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THE DAY THE PROFESSOR BECAME A HABAL-HABAL DRIVER

 

 

 

Where to?

A point in a map

where all roads meet?

 

 

 

With this shiny bike with leather seat

I see places no dusty books can run.

I scourge dirt roads with rumbling sound,

treading tire marks in holy grounds.

I smell highway breeze, gasoline from the air,

play fast music and not think of missing a beat,

wear dark shirt, dark specs until I burn in heat,

chase after the sun, until my bones say I’m not too young.

My boy, own the beat while you still have it.

 

 

 

Hold on tight, kid!

We’ll speed off to infinity.

In your body that

sings epic, I look for that

haiku that trembles.

 

 

 

 

 

 

.

Desktop is blurred, cellphone needs a charge,

music player blinks, so does my eyes.

First light slants, hits the wall.

Bulbs turn off, bulbs that were gold.

Last cold slips under the door

as the fan whirs on the floor.

Local news on TV, man beats wife on TV,

on the muted TV, brawling on TV.

Rice boils in the cooker,

water boils in the heater,

underwear spins in dryer,

head spins with dryer.

Empty cigarette packs, cold black coffee,

crumpled drafts here, unfinished papers there.

And you snoring over there,

– all the world needs to calm me down.

 

.

Lady Ishikawa

Lady Ishikawa, (to Prince Otsu)

 

Waiting for me

You were dampened.

Oh that I could

Be the dew dripping

On that board-flanked hill.

˚_˚

Dec. 5. Wednesday. Evening.

The previous poem by Prince Otsu, which I had considered as the first poem that I have to meditate on daily basis, turned out to be epistolary. (Wow!) Yes. Like a little love note. A text message. So it turned out that our Prince sent his little poem to Lady Ishikawa. Prince Otsu’s poem is about waiting and being dampened by dew. As what has been agreed upon, the dew signifies the sad predicament on which our Prince felt entrapped. Our Lady then writes a reply poem to Prince Otsu. Here, Lady Ishikawa transformed the depressing image of dew into an enlightening vision of the element of water.

˚_˚

Dec. 6. Thursday. One minute before striking twelve.

My sister is studying for her National Medical Admission Test (NMAT) this coming Sunday. All week I have been hearing her complaints. Last Monday she said Biology will be easy but Physics? For crying out loud! Physics? Now I hear her complain about Chemistry. Things may look like clear water but they may be an ingredient for a nuclear bomb. They may not have any smell but they could be radioactive. A misplacement of one insignificant atom may alter the whole composition of a substance. This got me thinking. The dew on the poems is not really dew.

˚_˚

Dec. 7. Friday. Afternoon.

Let’s over read. On present condition, people like Prince Otsu and Lady Ishikawa are not those royal loveless romantics anymore. On present setting, they are now these kids with exaggerated hair bangs, singing alone in restroom stalls, crying black tears and scribbling one-liners on tile walls with their eyeliner pencils. The dew could be…what? Monosaccharide? Hexose? Ambrosia? Cough syrup? White Caffeine? Who knows? Let me ask my sister. Wait.

˚_˚

Dec. 8. Saturday.

NICE ONE

˚_˚

Dec. 9. Sunday. Lunch. Eating mais con yelo.

So the dew is Lady Ishikawa. How romantic. How martyr. How freaky.

I imagine myself the speaker of the first poem dampened by dew. Then there is this apparition of a woman enveloping me with her wetness, dripping and declaring to me her existence in the form of water. She would sing: “I am the one you’re waiting for.” I see Galadriel. I see the Lady in the Water. I see the Virgin Mother. And all those other white women standing on the foot of the hill and they all sing the songs by dripping their tears. The dew. The white tears due on the hill.

˚_˚

Dec. 10. Monday. Night. After watching Grey’s Anatomy and Brothers and Sisters.

Do I really need to analyze poems? Read them five times a day? Every week? For the rest of the semester? I’ll be saying the same things over and over again on how they are presented, who are the speakers, what is the setting, how am I affected, etcetera, etcetera. Hah! The test of patience. I could be well writing a poem myself. But, no Jeff, no. Patience. Analyze. Analyze what?

˚_˚

Dec. 11. Tuesday. 10AM.

I cannot write anymore. Spirits in my hands leave me dry.

moss-covered beneath

flowing streams, these stones are like

our fingernails: dead.

˚­_˚

PRINCE OTSU, 663-87

Nov. 28. Wednesday. Night.

The poem is an example of a dramatic representation in which the speaker himself speaks of his circumstance as he/she waits for someone on the hill. The speaker directly addresses his monologue to the audience as he indicates this “someone” he/she is waiting for as “you”. The poem shows us two distinct images. One is the dew dripping and the other is the speaker dampened by the dew. The poem does not tell us directly who the speaker is; how long he/she has been waiting and what events have happened that led him/her to wait on the hill. With the hardly any images, we can only speculate.

˚­_˚

Nov. 29. Thursday. 6 PM. Trillanes surrenders.

