Night Songs

I met a man once

who spoke of having seen hell—

A postmodern pastiche of

Half-forgotten offenses

and of well favored

mistresses

that filled the air

with cackles and

bad intentions

Where love was

a zero calorie element

that cultivated a fear of

bears creeping up on houses

mounting stags from behind.

I loved a man once

who uttered lovely lies

of  beautifully woven

haphazard futures--

Where children were

boisterous and

women were happy

favored goddesses.

What a farce

Tonight I will lay my head

on a bed of invented memories

and dream of solitude

for a change...

AFTERTHOUGHTS

Languidly I rose beneath preposterous stars

that drew a perfect night amidst a transitory ravine

In which some trees and weeds created

An Ambiance--nothing more.

Uncertainty marinated the air

Howling in the night

The past is never dead--

it is just another

land.

Now I dart my eyes from sky to sky

Harvesting tales of my youth

Against the innocuous clouds

of mutilated memories.

Put on your mask, and show me your face

Missing Home. . .

I was born a child of the sea...

Traveling, I am always traveling.

This heretic wishes her solitude would last forever...

first rejection

The first jolt was that crayola heart
zig-zagged right smack in the middle
as if to indicate it had been broken

you had found another you said
she had ribbons
long hair
and collected erasers


rejection hurts when you're seven

We are all bound by a thread

Of experiences--

And shared memories

Whether

real or invented.

What I'm listening to now...

Brave Bulging Bouyant Clairvoyants by the Wild Beasts.
None of that bubblegum Taylor Swift shit.

BROTHERHOOD

On the summer of our puberty

I was told it was the neighbor’s cat

That fed our bellies for a week

You were fuming

And incantatory

Speaking some unknown language

As strange and foreign as the wind.

As children we hid

On the balconies of our

ancestral homes,

curved and cantilevered. 

Gushing about first loves

And unending erections

By the bay

we gathered conchs

and gossiped

I sit here

Waiting

Collecting Scars

A blog on blogpost

You screwed my formats
toyed with my lines
and yet.... here I am again

I'm Back.

Let's start things over, shall we?

Hello blogspot, I'm Carissa.

Please don't screw up my format this time around.

Love story: a contrivance

They come in droves, she used to say

squawking like fishwives by the shore

but every year they whittle down

like your waist line

That year you met your match

but as always you

retaliated like a typhoon

Oil and water never mix

you used to say

you are brain

he is brawn

like the flesh of that wild boar

we pickled in vinegar

and insisted upon guests

who very well obliged

That night

under the perigee moon

I saw

a man naked

swimming

I had hoped it was

a nymph

or a siren at least

Pork and vinegar

remind me

of insidious love affairs

First Lust

My thoughts

Unsettle

Crimson merlot

Alabaster  shoulders

I battle

Your infinitesimal mounds

With my infinite moles

Each memory

Forgotten

Each heave

Relived

Each time

I unlearn.

Infidelity

The last straw was that blonde. But own up to it,

his loins meandered all the time.

White Casablanca lilies, blood diamonds. Subdued

gleams of treachery .

I couldn’t face you, in those days,

for our own good. They were choking

the little Siren. Punished

for her ethereal beauty. Sublime and Junoesque.

They cast a thousand stones,

spewing venom. As she sang--

Sang to her dying.

TRANSGRESS

Lying here
in my unrest

I twiddle 
my thoughts

In  a corner 
somewhere 

A lint ball

In another

A woman

Now a man

Bidding him

A sad adieu. 

AN ELEGY TO ‘91

For the lives, minds and dignities lost-- 
that one twisted day, on the 5th of November 1991 Ormoc City, Leyte 


1.
Stay the same 
your parting words
Tearing at an ocean 
of bodies taking you

They may have snatched you
but your memory lives
on cable news


Cause of death? 
Wanton logging. 


Trees hacked down into lumbers 
lumbers feeding their ten thousand children 


A grain of rice and nothing more 
a nun utters
For Jesus ate nothing 
For 40 days
The lumber yard across the street 
smelled barely of sawdust 
But of borrowed life and 
of you gone too soon. 


They ravaged the mountains that mothered
lives upon lives of wild I can no longer name

Ormoc Bay whimpers 
not having seen such anger 
Since GI Joe and the little
brown Pinoys defeated the Yamashita's 
right under his nose. 


2. 
Nature is
           a bitter woman. 
Calculating
Vindictive 
Beautiful


When she could no longer take it 
She birthed a generation's worth of wrath 


Taking with her 
bodies, homes, dogs and that photograph 
of you and me on that one 
fine day I uttered my first word—mama. 


The others called her Thelma
But to us, she was Uring the wrath of God 


Eternal proof 
that Nature is God and 
that God is indeed a woman 


Scorned.