My new home: http://solopika.wordpress.com

Salamat sa Spindle: The Online Literary Journal sa paglalathala ng “Isang Umaga sa Buhay ng Salamangkero“.

Anong damdamin mayroon ang iginawad na halik ng lumisang panaginip?

Walang maalala ang sarili sa nagdaang gabi.

Saang lupain siya nagpahinga at naiwan ang kaniyang kaluluwa?

Narito ang buong tula.

(Salin ng “I Asked You For One Kiss, You Gave Me Six” ni Rumi

Batay sa saling ingles ni Zara Houshmand;

Salin sa Filipino ni Mikael Gallego)

Hiling na ‘sang halik, iyong iginawad ng anim na ulit.

Anong natutuhan sa kamay ng paham, bakit ka hirati?

Likas kang hiwaga’t bukal ng sanghayà, ikaw na kandili

Ang s’yang tumutubos sa palalong mundo ng sanlibong ulit.

***

I Asked You For One Kiss, You Gave Me Six

by Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī

I asked you for one kiss, you gave me six.

What teacher taught you, that you’re such an expert?

You’re so deep a source of goodness, so kind

That you’ve set the world free a thousand times.

Translated by Zara Houshmand

directed by Nagisa Ōshima.

Your name, I wonder.

Your smile measures the distance of two dividing poles

of slumbering universe

Who can recognize the face of a lover?

A beloved?

Who can recognize their voice, their dream,

the shape of the riddle?

Before this train hit its final doom.

It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably everyday for lack of what is found there.

Asphodel, That Greeny Flower; William Carlos Williams

Shared by one of the panelists in palihan (workshop) I attended earlier. I think it summed up to what I feel (or the lack of it) today.

Another one:

“Politics is art of the possible.”

In discussion of Poetry and Politics.

And another one:

Narrowwood day under

netnerved skyleaf through

bigcelled idlehours clambers, in rain

the blackblue, the

thoughtbeetle

Animal-bloodsoming words

Crowd before its feelers.

by Paul Celan

In discussion of dialectical nature of language and politics as art of the possible. Notice how Celan constructs the poem like the line “animal-bloodsoming words.” According to my classmate who recited the poem in its original German language, it simply means “blood blossoming.”

Ano ang kahulugan ng tula? In one of the readings, one interpreted that the persona is speaking in the manner of his/her own oppressor. We can think of it as a war diary, narrating/describing his/her experiences in holocaust. The tragedy is there. For the persona, in times of war even simply seeing “the thoughtbeetle” is something he cannot describe (or something he does not want to describe.)

It is a poem about holocaust. But where is death there? Where is the tragedy?  Where is the struggle?    

If my first attempt of writing a prose poetry you found a vulture and dead rats inside your house, do not think that I finally found my way home. I am still the man who killed you one October night. Blame the stars. They do not suffer from the art of falling. I am still the traveller who walks everynight in your dreams without you noticing. I run to your old home and saw dead rats eaten by vultures in the stairs. It puzzles me: Did I kill the rats or did the rats murder me? I do not blame the stars. They too suffers from vertigo.

Wow. Perfect. Brilliant. Magnificent. Insult. Filipino. Intellect. Massacred.

news feed: Arroyo names 7 National Artists for 2009

“I love you so much that I wouldn’t go to bed with you,” he said. Then he walked over to where she was. He stood looking into her face, his powerful arms leaning on the counter in front of her, looking into her eyes. He said: “I love you so much that every night I’d kill the man who goes with you.”

From The Woman Who Came At Six O’clock, Gabriel Garcia Marquez

yo, Gabriel!

I bought second-hand books last Sunday. One of these is the Nobel Crimes, a collection of short prose by the winners of Nobel Prize for Literature like Heinrich Böll’s In the Darkness, William Faulkner’s Smoke, Ernest Hemingway’s The Killers, Bertrand Russell’s The Corsican Ordeal of Miss X, etc., a book with the themes of murder, mystery, and intrigue. Home, tired from the workshop I was attending every weekend since June, I started reading Albert Camus’ The Guest in my room. Then before midnight after I scribbled seven lines of a poem in my notebook (imagery are still incoherent and some literary devices used are still vague), I decided to take a rest and read The Woman Who Came at Six O’clock.

The plot is simple. No effect of highfalutin drama, pervasive in Marquez magical-realism novels. The story is tracked between the conversation of Jose and the woman named only as Queen. Queen entered in the restaurant at exactly six o’clock. The story tells us that no regular customers will arrive in the restaurant until six-thirty. Queen who came to visit Jose everyday insists him that she entered in the restaurant at quarter of an hour. Why? As we follow the story, it was revealed that Queen is whore, who sleeps with different men every night. Jose, the ugly and pig-shaped Jose, was in love with her. Unrequited love. The best kind of love ever expressed. He will do anything for his queen, giving her the best steak he cooked as his immortal offering to a repressed love; even killing the man who went for her if necessary. But no, she does not want anything. There’s nobody to kill. What she wants for Jose is to make a lie for her—that she came in the restaurant at quarter an hour—if ever someone comes asking for her.

What strikes me is how it builds mystery and intrigue inside my head. The world of the story revolves only with the conversation of the two; a thirty-minute conversation before costumers are starting to arrive; a very short span of time to inject mystery. There was some sense of unlocked knowledge hidden between their conversations, an undertone. The story points-out there is a murder involved. But where and when, we do not know. It is outside the world of the story. On the second thought, is there really a crime involved? Is the crime already happened? Consider the ending of the story suggesting an ambiguity of action.  The good thing is that Marquez writes about something mysterious without telling us anything about that mystery.

Taragis, ang galing!

True fact: Hayden Kho is a fluffer.

Hayden Kho and Katrina Halili on the verge of sex scandal. Hayden jackhammering, Katrina moaning. There, there, there. Hayden and Katrina in the classical arcade game “Dig Dug”, that is, the sex scandal that become today as coin-operated machine entertainment.

Hayden the Dig Dug drilling the hole of Katrina the Pooka.

Hayden the Dig Dug crushing the cave of Katrina the Pooka by a rock.

Hayden the Dig Dug firing his white ooze to Katrina the Pooka’s butt.

The sex scandal that comes in and comes out, in and out, in and out with another cum shot!

Poor Katrina Halili, I love her. If she wants to be saved, I’ll save her using my own version of Laser Sword. Go, tell her.

True Fact.

Did you know that Hayden Kho is actually a fluffer?

True fact.

Excerpt from Snuff:

A fluffer is somebody whose jobs is to blow guys or give hand jobs to make sure they’re ready to act on cue.

-image: manilagayguy