Getting Here, Getting There

Standing on the edge of hope
teetering on the side
of fear
next to each other
completely aligned
almost similar
at times decieving
pondering which way to go
- a luxury,
vain preoccupation,
and it is what most
here fear and
also take for granted

Writing it down
is more than recording
a thought as memory
It is reveling in selfish reality
and displaying it
vulgar
inconsiderate
callous
full of conceit

To suppose that
others do as you do
and mill about
making decisions,
or worse,
get to reflect on them
before actually making them

The self absorbed
are thoroughly convinced
of their do-gooding
and themselves
and their lives
as the embodiment of good

Colonized Mentality

Foreign is such an incomplete word
though it seems apt to describe
our mutual otherness.

My manners and ways
no doubt confound you,
My difference makes me stand out
like a sore thumb.

You don't realize that to me
you are hardly a mystery,
unfamiliar nor new.

You and yours are the others
inside us, beneath our skins,
at the back of our minds,
tangled up with our ideas
of ourselves.

You got there by your sheer
often vulgar presence,
a persistence you both expect
and take for granted.

We know too much about your ways
we hardly know about ours anymore.
And while we are "foreigners" to each other,
we sit on different sides of meaning-

Your ignorance of me and my kind
stems not from any absence
(Arguably, we too proliferate)
but simply a lack of interest,
while I on the other hand
find it impossible to ignore you.

And the only reason you are foreign to me
is because I am to you.

Thinking as Feeling

“Is evil-doing … possible in default of not just ‘base motives’ ... but of any motives whatever … Might the problem of good and evil, our faculty for telling right from wrong, be connected with our faculty of thought?” Hannah Arendt

Feeling doesn’t negate thinking
but presupposes it.
Without passion, an action
is only reaction,
and what is mistaken for thought,
merely afterthought.

Inability for thought
follows loss of feeling.
Numb senses increase
not the capacity for pain,
but rather the ability
to inflict it: without thought,
without feeling.

Poetic Wisdom

Poetry is not a trick.
It is many-layered truth:
briefly told
and with some luck,
in a lifetime,understood.

Alas a poet's only gift
is expression unadorned:
constant reminders
of reading,listening,
and speaking in the mode
of thinking.

Authoritative Meaning as Intentional

"I don't know what you mean by "glory,"'Alice said.Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. Of course you don't -- till I tell you. I meant there's a nice knock-down argument for you! But "glory" doesn't mean "a nice knock-down argument,Alice objected. When I use a word, Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less. The question is,' said Alice, `whether you CAN make words mean so many different things.'`The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, `which is to be master - - that's all."(Lewis Caroll, Through the Looking Glass)


Poor substitutes-
always imprecise,
clumsy symbols
that serve us well.

What would we be without it,
when in it,
through it and around it,
we make our places,
arrange ourselves and others,
look inward, reach out,
find comfort, give comfort,
divide and unite,
and try to make sense.

Feeble as are our attempts are,
some often get carried away.

Mesmerized by our creation,
what fed imagination
can also end up containing it.

An insidious despot without an army,
with authority to proclaim the rules
utters not to include
but to exclude -
passing it off as tradition,
invoking it an act of inclusion.

Global Villager

How is it
that having made
connection visible,
revealed it as
intricate,
elaborate,
and profoundly
embedded,
we ended up
feeling
completely detached,
hopelessly alone,
aimlessly adrift,
anonymous?

Tyranny of Innocence

" A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again."

Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism:215

Knowledge is a state:
a stark revelation.

More information,
never leads to answers,
but opens more
unanswered questions.

To remain ignorant
is often an excuse
foisted upon us,
tyrannically imposed,
as if ignorance offers
safety and protection.
The innocent:
idealized recluse.

For in learning,
as in living,
not having all the answers
is exactly the point.

Continuing to ask,
is continuing to care
and continuing to create,
is continuing to dare.

Ill Literate

Safest inside
a sentence
of declaration;
buried
beneath
words;
shoulder to shoulder
with footnotes
and annotations.

Least secure
in mid-conversation;
eye to eye
among
floating faces,
in introduction.

At the receiving end:
a glance,
inspection,
scrutiny:
intrusion.

Being seen
is an illusion;
being read,
revelation.

Primal Fear

Titled Titans
scare me the most.

So much more -
than vagrants,
greasy pick pockets,
who can rob me blind.

They who approach me
in stealth
somehow feel fear,
and often -
smell of it.

Ubermensch
with license to splay
my insides about,
they are:
untouched by disquiet,
beyond mercy,
above faith,
and often justified,
though more often:
lacking justice.

Word(s) to the Wise

The order used to be
sticks, then stones,
words inflicting the least
- in damages
or quite unable to
even if the user willed it.

Nowadays it doesn't take
a word smith to launch:
a verbal "nuclear first strike"
no matter how dull the weapon
or void of wit, the wielder,
trifle words end up
meaning too much,
people understanding too little.

No wonder:
democratized medium
with neither access to facility,
nor honing of ability,
leads us not unto inspiration
(nor aspiration)
thus delivering us from thinking.

Eating Pie

Nothing like the present
quite as efficacious:
a wake up call.

Better than cold water,
stronger than pure coffee,
calling your attention,
your inelegant life.

Weary as the whirring
aged fan's engine,
hapless,
hopeless,
unsuccessfully going about
the business of cooling
when air itself has grown
heavy, weighed down,
and laden with swollen heat
a painful summer's day
with nothing mild about it

Thwarted by the sting,no doubt
other cowards like yourself
hide away in uninspiring dwellings
safety often the refuge
of the uninspired.

