Asylum

My life becomes too hard, so I go away.
A couple near Turlock takes me in,
not because they like me,

but they like the good my rent will do.
It's just the two and the woman's mother,
frail and shawled in black.

As spring heats into summer,
the old woman comes to call me "son,"
for we have both lost sense of home.

At meals they barely feed her,
give her the smallest cuts of meat,
mostly fat, and a few red drops of wine.

They do not speak.
She convinces me they want to kill her--
"Neglect is only the beginning."

One afternoon, outside their farmhouse,
we sit on crates and smell yams
swelling in the warm earth.

I ask her why she lives like this,
but she says nothing, only smiles,
grabs a chicken, and wrings its neck,

then pulls out its innards,
showing me the freshly eaten grain
inside the dark gizzard.

She frowns at my silence, as if to say,
"There is a lesson here,
but you do not understand it yet."

Later, as the moon begins its nightly rounds,
she leads me a little ways from town,
to a tree clutching a fallen ax's running blade.

She says it was the tree that bit,
catching the axehead
and snapping the handle in two.

Come autumn,
she offers me the axe that lost its head,
and I go south to face my life.


Herman Fong 

After Fighting for Hours

When all else fails
we fall to making love,
our bodies like the pioneers
in rough covered wagons
whose oxen trained to cross the Rockies
until their hearts gave out trying,
those pioneers who had out-survived
fever, hunger, a run of broken luck,
those able-bodied men and women
who simply unlocked the animals
from their yokes, and taking
the hitches in their own hands, pulled
by the sheer desire of their bodies
their earthly goods over the divide.

Kate Gleason

A List Will Help

1. Smoked my first cigarette in months, Kevin looking on. I felt faint and nauseated and high and reckless.
2. That list of conversation topics to avoid voided during the first conversation after I wrote it. 
3. I have to cultivate my silence; that is the only thing standing between the world and the word vomit I so regularly inflict upon my (unsuspecting) friends. 
4. Hey, you look great. 
5. This is how I feel after long conversations:  

Andy Goldsworthy at Tewet Tarn, Cumbria 1988

What the Words Meant

Context: I returned a textbook I borrowed from my youngest cousin. She is 13 and a high school freshman. This is what happened.  

Bonus! Here we are two years ago, trying for a jump-shot. Dafuq was I doing:

Jon Misha (20, sibling), Dennis Ryan (17, cousin), Lles (21), Drex (12, cousin), and Ace Rose (11, cousin)

1. You volunteer stories the way I collect them. If you knew me at your age, we would not have gotten along.
2. I remember your mother when she was pregnant with your two older brothers. Does this surprise you?
3. I've been reading since before you were conceived. I didn't hear the first word you spoke but I've been waiting for you to talk to me (using complete sentences and, preferably, of your own volition, about a topic of your own choosing) since you were three. I remember that time I met you at the gate of my home and you were riding, couched in your mother's arms and you were so new, so terribly new, that you knew nothing of Christmas or family tradition or, even, who I was save for what you heard or listened to. You remain, still, so new and unfailingly surprising. You read library books! I now have no qualms spoiling you senseless with Fully Booked gift vouchers.
4. You said, Ate Ky (almost the same way my brother says it) hihiramin ko pa lang 'to sa library namin (referring to Antoine de Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince) nakaka-kalahati na 'ko. 
5. You said, Sabi ni Kuya Drex ayaw niyo raw siya mag-Ateneo. 
6. You said, Sa SCB (Student Coordinating Board) may meeting bawat Monday, after school. 
7. You said, Palagi na nila akong sinasabihang mag-doktor. 
8. I realize this is nothing but a tally of that hour-long conversation but what else do I have? I'm hesitant to write judgment-laden items or to account for/ inventory/ tally my own selfish expectations (what if you come upon this post??). 
9. You said, Dalawa. Si George at si Kiomi (I am not going to forget these two boys any time soon). 
10. You said, Kailangan ko maging role model kaya hindi muna ako papayag magka-siyota! 
11. You said (I shall have to paraphrase) Ryan locked the door behind him. The airconditioner hummed (were you listening by the closed door, hand cupped against wood, to hear better?). 
12. What category did you use to select the details and anecdotes you shared? In what way can I account for or alter or reinforce it? 
13. I still consider you the sister I never had, a tiny sibling (in contrast to my biological sibling, who either rejects or ignores my help/input). 
14. We are bookends, all the others are middle children. That was no coincidence. You are ambitious (unlike me), aggressive (unlike me), and already I can sense the shape of your self-esteem/self-perception. I am thrilled, awed, grateful.    
15. I realize I've been listing differences (in preference, style, opinion, delivery) and that, in meting out judgment, I've behaved in exactly the same way some of our older relatives have. I hope that I have not embarrassed you.

