I find it apt

I find it apt to give the rain the credit it is due. For long, you and your torrent sang to us--those caged in "windowless" bedrooms and roofless roadsides. I was at the waiting shed and, your friend, the clouds (dark as they were), told me you were coming. So I stayed, shaking my left leg incessantly as I stood. Dum di dum. Tappity tap. And I started to sing and. You arrived in a rush. I continued in my trademark faux baritone, attempting the best failure of a Louis Armstrong cum Ella Fitzgerald I could. Miserable. I laughed. It seemed that you liked my crappy singing. More tears. Heavier drops--bigger with the weight of the world--pitter pattered on the aluminum roof. I stopped and let you continue. There's nothing better than your urging me to continue my singing. I stopped and ended with a silent reverie. Breaking the noise with my silence. No, my darling. I will not go singing. I have given you the credit you are due. Continue your serenade while I cage myself again in my "windowless" bedroom.

-August 18 (2007?), 2:07 pm

Pink-tinted the way

Pink-tinted the way the TV glistens for me

Ruby-red lips are all I can remember

Temporary amnesia has taken hold

And I thank whatever god made me this way it so

Just try

To let the words come out of your moth

Dance on the lips my ears

Twing twing twing

-2007 or 2008

Found in my sophomore year

college notebook

A man came up to me the other day

A man came up to me the other day and

asked me what I do.

I smiled and peaked over

the rims of his glasses and

confidently sighed an answer--

like with the release of a deep inhale--

I say:

I wait.

I wait for buses to halt and pick me up,

for drivers to yell the next stop and

for destinations to come closer to me.

I wait for the moment when the car has

travelled double of itself.

Say, a car is 6 meters in length, I wait

for when it moves from 6 to 12 then 18

and so on.

I wait for the numbers to buzz by and I

miss them.

I wait for long-lines to shorten and

learned to tap my feet to tunes.

-Probably done 2 months ago.

There's another version of

this on my ipod

which I think I'll save for

a later post

Everything revolves around her room

Everything revolves around her room, a room painted entirely in pink and cluttered with everything you can imagine. A gramophone is at one corner with a thick pile of magazines is bundled together by a long strip of grey straw right beside it. Her paintings aren’t mounted at all, just flimsy and deliberately unfinished canvasses lying around on the floor. A mannequin and numerous cola bottles litter the bottom of her closet. Her clothes are, instead of being placed inside it, strewn haphazardly on the bed. Her panties—clean ones at that—are in a drawer that is always open while her brassieres all hang loosely on her bedpost along with her numerous bags and hats. A burger wrapper and an empty soda cup are on top of her television. A few droplets of condensed water are slowly sliding down the side of the cup, threatening to create a circular puddle on the TV’s plastic casing. She immediately grabs the cup and transfers it to her bedside table. No one can say that she might not need a drink later, sometime in the middle of the night.

She’s been waiting. It’s undeniable that she’s been waiting since that night when she left him to enjoy the company of people other than herself. By her head lies her phone. Silent for the past eight or so hours, apart from the random check-ups from her mother as to whether or not she had washed the dishes yet or had cleaned her room. Obviously, the answer was a flat out no. The dishes remained unwashed, the trash still not taken out, and the floor gathered a triple layer of dust.

She breathes in deeply. Coughs and then breathes in again, much deeper than the last one. She stares at her pink ceiling for a few more moments and then decides to stand up and make her way around the clutter of her room to a drawer. Her cigarettes are inside. Only one stick remains and, as she makes a final survey of the cigarette’s well-being, she fumbles around her pockets for that lighter she had bought just the other day in 7-11. She takes a whiff of the cigarette and coughs again. She looks at it and sees a patch of mold growing on the very end of it. Repulsive. She throws it away.

It’s 12:45 in the morning. Halfway around the world, people are awake or just waking-up, depending on whether or not they were drunk the night before. If so, then it would be a different case altogether. She’s wide awake along with the drunkards on the other side of the earth. It makes her feel more alone than ever. She proceeds to her bed and lies down on her clothes. She closes her eyes and dreams.

I had dreamt that I was in a game of life and death. I was a player and yet a participant as well. With every move I made, someone had to go away or die. I was in my house with my family. My sister was waiting for her boyfriend to pick her up so that they could go on a date. My father was fixing the plumbing under the kitchen sink, looking very much like those clichéd repairmen fathers on the television. My mother was just beside my father except standing up and embracing a big bowl with cookie dough in it. She was making chocolate chip, oatmeal, and walnut cookies for dessert.

