Matthew Says

Must I always concede to the world?

Ask, often you do not receive ---
like the time she caught you peering from half-lidded eyes:
half-wanting, half-shy to start something of meaning
or the time she held out her hand to you hesitant to claim what was given
and so you lost the opportunity, drowned yourself in wine and whispers of reproach and longing, bouncing against a wall of ambivalence, her not caring. Anymore.

Seek, what have you found?
A felt-tip pen buried in a book to mark a page
filled with words that sparked a dozen exchanges over time and space;
a feeling, intense, demanding to be felt yet nameless;
that incident in the bathroom fading into memory,
fading into Must Forget.

Knock, who opens the door?
Choosing to keep it closed, deferring to Archimedes and buoyed by blood
displaced by the organ, which has lodged itself between lock and key,
every twist and turn
vomiting words instead of what you drank for dinner.

Again, must I always concede to the world?
Perhaps there are battles that mustn't be fought
nor beliefs that must be taken with a grain of salt, i.e., the silly belief in the stars
and what they tell us about the past and distance,
radiating from the dark expanse of night ---
how conceding, sometimes, is just the thing you need to get you going.

What

Begins when everything ends: Love
vestiges of lust, evolving with a hint
of truth; written in many, many forms
of blood, from blood as ink, ink of blood
drip, drip, dripping from a heart
worn, aching --- ready to relinquish
its claim upon your sleeve.

There are many measures of love.
A heart contrite, for one. And two, a hand
reaching out into the eye of the storm
that exists for us both: similar and not the same,
differing in minute details: the intensity perhaps,
what it picks up along the way, debris, the chip off
a shoulder, baggage lugged  from one continent to another.

Love
has been written about elsewhere before
rewritten and rewritten but can never
claim to be rewritten no more,
perhaps by myself, wary and yet dauntless ---
as a way maybe of moderating desires or
questioning them:

Do I love you, for example; or
Do I love me with you that's why I do love you?
You and not you when you are with me?
Or what you do to me?
Now that I've shrugged off the fear
of what could be and may and will happen,
I will let love be[gin].

Seasons

Goodbye...

When you walk away too fast

I am transported to a time when

my life knew of only two seasons:

Winter and Fall

when tragedy hung loosely around the edges of things.

Yet there is a stillness:

my mind is filled with quiet

distilled night terrors subdued into

ominous dream sequences

where Beethoven played in the background.

The next time you walk away too fast

I will push the oxygen in my lungs

to exhale the petty worries of yesterday.

I will stand still and smile...

See you tomorrow.

Let her sleep

Water slips through the slits of her fingers as she keeps

her gaze to the vastness of sky; she wonders how 

she dreams and in what color --- cerulean, sienna,

or that plain block of brown --- do they come in, her dreams.

Or maybe she slumbers in silence, void of images, a blank slate

which clamors to be filled, splattered with paint: a splash of red

for passion, a smear of carnation, signaling a silent, burning love

she longs to send her. So she whispers to the night, willing the wind

to carry her words to where she sleeps, dreaming in snippets --- a fingertip tracing

the outline of a scar from when she once tried and failed, a hesitant echo,

silence golden and yet wishing to be taken back with the words 

I love you, darling. And somehow, that is all that matters; her resting,

caught in slumber for when she awakens so it begins. Again.

Yen

I need to come up
with new words to describe you
my darling, my little delicacy ---
this is what I call hunger, desire. The strange need
to rip you apart with my bare hands.

I imagine how you would tear: shining, shimmering
invisible threads holding my human[e}ity together.
Resplendent like the sun -- you are enticing -- existing
to feed a hungry, pernicious creature like me.

How I long for you, my sweet.
Your eyes are pearls and how you smell like a December dawn.
Cold and crisp , alchemizing to warm and comforting
under my nimble fingers.

And yet, you remain remotely beautiful
within some surreptitious corner ---
Oh, sweetheart! How you forsake me:
keeping yourself hidden, tucked in some distant creation.

Strangely feeding my hunger, the yearning
making my blood boil. No words to describe
desire or how you make me feel at three in the morning:
when in need, I taste you and have you move against me.


---
In pursuit of abundance in writing.

Ask yourself:

All the hard questions.

Like what do you want to be, what does the morning decide you will become? A raindrop, a mermaid, a fallen feather off a clumsy dove mid-flight? Whose voice sings in your heart right now? What words do you find your thoughts clinging to over and over and over? What story did you erase and which chapter did you start with? How many ghosts inhabit your head at this very moment, and how many of those said supernatural forces are you willing to entertain?

Just right now you offer your hand, fingers dancing despite the cold coating it, despite the rain, reaching out with hesitant palms wide open, an aria aching to be sung from the quickening beat of your pulse:

1. How long do you have to wait until another verse arrives?
2. And how do you intend to welcome it?

Turning

Morning

What is there to lose?

Rueful and sheepish, I am when it comes to a dialogue where you are the central character. I remember distinctly how you uncorked the bottle to have laughter and words spill out, unbridled, instead of wine. We laughed and laughed some more, exchanging our versions of sadness. Or something like that. After sifting through each other's shit, what did we talk about? Nothing much. But always, some sort of insight was gleaned through the labyrinth of innuendo and allusion.

"How ironic." 
"Irony is sexy."
"How can you say such a thing? Feigned ignorance is condescending."
"Now that is condescending. But to be strikingly unaware of say, beauty or one's apparent coolitude? Now that is sexy."
"I get you."
"I know you do."