Bonus!  I insisted on this photograph because I felt my cousin needed to feel special specifically for occupying a niche within her own household as unica hija, the only girl. At this point, I think Ace was a little young for some female bonding but I felt obligated (in a good way) to make her feel--well--more at home, especially since her two (obnoxious!) brothers always get all the attention: 

Lles (21) & Ace (11)

I feel as though I should end this post either with a summary or with insight but I have neither. I only have this sinking feeling that I've accomplished none of the goals I set out to do (ie: to become a bigger part of my family's life, to accept that the heart that I have is incapable of nonchalance and ignorance).

Poem: Here

Swerving east, from rich industrial shadows
And traffic all night north; swerving through fields
Too thin and thistled to be called meadows,
And now and then a harsh-named halt, that shields
Workmen at dawn; swerving to solitude
Of skies and scarecrows, haystacks, hares and pheasants,
And the widening river's slow presence,
The piled gold clouds, the shining gull-marked mud,

Gathers to the surprise of a large town:
Here domes and statues, spires and cranes cluster
Beside grain-scattered streets, barge-crowded water,
And residents from raw estates, brought down
The dead straight miles by stealing flat-faced trolleys,
Push through plate-glass swing doors to their desires --
Cheap suits, red kitchen-ware, sharp shoes, iced lollies,
Electric mixers, toasters, washers, driers --

A cut-price crowd, urban yet simple, dwelling
Where only salesmen and relations come
Within a terminate and fishy-smelling
Pastoral of ships up streets, the slave museum,
Tattoo-shops, consulates, grim head-scarfed wives;
And out beyond its mortgaged half-build edges
Fast-shadowed wheat-fields, running high as hedges,
Isolate villages, where removed lives

Loneliness clarifies. Here silence stands
Like heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken,
Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken,
Luminously-peopled air ascends;
And past the poppies bluish neutral distance
Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach
Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence:
Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.

Philip Larkin

Dear Current Job

At the beginning of last week, I promised I'd write a piece about my job if I survived the event my boss and I had spent the last three months putting together. 

First, an aside: during the event, I was so tired that even my glossy, chipper back-up Lles (she runs on battery) had to receive and deflect concerned exhibitors and writers asking, "okay ka lang? kaya mo pa?" When my CL350 friends arrived, they voiced the same question. I tried to pass it off as a joke but I forgot to eat breakfast and I had less than fifteen minutes to gather myself for lunch. if anything, that was the major failing I found, and it wasn't even in the program or logistics. It was in myself. I had spent so much time and effort--both online and offline--trying to get things ready that I had completely and almost certainly neglected to tend to my own needs. But hey. At least I remembered to pack the essentials: a sharpie, a pen, my fully-charged mobile, a copy of the program. These things all fit in my pocket so I was never unprepared. My mind--despite the white humming noise that, I imagine, could only have been my own internal machinery slowly breaking down--ran on fumes but ran exceedingly well. I found the rhythm in the job I had been given.

A Life Update

Let me just post this picture of Sir Ian McKellen being a bamf:

Ok, now that's out of the way: hello. I needed to say this aloud somewhere: last night, during that long conversation, at around the witching hour, I was all set to show you the tumblr post I wrote a few hours after you apologized. I wanted you to know I had gone through something like that but, as we were good friends, I decided against it. I missed you.

I forgot to tell you: I rely on you much more than I let on but I can't not say that forever so it must come out here, in this space, like a secret.