Wisdom: A Warning

Hesitation often fancied
as doubt, lack of courage
is also
the timely company
of safety.

An instinct,
an instant,
kicking in
-an ancient warning:
primordial,
prehistoric wisdom.

But how to tell
dark clouds
from silver
that's the trick;
which doubt to heed
which one to overcome:

That is to succeed.

Identity: The Unsolved Mystery

Skin is seen and your body
is the sign people saw as you.

While others in condemnation
still many in consolation,
all just the same:
they saw you as your body
your signifying skin tone,
your eyes,color of hair,
your "otherness"in that place
still so fixated on the "other"
that is not pale or flaxen,
blue green, or hazel gazes
-which many of them
are not.

I wonder now whether
you saw yourself
as everyone else did:
the exotic "other" or
by their standards,
their expectation,
gifted in science,
math or classical music,
I wonder now
whether you hated it,
resented people,
-for thinking it.

You got our attention
and you knew you would
but did you figure
on being "seen" (by the world)
the way others have seen you
all along?

Caveat to the Voter

(Philippine Elections 2007)

Today's totalitarian wears and plays
the populist -
among other robes,
costume of a sinner's past,
makes for more drama

Morality is a badge
only displayed by the crook
performing compassion
as if by the book

Mistake not honesty nor sincerity
for the act of confession
understand that stupidity
has no place in any act of mercy

Forgiveness is not forgetfulness,
ignorance is not innocence
Hope is neither something
to wish for, nor something granted

Its what we give ourselves
when we decide to.

Hi-tech/Lo-tech

Touch outside skin
is either new sense
or nonsense

New signs still rely
on old lines
and I ask:
Is repetition made novel
in real time?

Freed by new possibility
but lacking new ability
today is a trap
between yesterday
and the past

The old and the young
think each other
the fool
debating the rules
but not minding
the tools

On Wholeness

when there are no longer such things
contradiction, disturbance -

the incongruous: are figments
imagined opposition

all things being in themselves:
a complexity of relations

the strategy of contrast,
arbitrary classification,
mediating meaning,
stifling imagination.

The Anesthetized As Free

Sometime
when caring
came to be
considered a fuss,
and friendliness
unwelcome familiarity,
handshakes
recognized less and less
as courtesy,
but more likely
contaminant,
contagious,
is just like the time
we solved the problem
of Freedom.

An empty self
devoid of others,
light,no longer
weighed down.

The truly sovereign
needs no one,and owes nobody,
and the trade off seems fair
(or does it?)

The prized right
to be left alone,
even if in constant fear,
or loneliness.

As such,
freedom is really
a wall
bounding the self in
and others out.

Freedom: A Commitment

Unfettered,
freedom
takes root

The bravest,
remain
unflinchingly
compassionate,
ever able to trust,
ever willing to hope.

This I learned:
Freedom lies not
always in leaving
but often enough
in deciding
to stay.

Through the Looking Glass

"It is not just about adapting technologies to people, but also about people re-creating an environment that is increasingly mediated by technologies..."

Domestication of Media and Technology (Berker, Hartman, Punie and Ward), Open University Press 2006

Gazing
cooly
boxes
glass
and circuitry
in awe,
anticipation
later,
vanity -
vacantly -
closeness
bred by familiarity,
an indifference
inhabited
only by
intimacy
at one
at last
lost
unable
to look
unable
to see
on our own

An Ode to Guy

I wrote this for a friend on her birthday. While my other work may not be as easily understood, this one (because its for a specific person) is even more so baffling right here!

Names label
fix and delimit
but when expertise lies
in gender
and sex
admit it
"GUY" is a monicker
so aptly unspecific

Re-framing no less
than the commonest name
of what could be
or would be
patriarchy

Calling a feminist "GUY"
instead appropriates
(save for when she's in drag
as UP's respected)
befuddling all sense
of a binary

Blasphemous Belief

"Un hombre que ha sido deseal
y con el que fueron desleales
puede sentir de pronto, al cruzar la calle,
una misteriosa felicidad
que no viene del laldo de la ezperanza
sino de una antigua inocencia,
de su propia raiz o de un dios disperso,

Sabe que no debe mirarla de cerca
porque hay razones mas terribles que tigres
que le demonstran su obligacion
de ser un desdichado,
pero humildimente recibe
esa felicidad, esa rafaga"

("Alguien," Jorge Luis Borges)

Iv'e decided that
Happiness
is not just a feeling
but a Choice,
and that God,
(if she exists),
eternal,
all knowing,
alive,
is a fringe benefit
a bonus
or a welcome surprise
pleasant,
heady wine,
warm sunshine
and quite possibly
far better
than ice cream

It is people
who are wretched
and worthy,
no matter how
broken
and battered up
inside (or out)
in pain
and have themselves
tormented others,
the people who need
caring for,
and craving
to belong,
unwelcome,
unpleasant,
impossible,
horrible,
it is the perhaps
the people
hardest to care about
that makes the notion
of God a possibility,
if not
a necessity.

Wisdom

'blessed is the blameless vestal's lot, the whole world forgotten, by the world forgot, eternal sunshine of the spotless mind."
(Alexander Pope)

Frightening truth
took its deepest root
in the comfort of a lie

Distrust the eye,
and be keenly aware
of its tricks

Learn the ways of seeing,
piously receive lessons
in the art of knowing

Partake in creation
Make meaning
worth believing