Out in the Sea...

i just recently came back from a 3-day, work-related, seminar workshop. and its good to be back.

but not to say that i did not enjoy the place where i have been. it was tiring work, challenging, but hey, i love my job, and that made it bearable.

once again, i have been to the sea...and i realize how much i miss it, and how, somehow, being at sea changed, tamed something inside of me.

its not that the city where i am now is far away from the waters. it is only a ride away and i could be by the shore. but its good to be really at sea, and not only by the shore.

the winds that was always blowing felt like a thousand caresses on my face, a thousand soft caresses every second. how does it feel? indescribable. pure poetry never meant to be written but only experienced.

turning 3 decades was something that took me by surprise. years before, i never even expected to reach it, much to the sadness of friends. and yet, as if their prayers were answered and answered everyday, here i am, and willing to survive another decade at least.

(hmmmm..perhaps its possible that its gonna take a decade more to finish the great project. =) nah, just kidding..its underway, and ur gonna see pages of it soon...)

a lot of things fell out of place in my life, and could not say that the experiences of the last months have been nothing like i have experienced or imagined before. talk about surprises, and i could remember years ago when i said that one of the reason i wanted to end it all was that there were no more surprises in my life.

im glad that i am wrong.

pieces fell out of place, a lot of pieces, some blown away. and since abandonment = solitude, i learned to pick the pieces, well, the pieces that i could anyway.

somehow, it feels as if i have been sleeping all these time, and i woke up from the long sleep, from the beautiful dreams and fantasies, from the nightmares of loneliness.

of course they all happened, i know that.

i do not know whats gonna happen next, whats gonna come. but im gonna stop trying to figure it out. im gonna stop calculating the odds.

im just gonna go on...

damon steine also turned 10. its been that long...and that short.

wish you could all see me now: i wear a smile not only in my face..but also in my eyes. =)

The results would be in by the end of the month, or first week of May. I do not know what the result is gonna be, but these were my entries for this year's national writer's workshop here in Iligan. They are old works but with revisions. Are they good enough? I don't know. Still, here they are, my candidates for the workshop.

I only hope that they are strong enough to pull me in even if I was not strong enough to give birth to them.

Enjoy.


Pairs
J. K. R. Kanindot

It is not
The way of birds
To reign over
A sky rain.

I do not have wings,
But there must be
Something
About water glazed on fine feather
That disturbs
The art of flight.

And yet there they were,
The pair I could not name.
Wings tracing half circles toward the other
Overlapping and crossing.
In the sky there must be
And invisible pole,
And they were two separate vines
Twirling around each other.

And yet it is not the way of birds,
Nor is it the way
Of sanity
To stand still in the rain.

There must be a rage
In these two birds
To defy and remain.
Perhaps, they are waiting
For the sun to wash over
The cold tears
With warm fingers.

So much perhaps like my rage
And my waiting
For an umbrella to bloom
Over my head.



Pinoy Big Brother : The Fucker
J. K. R. Kanindot


I have always believed
That real life
Is lived
And not a recipe
Of herbs and spices
Vegetable, meat, salt
To be baked
Then sliced
Into little servings
Called
Primetime

At least, I am happy
For those who have sold
Pieces of their lives
For their dream
Of recognition beyond
Mere ordinary patterns.
For their smiles
As they shed
Tears and promises
Written on sand

Perhaps big brother deserves my envy.

Of how
Big brother speaks
As if he was the bush
Burning not with flame
And yet whose light
Many wait
In couches, sofas
On cold dirty wet floors
To witness
In a flick of the remote control
things going
On and off
In his house.

This is the television series
Of Real life.


Little brothers and sisters, devotees
Fail to return calls
Or text messages,
Cancellations and postponements,
Even the full spoon waits
For the open empty mouth
While eyes are glued
To the altar
Where Big Brother's
Fake fire
Burn.

The television series
Of real life.

While in all the cities
Somewhere in its streets
Beyond the reach of warm light
Where sound doesn't sound
Like sound at all
Someone is waiting
One outstretched dirty hand
The other clenching the stomach
Trying to squeeze away
The cold fire of hunger,
Waiting
For a big brother
Or a sister
To take them home.


Shape
J. K. R. Kanindot

Because it is not my lips
You seek for your own
So you may savor the day
That is being born as promised,
Laced with the aftertaste
Of ashes and yesterday.

Because my hands are scarred.

And your skin bristle, your flesh
Shiver at the contact of its strangeness.
Your skin detects but would not believe
The possibility of ripe sweet fruit juices
From the seeds I gathered and saved away
From the famine of abandonment,
Coated as their shells are in grime,
Washed out traces of something red.

