
Dark. Click.
Light.
The drawing-room.
The chair.

In silence we cobble up
a special relationship.
We thrive in errors, they say.
The more we make, the better become
the persons next to us, as such
we would say of our intention.
Our ways pathetic.