My vision of the poem makes a sudden leap as the speaker transforms into a different image from my initial idea of who he/she is. He is once a romantic prince but now he is a ragged man in unwashed fatigue, carrying a high-caliber firearm. He could be more than just waiting; he could be hiding under a bush from which the dew drips.  He is either waiting for his weekly ration or his ambush of his enemy. Or maybe, symbolically, this man is waiting for that magnificent change of society, of that rising sun and of the better world where there is need to be idealistic anymore. Whatever he is waiting for, it is far from the trivialities of life.

˚­_˚

Nov. 30. Friday. Bonifacio Day.

Prince Otsu is an anime, a nineteen-year-old boy sitting on a boat in the middle of the pond full of coys. Instead of worrying about the looming responsibility of being the next emperor, of wars and of lands to conquers (a responsibility which he leaves to the struggle of his uncles and older brothers), his boat floats under the moon and he thinks about his soon-to-be first wife. He knows calligraphy, but not as perfect as the brush strokes of his master. The rigidity of those ways won’t play any romance in what he is about to do. He sways his arms to write the first line but his kimono sleeve gets into the water. As he raises his writing hand above the paper, water drops onto the paper, forming a small clear bulb, like dew, reflecting the moon and worlds beyond, of the past, of the future, of his soon-to-be fifth wife, their first-born son who would conquer whole Japan and the world before the paper absorbs the water, suffusing water visions into this fragile sheet. Prince Otsu sits on the boat imagining himself waiting for someone on the hill.

˚­_˚

Dec. 1. Saturday. Afternoon.

While waiting, the speaker of the poem states his condition as dampened by the dripping dews. The dew dripping can tell us how long has the speaker been waiting and what have happened while he/she is waiting. Dew appears in two possible conditions: (1) after a rain and (2) on a cold foggy time of the day. Option 1 is improbable for the speaker indicates that he only dampened by the dew. If it had rained while he/she is waiting, he may be more than just dampened.  Option 2 is more likely to happen in the morning. Just before sunrise, sheets of fog roll down from the high lands like a hill and leave it covered in fresh dew. It could be possible that the speaker waited for “you” the whole night but “you” did not show up. With the possible conditions stated, the speaker waits on the hill the whole night. “You” fail to appear. He states his condition as morning approaches, given that the dews are already dripping. He doesn’t tell us how he feels.

˚­_˚

Dec. 2. Sunday. Evening.

This representation of the speaker’s experience and his use of the word “dampened” evoke us his/her desire and longing for “you”. He could have used other words that can express the same essence of the word “dampened” like “moistened”, “wet” or “humidified”. But his use of the particular word “dampened” does not only tell us his physical experience with the dew but of something deeper. The image of dew signifies many attributes. It is about emotion because it is fluid. It is overwhelming and encompassing because it is small (minute objects in poetic works tend to hold the greatest of emotions). It is unexpected for no one knows when it drops. It is unforeseen for no one knows which leaf it may come from. It continuous for the mere fact it drips. It weighs down someone because it drips on somebody, dampening that person, creating a film of burden on the skin. The poem doesn’t directly tell us how the speaker feels. Again, we can only speculate.

˚­_˚

Dec. 3. Monday. Morning.

There is something crunchy about Japanese poetry: brief, concise and cracking poetry, like a fortune cookie or firewood on a camp. Like an incoming signal and a low ringtone. As if there is always that need, that struggle to condense life, world and love into few characters, and fewer lines, making it seem possible for one to see abstractness in a small graspable figure like a poem. Lesser is more. Minimalism in grand scale. One hundred and sixty characters, space included, all Filipinos need to achieve the same sublime effect. We can dismiss Japanese poetry as terse and snappish but we share the same idea of brevity as part of the modern Filipino culture. Ha! Japanese poetry, the Japanese old form of the art of text messaging.

˚­_˚

Dec. 4. Tuesday. Night.

As much as it is avoided to open the subject, the idea is that the speaker is in love. Only fools would want to endure the conditions in which he/she has gone through.

There is another perspective to the whole idea of the poem. This endurance may tell us what kind of relationship the speaker and “you” have. Though it is not stated, the poem implies that something is preventing them from being together: people, nature, divinities or whatever. We could only speculate that the relationship may be a richgirl-poorboy affair, a May-December affair, a may-asawa-na affair, girl-to-girl affair. Who knows? The choices are endless. But one thing is certain. No one waits on the hill only to be dampened by dew and for nothing.

˚­_˚

I knew I lost the poem the day after I wrote it, the day when I could not find the one-fourth intermediate paper I wrote it on. I knew I inserted the paper somewhere, maybe in my file case, my notebook or the book I borrowed. But I could not remember. For me, the theme of the poem was a good idea to pursue. But the paper was gone.

Poem was entitled “Reunion” and it sounded like this when I found it weeks later (weeks after I have written another poem entitled “Reunion Ver. 2: Reviving a Lost Poem” with the same theme and situation):

REUNION (click here) 

This poem was written on the rush of instant excitement with no intricate or laborious preparation. The idea was just sitting on my head, fanning itself, ready to be presented.