And so you dare not even discover
What twigs it would gather
For bonfires to blaze in your darkness,
To melt your shields,
Your daggers and armor,
And forge them into spoons and forks,
Into a clean goblet
To hold the wine.

Because my voice is not his voice,
My eyes are not the stars
Of your blued skies,
In daylight or dark.


Rain
J. K. R. Kanindot


Whenever the raindrops become refugees on my skin
I cannot explain but I remember you.

Of how you held them, splattered as they were
On the cup of your palm, as if an offering
Or waiting for them to fly.

Like a child you were with your smile
With outstretched arms you welcomed them
As if they were the toys
Inside colorful and ribbon-laced boxes
Behind iron bars and glass windows.

I have wondered if you welcomed the rain
To become your cloak, your mask,
Or if they clung to you
Like those who embraced you yesterday

Or perhaps, their cold is there to temper you,
So that whatever that burns you may steam off
or perhaps wash away the dust and dirty traces
Of something heavy even after you said your prayers.

"The things that fall need places,
And the rain washes away the streets,
why not let it wash
human bodies?"

So you told me with your transparent words
Emerging from the cave of your mouth,
Your eyes had hands
And they whisked me away
To talk of different paths…

…until the sun was chased away
by the dark who then stood between us.

Whenever the raindrops become refugees on my skin
I cannot explain but I remember you
Even after when the hands of day
Have brushed away the rain you held so close.

And I wonder if you were also washed away
Absent as you are now.


My Poetry
J. K. R. Kanindot

If my poetry is filled with women,
it is only because the branches of my life
were tended by them
even before it was a stalk.

Like you I was a seed inside a woman
and from the moment I sprouted
from the shell of her womb
my roots were taught to dig deep
into the soil of life,
past layers after layers
of stony indifference and shallow water
to drink from the mouth of this earth.

Under the sky of women's love
my branches were free to seek out
the layers between myself and the sky,
in the garden of women's love
they guided my roots
to sink even deeper
and not to wander wide.

There was a woman
whose smiles and eyes flashed
like white stars as she named for me
the constellations in the sky,
Orion and Sirius,
of what I would have to bear,
major and minor.
There was a woman
who spoke to me in meter and rhyme,
who fed me my first sweet fruits of metaphors
whose aroma and flavors I could still taste even now.
There was a woman who tucked me
between warm bed sheets and blankets,
soft pillows on my head, like her breast,
so that I could dream and in the morning
be set free to discover who I am to be.

Father is only a name
I barely remember. Brother
is the son of my uncle and aunt.

If there are so many women in my poetry
it is only because I have been loved
by plenty as I have loved and lost many.
From women springs
the blossom of my summer laughter.

There will always be women
in my poetry for I know
with a rooted certainty as deep as my roots
that when I could no longer smile
nor sing to the wind nor feel the moist
of the earth, when I have forgotten my name
for the windows of my eyes had witnessed
their final silent sunset,
there would be women,
it would be a woman
even if I no longer have my poetry,
who would shed and share her warmth
from the tears and her arms
for me.

my birthday gift...

To my brothers and sisters and friends who have endured with me, to those whom I have lost, to those who still love me in silence, thank you for believing, for being there after all this time. And because of that, this is my birthday gift for you: I will endure another decade. =)

On Growing Old...

On Growing Old…

A couple of hours more, and it would be one more year added to my life. And how do I feel about it? I am content, I could say.

I can still remember birthdays from long ago celebrated with cakes and candles. So long ago, and yet there is something about memory, of its selectiveness that though I may not remember every detail, there are some I would never forget as long as I live. A red sailors uniform that I once donned. The crunching of brown dried mango leaves under our feet as we celebrated it with my cousins under one of the mango trees way back in Mampang.

I can still remember birthdays that I spent with my friends.

Or birthdays celebrated with a love one from the past, a celebration without balloons or candles, but with a flame so much brighter, so much warmer as it was flowing from the sighs and moans and whispers of two lovers, I being one of the two.

I can remember the first birthday of my rebellion. It was supposed to be a “no celebration” at all due to economic necessity but good friends started coming, bringing food and drinks, raw fish and meat, telling me to just sit down and take it easy as all of them went on to their tasks of preparing everything. Everyone got drunk, two of my brothers decided to sleep over at our place. In the morning they called up the others and celebrated my birthday. Again. That celebration was thrown by my brothers in the Baisan Gang. And though there have been silence and misunderstanding throughout the years, I will never forget how they made the first birthday of my rebellion a happy one.

Or that birthday wherein one of my sisters, Posh, have me a bottle of cognac and thus started my tradition of having a bottle of that fine spirit after that. A birthday and a double date to booth, how could things be better eh?