I was in my room, as usual, bathing in the pink-ness of it. Staring at the ceiling and talking to that big guy/girl/whatever up there. My room was, amazingly, in a state of utter cleanliness. No amount of shock was founded in me, almost as if it being clean was something even natural. Then, suddenly, the ceiling talked back. It said something about giving me powers. I closed my eyes and shut out the voice. God, I was obstinate. It stopped after a few minutes. So, I opened my eyes, put on a pair of shorts, and went outside. I had heard the sound of a truck and followed it.

My sister was gone. I heard the truck drive away. Saw the little speck with her in it disappear into the distance. She wasn’t coming back. I knew she wasn’t. Depressed as I was, she was, on the other hand, happy. I imagined her head outside of the truck’s window. Her wavy hair was reflected in the side mirror, being played around by the wind. Her face was aglow with a joy I had never seen in her before. She was leaving the home turned hellhole called our house.

I couldn’t say that I felt exactly the same way towards our humble abode. Comfortable as I was in it. I returned. From the foyer, I could see the inside—up to the kitchen.

My parents were gone. Everything they were holding was laid down perfectly on the kitchen counter. The wrench and the recently dismantled pipeline. The bowl filled with cookie dough and the half-finished chocolate chip bag with its opening gaping. The oven was preheated. I could feel the heat singeing the hairs on my leg. The water from the sink’s faucet was still running. I turned it off.

It wasn’t that I wasn’t looking for my parents. It was, just as I said about my room being clean, almost something natural. Like I had expected them to be gone. And they were.

Maybe they had gone on a permanent vacation. Maybe they had deliberately left me to be on my own. That was how it felt. I wasn’t exactly happy about it but I had instantly accepted it. They could’ve been on a plane to Cancun or Macau. It didn’t matter. My parents, just like my sister, had absolutely no plans to come back to me. Or, at the least, say goodbye. In a way, they had died.

She wakes up. Something cold had dropped onto her face. Liquid. Water. The pitter patter of the rain gets louder and louder. Her ceiling is leaking. A moist puddle that seemed to defy gravity had begun to form near her room’s fluorescent light while she was dreaming. So she grabs a stool, the yellow one beside her bedside table, and stands on it. Wobbling, she reaches for the puddle with cupped hands so as to catch the dripping water. It drips. And drips. And drips. But each drop slips right through the wide gaps between her stubby fingers. She loses her balance. There’s no time to shout out loud. She just falls onto the floor with a loud and heavy thump.

The tears begin to well up in her eyes. A low rumble forms at her throat and gets stuck there. It transforms into a high pitched moan—as if the rumble was squeezed tight. She bawls.

“Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.”

- June 30, 2008

from a previous blog on

Multiply

Going out of my mind

Believe it or not, my brain jumped out of my head today. It came out of my nose and climbed up on it so that I'd have to strain my eyes to look at it. Double vision made me see two brains instead of one.

"Why are you so small?" I asked. "I always thought you were bigger."

"That's why you say that you thought I was bigger," it replied. "You never really saw me you know."

I nodded and picked up my brain from my nose. It dangled from the tips of my fingers, dripping brain juice. Slimy from the fluids it was floating in in my noggin. I put it in my mouth. It struggled. Still, I persisted. I didn't want my brain going through my nose again so the mouth was the next best thing.

The task proved harder than I expected. My brain jostled itself inside my mouth. I tried to suck it up and then realized that that was impossible. Stupid me. You can only suck things down. Then again, my stupidity could be blamed on my lack of a brain in those moments.

I pulled my brain out of my mouth and placed it in my left ear instead. I pushed it in. It resisted but I won the battle in the end. I heard my brain settle into the fluids it landed on. I shook my head and heard it sigh a sigh of relief. Thank God. I let out a sigh as well.

So much for going out of my mind.

- June 30, 2008

from a previous blog on

Multiply

Lunchtime & mussels

Lunchtime & mussels at an

all-you-can-eat diner.

The children all run to the dessert table to

get their fill of

iced cream and nuts while,

somewhere near the fried

mozerella (sic) and

tapas sits

the mussels.

Breathing with a huge muscle

tongue

sifting through dirty air with

fine untouchable

pubic hairs.

The mussels wait for someone to

pick-up a tong and take her.

- Earlier last year, I believe

I wanted to carve the ice with you

I wanted to carve the ice with you. How the blades fitted at the bottom of our soles--rather SOULS--made the softest of hearts on the hardest of liquids known to man. I wanted to lay down, back on the cold, head in the clouds, hand in your hand, and all that is cliched beyond comprehension. It is the brutality (carving), the strength (hardness), and utter fuzziness that leaves me without words. This isn't all I want it to be--my writing. Senseless. Senselessness. Simply, I want to carve the ice with you.

- August 15 (2007?), 12:50 am

Probably had just watched

"Eternal Sunshine"

or listened to

Stars' "Your Ex-Lover

is Dead."