And for a moment, it felt like everything was right in the world.
Alike in our differences, the night offered an overwhelming sense of being overtaken by joy. It was as if the city and night and you and I, midst a wave of people, were united in a kind of profound identity.

So I plummeted, reveled in that lighted moment, when we seemed to understand ourselves and the world and, for a single instant, knew the loveliness of living beings.

But the moment vanished quickly, and we are almost embarrassed to admit that it has ever been, as though in doing so we betray a willingness to believe in what is not true ---

Because

there are those who cannot reconcile

how joy may come 

from where we do not run from life,

from where we learn to break out of the prison of self.

Because

some find it strange how 

perhaps joy is most likely to come

when we forget ourselves in service,

or in the pursuit of a great dream.

Because

most fail to understand how

we are most likely to experience moments of joy

if we can admit that there is more to life

than we have yet fathomed.

And because

we refuse to consider how

moments of deep exaltation are born out of

uncertainty and challenge and peril;

how we are blind

that there in the universe is light,

a stuff,

a tissue,

a substance

in company with which one would never be lonely.

Noon

I keep to the shade, quiet places where I can sip my coffee and look at the world. You bask in the sunlight, always in a flurry of activity, paddles untucked, never at one place at one time. You wear your heart in the outer folds of your sleeve, sometimes in your back pocket or at the tip of your nose but always where everyone can see it. I have kept mine hidden in my cobwebbed cage of blood and bone, only to claw its way out when you revealed yourself to me. It's been somewhere since, never within my reach, enjoying this cruel game of hide and seek. 

To be continued...

Night

Cont.

I stay cocooned in my nest surrounded by people made out of paper while you keep to dancing lights and the haze of smoke.

Be that as it may

You and I will forever

remain equals, still.

And I must say, there are things I love:

Love that we battle

in secret, drawing our swords of

prose and poetry.

How you challenge me

to say the least, more

than I do myself.

Yet the question still stands: What is there to lose?

Say I lost my heart

somewhere in the folds of your skin.

Say you chanced upon it

would you, would you

consider keeping it?

Red Flags

uttering her name you fell completely
unaware how the sonant curved into a warning
planting a seed of sadness in your heart
only to blossom majestically

its thirst quenched with tears ---
tendrils enveloping the organ
powerless to contain the burgeoning
darkness within

like a flock of birds with fractured wings
struggling, beating mercilessly
through your cage of blood and bone
poised for flight

in the stillness of the night.



---
Night terrors are the pits.

Mula sa Musa

Para sa Manunulat --- 

Isang malalim na buntong hininga ang sagot ko sa pag-agos ng mga salita mula sa iyong pluma.

Dahil sa unti-unting dumudulas ang mga sandali, parang hindi ko kayang pasanin ang kalungkutang mararamdaman ko kung sakaling dumating ang araw na hindi na ang aking anino ang lililim sa katawan mong magbibigay-buhay sa isang tula.

Natatakot ako na sa bawat indayog ng [mga] buwan dala nito ang mga alaala na ulap na lamang ang nilalaman.

Natatakot ako na hindi na maaari ang mabagal na paglalakbay sa bawat araw sa kagustuhang bawasan ang lawak nitong distansya sa ating pagitan.

Nababalutan ng takot itong aking pag-amin na nais kitang mahalin — sapagkat 

anong sagot 

            ang maisusukli mo 

                                    sa akin?

---

Muted gestures and imaginings. Often it is the writer who captures the words behind beauty and inspiration, bottles up the emotions, and unleashes them on the page. Do you ever wonder -- what of the muse? 

---

True to my editorial colors. Original scribbles from The In-between. Because I'm bored and would like to put the 'use' in amused. Hehe.

Someone beat me to it

Finding the words before I did ---

We talked about nothing in particular, but it felt like we were talking about the most important things.

 Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Yep, there are things I sure miss.

"Hey, you," said I, as I wave to you in dreams that vanish in the morning, snippets of which hover in the air as I make my morning coffee.

Anyhoo...

Trying to a write a poem with se[x]nsual undertones. Progress report: Not very successful.

This may not see the light of day or am I the only one who thinks writing/revising a piece can take forever? This rediscovery is (still) scaring me but reining it in. And trying my hardest to catch up. Or keep up?

Of course there are the questions: Must everything always be tested by time? Must things always take time? Time to heal, to evolve, to make sense of? Time -- that which I do not have -- is slipping away like a missed train I want to be very much on.

Obviously, patience is not a strong suit. Also, a penchant for stating the obvious. Minus 5.

Starting to get sick of the voices inside my head. Three words: Not good enough.

I have been feeling better --- and worst. One more so than the other; guess which. 

But, trying to make a conscious effort to see the glass half full. As in 'seeing' -- really -- and not merely 'looking'. To inject some sense of "Yes, I understand." Which means getting over Things Not Going As Hoped, Things Not Happening, and Being Too Hard On Self.

Fighting off this anchorage. Let go -- it's ok -- let go.
Fight.

For now, a poem by e.e. cummings -- because words are elusive sometimes, like butterflies.

Lady, I will touch you with my mind.

Touch you and touch and touch until you give

me suddenly a smile shyly obscene.

Lady, I will touch you with my mind.

Touch you, that is all,

lightly and you utterly will become

with infinite care

the poem which I do not write.

----

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