But for some reason, this year’s birthday is something that I cannot really put into words. For one, this is the 2^nd birthday that I am spending out from the city I call home. But more so, because the friends whom I have been with are not here with me, though wishes and greetings have started flying towards me.

I guess it has something to do with how many years this birthday is going to celebrate.

Three decades to be exact.

And because its my 3^rd decade in this world, I don’t know why but I decided to group it into 3 groups, a decade each.

For the first, it would be the birthdays of my growing up. I did grow up normally (though what normal is is open to arguments, but hey, it’s my birthday so don’t argue ok? =) ) Those years would be the years of growing up, of discovering the sweet things and the some bitter truths. I still haven’t discovered women back then. Hmmm, well, I had but that’s a story that is really not fitting for this theme.

The second decade would be the birthdays that happened less at home and more in the streets, not with my family but with my friends. These were the birthdays wherein every year brought me closer to understanding and deciding on what I would then do in the next decade that would be arriving. It was in this decade that the seeds of my humanity, of my personality were being sown. It was also here, on its final year that I found love.

Only to lose it on the Third one. Hahahahahaha.

And the third one dealt with my long travels searching for the things that I was then losing, though I did not know it at that time. Running out of time. Running out of chances. Losing. Dying. Crying. More and more poetry became my last standing ground, and it helped me through. Poetry is strong, but I was not that strong to carry the burden, and so the past years saw me giving birth to malformed lines and verses who haunt me to remake them, as if I was an alchemist and I knew the transmutation process, I if I have the Philosophers stone. (alchemy stuff due to my recent finishing the anime series Full Metal Alchemist on one of my anime fests.)

This was also the decade that I found myself running away, literally and figuratively. Inside my head I erected mazes where even I get lost at times. I ran away to Cebu, and “victimized” a handful of willing ladies in my anger, in my last, in my pain and shame. Only to realize that what we carry in our heads can never be far away, no matter what shore we bring ourselves to.

In some aspects, the 2^nd and the 3^rd decades mirror themselves, if only I should say that the second was sweeter, when innocence was still to be lost and the third the most exacting, when I foolishly tried to regain the innocence I lost. The lakes of pain I found myself floating and drowning got deeper, more dangerous. In the end of the second decade I thought I found the map of my life, and I was wrong. In the end of my 3^rd decade I experienced something similar, and I thought that there is salvation for the self-damned. Again, I was proven wrong.

And yet I am still alive. And though only the living may feel the bites of dying, only the living can only feel the softness of a kiss, the tenderness of a caress. Though the living may lose and die and lose everything, it is also only the living who can have it all before they have to lose it.

Three decades, and soon a new one will open up to me.

I wonder how is this new one going to be.

The Music of Ecstasy (condoms not included)

Ok, this all of this comes from personal observations.

Why are Filipina women so silent?

Its not that I am asking for the woman to act like a porn star, highly exaggerated moans and screams and other special vocal effects from all those directed videos that I use to watch before. But why is that women are so silent, and it’s all too clear that they are doing so not because it is their nature, but they seem to be controlling the urge to let out the music of their ecstasy?

I have always considered “doing-the-do” (yeah, that’s how I usually refer it to) as something that a guy should do to the best of his abilities. Especially when it happens that I will be the one guy who would be tagged with the distinction of being the first. Unlike many that I know of, being the first one entails a lot of responsibility.

It’s not about just being the first, but being the unforgettable and fondly remembered in that aspect of a woman’s life experiences.

And because I am such, I cannot help but notice that the one I’m doing the do with is somehow inhibited from letting me listen to the rising song inside of her body as both of us move together, like violin and that thing you play the violin with. And somehow, I believe that because of this inhibition from being vocal is the reason that I had to endure all those bite marks on my shoulders and fingernail rakings on my back. As I have said, I don’t expect her to act like a porn star (a fake act, and I know I can detect one, would actually kill the spirit of the deed if you ask me) but I sure do find the act of stifling it a little bit... disappointing.

I guess the situation is rooted on the “bad image” of doing the do that was ingrained into our psyche by our colonial past where women were forced to act in a certain manner, a “womanly” manner. But if you are going to look at how men have really treated women over the last centuries, it’s a contradiction, or so it seems. There is actually a reason why such “womanly” practices were encouraged; even the so called preciousness of a woman’s virginity is actually something that men of earlier times came up with for their own advantages.

I actually can’t help but pity a woman who believes that keeping her virginity is something so important, who consider it as a gift to their future husband, who even believe that such an idea was originally hers. I’m not saying that one should lose it, but at least it would be good if she knew why it’s in her belief, and who put it there. But that’s another story I guess.