The writing happened last semester when I found myself one afternoon with two other classmates imaging a world of more afternoons at the Atrium. We didn’t have a class but the teacher gave us a seatwork. But instead of doing what was supposed to be done we played a game to see if we could write a “poem” right there and then. We scribbled immediately. Since then, we called these surges of instant inspiration “emoments”. The seatwork had to wait.

The idea came up like a breeze as I remember the drinking experience that happened two nights earlier. I was trying to dribble a ball in a basketball court in a subdivision in Maa, drunk with the stars, struggling to make a score. I was smiling that whole night because the last time I was in a basketball court, drunk and finding the corners of a ball, I was in high school. I was overwhelmed with that experience in Maa that it became the sparkling inspiration of what I was about to write that afternoon at the Atrium. In my mind, I see a man in his forties in a high school reunion playing basketball in the school’s old court and drinking with his old buddies he hasn’t seen in a long time. The plan was to establish a character behind this forty-year-old man.

But I lost the one-fourth intermediate paper on which I wrote the poem. And the original vision was gone. So I wrote “Reunion Ver. 2: Reviving a Lost Poem”.

I added “Ver. 2”, meaning second version, in the second poem because I could not say “Reunion Ver. 2: Reviving a Lost Poem” was a direct take off from “Reunion”. It was another version of the first poem, not a revision. There was a different attempt to represent the idea and, in my opinion, “Reunion Ver. 2: Reviving a Lost Poem” was not a revision of “Reunion” because the intentions were not the same.

It may be a revision in a sense given that the meaning changes into a revision. Another vision of the situation.

I do not quite agree with the idea, as some of the canons in modern poetry say, that a poem is always never in its final form. When a moment, an event or a situation is captured in words, when published and printed, somehow, somewhere, the poet finds in it a wrong word or a mistake in enjambment or whatsoever. There is a need to correct the faults they see in their poem. To polish more luster out of it, as they say. There is a need for perfection. And as they say, a poem should always flow, that its revisions and changes is constant. A poem is never in its final form until the writer feels the end of it, or his end of it.

The poem in its published or printed form is a poem is its own self. It is the vision of the poet about a situation, an event or a thing in a particular perspective and angle. When a poet, for example, at his virile twenty creates a poem about drinking and basketball and at his dragging forties he re-creates it or revises it, the situation of the poem may be the same but the perspective is not. So the early poem and revised poem have their own souls, never the same two things. Two different poems playing on the same theme.

“Reunion” was the end of itself. I found it beautiful because it was raw like a bloody meat. Yet as I have reread the diction, the corny images and the shallow attempt to romanticize the situation, the whole thing was appalling. It collapses and fails as a palpable poem. “Reunion” has to go.

So, “Reunion Ver. 2: Reviving a Lost Poem”, the different vision of the original poem, looks like this:

REUNION Ver. 2: REVIVING A LOST POEM (click here)

Writing “Reunion Ver. 2: Reviving a Lost Poem” was more intense than “Reunion”. There was a challenge in my part as to make this a serious poem, meaning acceptable to literary standards. That was an intention not found in the first poem. Another challenge was how to make this poem sound like spoken by a real man. Basketball and drinking are symbolically macho, and in my perspective (or what I’ve heard from someone), they are “too macho that they become homoerotic”. And the hardest of the challenges was how to show the surface image of basketball and drinking as they were and just tuck somewhere (maybe between, in the corners or beneath the words, commas and lines) the idea of homoeroticism.

But, no. I did not take these challenges seriously. I just wrote what was appropriate for my aesthetics. And like the “Reunion” the diction, the corny images and the shallow attempt to romanticize the situation were as horrendous. But I love the second vision more than the first.

I showed the second poem to people whose criticisms I trust, meaning my friends. They all said that it somehow failed because even I was not saying my intentions; it was clear on the poem. A writer should distance himself/herself from his work. I was trying too hard to present it as homoeroticism-hiding-under-machismo. They could see me in these words, maybe lurking like a ghost in the background.

The third version, or let’s say the third vision, has the title “Reunion Ver. 2”. I dropped the “Reviving a Lost Poem” because I felt that it betrays my aesthetics of “revision”. “Reunion Ver. 2” was systematically a take off from “Reunion Ver. 2: Reviving a Lost Poem” but still I would consider it as another vision. Here is how it reads:

REUNION Ver. 2 (click here)

The only changes were the last two lines. Because according to one of my critic-friend the last two lines of the second poem were too giving. It was there where the poem shattered.

This third poem may be the last vision I write about that forty-year-old man playing basketball and drinking with old buddies in their school’s old court. It is somehow frustrating because I envisioned a much more riveting world for that man. I feel I did not place any justice to his existence. In my amateur vision of the world, that was the best I can do for him.

Now, the idea is just sitting in my head. I can still see the man, sweating and all flushed. Maybe I can write a better poem out of his experience. Only it will not be the same as how I saw him in my mind when I was drunk and playing basketball in Maa that night, or the time I was at the Atrium having and “emoment” with my two classmates. But somehow, some when, I will pick up the pieces of that lost dream and will stitch piece by piece the words that are worth his rightful existence. I will immortalize that man.

º_º