"Sailed not as a seaman, but as a traveler..."

"Sailed not as a seaman, but as a traveler..."- Sir Thomas More's Utopia

Saturday, December 18, 2010

Living on scotch and cigarettes just like a real writer.


Image: San Fernando's Giant Lantern Festival illuminating a black sky.

As a break from all the story writing, sometimes I dabble in poetry. Actually, it really isn't poetry so much as it is word vomit purging itself from my mind-pools. The following is my latest - enjoy the word porn.


I will find your heart
Amidst these crushed twigs and fallen leaves
Buzzing and humming to the key of coughs
I don't know if you exist
Or if you do if you'd dwell in these dark woods
Of well worn blues bars
Wearing the patina of countless nights spent awake
Same as me
Gobbling turkeys through measures of shot glasses too heavy for one hand
While drowning in sounds of every night's mournful howl
Filtered through a horn pressed againt the lips of a man with too much story to tell
Sifting through the smells of lotion and cigarettes
I will find your hands
Like yarn finds its shape upon the points of needles
We will find beauty in the residue of discarded dreams
I don't know if you exist
Or if you do if you'd dwell in these sultry nights
Running to the rhythm of hurricanes
But I will find that faint funk of festering divinity
Of marionettes unhinged and unbound
I will hear that delicate tremor of a voice buried under thousands of plywood puppets
Dancing to the tune of forsaken scores
For these are the portions for those who are not we
For these are the lives of those who easily erase the things they've seen
I don't know if you exist
And I have no inkling of your name but
Together we will be peacocks on power lines
Dancing across electricity

Tuesday, December 7, 2010

Still alive and kicking.


Image: Rizal's words emblazoned on the walls of his former prison.

I just realized that I haven't posted anything in over a month. Here's a post to let y'all know that I'm still alive and kicking. I've just been very busy frying up fish heads and whatnot.

Here is another excerpt from a story I have been working on. It really is amazing to be in a country so full of inspiration. Sometimes my hand can't keep up with the ideas pouring out of my head. If you know anything about Philippine mythology, you might be able to pick out a few reinterpretations in this little excerpt. Enjoy!

The Apricot Farmer

Ruled completely by logic, Don Adarna considered his predicament quite closely. The only logical solution would be to swallow an apricot seed and become an apricot tree himself. Without much ceremony, he picked an apricot from a nearby tree and began to eat.

"I have collected much happiness and sadness in the course of my life," Don Adarna thought aloud. "If this is where my story ends, then this is where it must end."

Savoring the essence of the apricot, he particularly enjoyed the subtle but complete and permeating pleasantness of the apricot. He took the last morsel of the fruit's flesh clinging to the pit with a tinge of sadness. Sadness for the fruit because it had ended and not because the fruit's end might also somehow signify the end of his own flesh. Don Adarna understood that although all things must end, all things also continued in manners unseen and immeasurable.

Unlike the yielding flesh of the apricot, the pit drew its course down his throat like the anchor of a ship hastily thrown overboard for a desperately quick halt. The anchor dragged on until it caught the stone of Don Adarna's heart. Taking root in the coolness of the beating organ, the apricot pit began to pull sustenance from his very blood, slowly transforming bone and sinew into moist and fertile earth.

Completely conscious throughout his entire metamorphosis, Don Adarna wondered if the excruciating pain of change would ever end. He waited patiently for the strength of stillness. When the inertia of his evolution finally came to a halt, his leaves unfurled and out came forth a most delicate rustling, the sweetly sad song of melancholy humanity. He listened and he wept for reasons indescribable by words.

All things have their place. Even the most doubtful of minds and the coldest of hearts can give way to beautiful trees with branches hanging heavy with succulent fruit, bursting with understanding.