Of course, amidst the many experiences, it is possible that women are really like that, silent. I mean, I can’t really say how it is to be a woman anyway. And that all those that I have seen and heard from all those videos are just that, directed, meant to deliver a message, although a negative one, of how a woman should act when doing the do.

Of course, I’m not saying that I do not know of any vocal women. I do actually. I know because they did tell me that they are vocal. Not that I do not trust their words, but I cannot really attest to the veracity to their statement for lack of firsthand, up close and personal experience.

I have also heard about other vocal women from my male friends. But usually, those that they talk about have been doing the do for sometime (though knowing my kind, they tend to exaggerate things at times…). It’s not a bad thing actually, I don’t see it as something against the woman for being experienced (if I did, how could I ever look at myself in the mirror and still have self respect, huh?). Though it makes me think if she does it so good and she wants to share the experience or she is looking for that one good experience to erase the memories of so many bad ones before.

I have always been a sucker for women who are vocal, though in another kind of way: women who know what they want, women who are not afraid to speak out their thoughts, women who see the truth about the so called norms of society and are not afraid to break them. And yet my experiences with such vocal women tend to end inside the four corners of a locked room.

There is also the possibility that I am responsible at some point for the silence. There must be something wrong about how I do the do. There must be something about how I perform that leaves them in silence, that takes away their ability to speak out.

Something akin to being in the presence of a deity.

I wish. Nah, I know.

Ok ok, I have been too vocal here. Now I am going to shut up.

Epilogue : It All Boils Down to...

...Good Fuck.

yes, as what the title say, this will be it.

being lucky, and with the responsibility of keeping relationships alive of almost all kinds have taught me to value them well. being human, i have had a few mishaps, few, but not insignificant.

and perhaps it is for that reason, for the memory of the joys of having a relationship, that deaths hurt me the most. i have not been able to turn the other way and walk whenever things end, especially with ties. just as my brother once said about the difference in our poetry, i do have to put my hands inside the flame and get burned.

anyway, i had a conversation with a friend from far away that comes to my mind. since the distance makes things difficult, she asked for the recent events that has happened in my life, and as how conversations go, it walked by the path of how the recent affair ended.

of all of my past relationships, the last one takes the crown for being the bloodiest, the cruelest, most destructive. for those who know my (bad) writing habits, something crazy like this happening is like a piece of cake, like a nuclear reactor for my poetry writing, right? WRONG! it made me unable to write, and for someone who has always been proud of writing not from inspiration but from desperation, who reaches out for pen and paper for his stains to be imprinted because that is all that he can do, i was lost. and the few pieces that i was able to let out i set free into the land of forgotten and useless things, the garbage bin.

and still, for someone who has also been proud to be an avid student of life (ha! just like my father!) such an experience is one that i will always treasure, though in no way would i want to experience it again. it taught me a lot.

anyway, to the meat of this epilogue. yes, the last one demanded so high a price. my absence. i do believe that if only the memory gun existed (like as how ray bradbury wrote about it) she would go for selective surgery to erase bits of me lodge in her memories as well as patch up some warning programs against intrusions from me in any way whatsoever. but hey, that is what she wants, so let her.

and since its over, i have thought about what it all boils down to, to who or what i would be remembered. and the answer is Good Sex. A Good FUCK. no, make that a lot of good fucks. Mind blowing, super multiple orgasmic, please-please-stop-youre-driving-me-crazy kind of fuck. the kind of fuck a lot of women wished for in their first time and end up searching for it for the rest of their life. The kind of fuck that makes them realize that if they thought what they read on all those historical novels were hot, those were nothing like the real good thing. the kind of fuck that makes you wish your period would end soon, or "what the hell, whats with a little blood anyway, lets go and fuck" kind of fuck. the kind of fuck that makes you a liar,where you profess all the sweet nothings in this world, saying i love you and what else just to be able to say something from all sensations. it is that kind of fuck, and so much more.

of course, my friend tried to make me happy by commenting that at least i got some action before the curtain fell. well, i would be lying if i say i didnt enjoy it. i did. but i am happy about it because it was not just any fuck. it was not jus sex to me. it was making love. yeah, sounds corny, but that is why it was so good. because it was so true, and so pure.

but that was then.

and since things have changed, it must have been a good lay but why do i feel like a stud. that for the things that i should be remembered for (admittedly i have a few remaining good qualitiesin me) why does it have to be only that. the first one. the first good one. the unforgettable first fuck, and the others that came after it.

thats what my friend also said, that i would be unforgettable, that that is something that cannot be changed by any force, by any hate, by any regret.

the first one.

well, if that is how the story has to end, then so be it.

hmmm, its also possible i could be the last. but hey, that is what it all boils down to. and it leaves me simmering. aaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!