Rituals

its 2:36 a.m. as i am starting this. i have been checking on my contacts, only to find out that most are offline. As it should be. Most, if not all of them might be sleeping by this time after all the lights and sound (and the rain) have died.

but not me. I have this ritual to perform. I am going to wait for the first sunrise of the year.

i cannot clearly remember when i started doing this, only that i have been doing it for a decade or so. i cannot even say why i started doing this. Perhaps this all started just when i started losing what most people would label as sanity, conformity.

All these years i wait, all alone.

So it got me thinking as to when i would end this solitary vigil for the first fingers of the sun to caress my face...

...perhaps if there would be someone by my side, and with her hands she would hold my fragile face, stroking...caressing...with a warmth that to rival that of morning stars.

2 Years and 1 Week : A Little Self-Indulgence (or is it torture?) before the year ends...

This is something i wrote earlier this year...

A Letter for Quesalina

Quesalina,

Will you find it odd, or something to be mad about, or sad perhaps, that in the end, it was your sarong, your shawl that was with me.

I have to admit I did not think this would be so. But that is irrelevant now. The day is nearly over, and here I am, garbed in the cloth that was suppose to take the place of your arms in your distant absence.

Absent as you are now, absent as you have been for a long time now.

Sometimes, I tell myself that it was a dream, a very beautiful dream, so vivid that even now, I can still recall the colors and flavors of you.

Perhaps it was a dream.

Indeed, it must have been a dream. Inscribed on the edge of this shawl are words so much like the dust that dreams must be made of. So much like you, Quesalina. For you, too, have always been a dream, and through all those times I held you, you wore another name.

Quesalina, I do not know the proper semantics of goodbye. Nor do I desire to say so. Allow me then, to make it like this:

To Quesalina, the most glorious of all my stars, in daylight or in dark.

Today, on the last year of the year is exactly 2 years and 1 weak since the last time she held me, since the last time she loved me..since the last time i was safe in her arms, since the..you get the point.

I am trying to be honest as i ask ,yself if i have been whole since then...

...well, i should be, right? It has been that long to be mourning over the death of something that may have ever been true or alive in the first place...

I Confess I Have Been Loved... (and perhaps one day i will be, again. Perhaps)

One last Indulgence.



One Final Last...

Postcard for Quesalina

Quesalina,

It will understand if you will never forgive me.
But i have already forgiven myself...

...and i believe you should do the same: forgive yourself.

Yup, this is for you, Because You Know I Exist and Thus I Am Not Dead (Yet)

What a year it has been…

…and another one is on the way.

Yet before everything, we have a few hours in between, and every moment counts.

No matter how things go in our lives, there is nothing compared to living. Yeah, it does not happen like they do in fairy tales, doesn’t start with “once upon a time” (though I could be wrong because it does actually) and always ends with “they/she/he/it lived happily ever after”, but since we do not know anyone reliable to tell us that the other side is better than this one (if there is indeed something after this side of life is another story altogether), we are stuck with this. We have our lives. We have time. We still do.

To all the sorrows that loomed like giant waves and fell on us in its attempt to drown us, to let us go of those that we cherish the most in each of our lives, I can only say this: dying is too easy. And though living is not that convenient, it does offer a lot, if we only allow our hopes to see the colors and shape amidst the tears that blur our eyes.

I have this ritual that I do on the eve of the new year: I do not sleep, instead I wait for the sun to rise, the first sun rise of the year…

..and every afternoon I always make myself look at the sky, especially on the hours before darkness would unfold, and I can’t help but smile for the sky is never the same, as if some great artist never fails to show us a new opus.

Some call him God (though what your definition of God may be different from my own, and whether we both believe in such an existence or not is also another story for another day)

Point is, there is always something new.

As a good friend once said “It can’t rain all the time…your tears wont fall forever…”

I am happy to have shared/met/experienced/messaged/texted/missed/talked/{add your own here} life with you on this year that is about to die….

…as I am happy to share the birth of the new one.

If you read this far, thank you. I know I could have just said “Happy New Year!” like everyone else, but then, I am not like everyone else, I am damon.steine, and so are each of you your own self, your own name and faces, each one like no one else, filled with so much of the world, its hope and despair, of nightmares and dreams, of hope. Here’s a smile for you =).

I know you exist, and as along as I live, you will not die.

A Peek at The Secret Lives of a Starving Poet : The Insanity Process - #1 - Self Conversations

this is not gonna make sense. fair warning.

an old post, like a year ago. and it tugged me.

While You Were Sleeping

d. steine

i discovered
the shape of my desire

to navigate the waters of sleep
without signal flares, rafts, or life jackets
like you do.

with you.

reading it led me to one of my old haunts, my first home in the web actually The HideAway (circa 1997 or 98) and led me to the following

iNnOcenCe

your innocence
as fine as silk
i ripped off
from your fragile soul

rape i guess
and i basked as i violated you
grinning with every inch away
and as i found, and
left your core
i was blind
i did not see
the flicker of your darkness

i became a prisoner of freedom

i guess
i should have never
violated you
in any manner

my fault
i guess
that your womb is
afraid to conceive love
for me

then i remembered that i once kept a site for those seduced by the pen (my first failure, i must confess) and found that it doesn't exist anymore...

