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.