...and so i went to the next one (this site suffered from one bad makeover om my part and i ended up ruining the design that my sis created for me) and got hooked on this...


ode for eupee

and to find you woman
on the second day of my final years,
when the ghost of tragedies
haunt my every breath and I have started learning
the black acid lessons of forgetting how to smile…

was it I or was it you
who found in the deepest ocean of despair
the whisper of yellow, the laughter of red and the silence of white,
like when stars explode in their silence
or the sensation of the fingers of the sun
caressing the folds of the earth.

Are you the cooing gentle balm
to the violent burn whimpers of my shame and pain,
The proof that one could only define redemption
On the moment of his damnation?

I do not know if angels do exist.

Only that I know that you are there,
Wings, feathers and skin, ripe lips, open eyes and mouth,
Soaring over the currents of sea waves raging
Or basking under the summer sky of pure grace.

I know you exist for the fingers of my thoughts
Are tracing you in the pages of my memory.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

as i was doing this entry..i got stumped...lit a stick...3 inhales...hands reaching out for the beer....then made a new window to view my page here in multiple, looked at the tags, saw POETRY and clicked on it....


[-1234456745923489237493iuyierklhfiofyklhiofydisfheiofysdf <---the next 10 minutes]

and then i publish this.

voila.

i need my coffee

Last Night

We started out when the night was young.

First, to an establishment whose very name promised food in packages, and it did not fail. Wrapped in banana leaves, environment friendly as compared to styro boxes, though I don’t think the banana tree/plant from where the leaves were chopped off would agree with me. Beef steak on banana leaves, never had that before, nor have I ever been a fan of salted eggs whose slices I separated from the rice rice, like a surgeon working a scalpel between fresh and rotting flesh.

Nothing like a good beer afterwards, but it was not on the menu, and so we decided to change venues, and found ourselves on a local coffee shop.

Cappuccino in hand, we chided a friend that we went there for coffee and not to ogle jailbaits. Coffee shops serve coffee, not fresh meat. Though I have to confess that I did take notice of the girl near the entrance even before we parked the car. I even took more notice of her when, just as I was pushing the glass door on my way inside, she crossed her legs while sitting on that brown chair, very much like an invitation to come in. But I was after coffee, not meat, fresh, used, or what else.

A hello here and a wave there, our city being so much like the common playground. Familiar faces flashed, some like fast cars, others like a tricycle laboring over the last meters before the engine finally dies.

Coffee was good, but there is nothing like beer. The car engine purrs, as if in anticipation of a kill, of the thrill of the hunt, or the language for the promise of a wild and rough night, bared tongues and claws.

Ooops.

The travel was brief, the flash of the lights and the boom and beats signaling the presence of beer.

The night was young, nubile, and pregnant with promises about to be born.

I hear my name, and my glance reveals old faces, familiar faces, faces I have never seen for quite a long time.

Hands shake. A kiss to the head. Cheeks greet in the manner of lips. They are my brothers and sisters, bound not by blood, nor by similarities in our brief, and for the most part of the past years, distant lives. If anything, we are all brothers and sisters because we are who we are, each and every one of us.

It was a night of words, yet no words describe it.

Afterwards, all alone on my way home after my third set of coffee, while waiting for my ride, I wondered, and somehow realized, that it is very much indeed good to be alive, when friends (oh, I forgot to mention the past lover who was also there who I am very sure saw me, though I cannot tell if she affirmed my existence) come out when you least expect them, where a few minutes burns far longer in memory, brief moments before they have to be absent again, in the hope that faces will see each other some other day again.

Or some other night perhaps.

Christmas is all about...

..the kids (though in this case it should be about this kid)...



i think i should have one...but wait..i do have one:

it's just that i lost him.

but then again, i never had him to start with, so how can i lose what i never had with me?! =(

Delivery Day

This must be the closest I would ever get in my quest for a greater understanding of women.

I am giving birth.

It’s gonna be a few weeks till delivery day, and yet, I must be feeling what expectant mothers usually feel.

Fear. Sadness. Joy. Desperation. Hope.

It has not been easy, but I never was one to take the easy (and more often sane) way.

For all the glorious women I met and shared my life with, thank you for the memories. We may have said goodbye, but the memories burn, my flickers of light in my country always in darkness.

Movado I

I received my gift from my sister. A time piece.

It’s supposed to be simple: it’s the holiday seasons, and though I am not much a fan of it lately, there are other people, well, most people see it as the so called time for giving, and they do give gifts.

But for some reason, wearing a watch feels something new to me.

I used to wear watches before but somewhere along the way I let go of them. The reason is actually that they either break down, or I have this tendency to lose them, same way I lost track of time when I’m out there, hunting for metaphors.

This is my first time to wear a watch in more than a decade. More like 15 years.

For some reason, I feel a thug inside of me. Something started ticking, and with each movement of the hand it builds up, a silent crescendo.

It feels more like a countdown.

In a week, the year dies to make way for the birth of the new one.

I am old, I am getting old, and I have to confess I am feeling it.

And with the upcoming waves of memories of my failures and tragedies and misfortunes, I cannot help but brace myself for it. No, I am not one to make a run for shelter, as how my brother knows of me.

It’s just a matter of time.