From Your Lips You Drew The Hallelujah

My sympathy lies with those who try
To cage you in and love you more and more.
- Leona Naess

It’s been roughly a week since I last posted anything here, and I’d like to take this as a welcome development. The only reason why I could have updated as regularly as I did was because I had nothing better to do with my time. I am not saying that ardent bloggers are a bunch of snorting donkeys who do not have social lives. I am only saying that the frequency of my posts was symptomatic of my sorry state: jobless, bored, and completely shot through with alcohol. Please refer to the equation below:



Not to mention the beating my liver took from all those weeks of nonstop drinking. I was hammered with friends almost every night, and then conked out and asleep for the rest of the day. My sister would cluck her tongue at me and say, Look at you, aren’t you disgusted at yourself? I often responded by batting my eyelashes at her, letting a lazy grin spread across my face, and then plopping right back to bed for a 3-hour nap.

All this freewheeling had to be aborted by the appearance of The New Job, which I have been reporting to since Monday last week. Which meant that I had to shake myself sober, pick up my carcass from off the linoleum, and wake up in perfect synchronicity with the city’s own rising.

I also began rifling through my closet once again for something I could wear to work, an activity which revealed a horrendous fact: nothing would fit me anymore. NOTHING! Over the past weeks, I’d ballooned beyond recognition – or at least, if friends still recognized me, my clothes certainly did not. As I struggled to zip up one of my favorite skirts, it gave me the cold shoulder and said, I don’t know who the hell you are, but you can’t wear me because you’re TOO FUCKING FAT YOU REVOLTING SWINE HAHAHAHAHAHA! It was absolutely chilling.

The way things are right now, I would never dare to go anywhere near a piggery. If I amble past one, the owner might come running to me, fling a lasso round my porcine neck, and drag me protesting and squealing(!) to the pens, where I will live with my brothers and sisters until we are finally transfigured into delicious honeycured bacon.

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Last Monday night, I stood in front of a roomful of people and read out a poem I’d just recently written. This was, in fact, my first poem in one year and seven months, a hiatus which worried the plasma and antibodies out of me. Days before, Joel Toledo had asked me if I could be one of the evening’s readers, and when Monday night finally came, I sat inside Mag:Net-Katipunan, aware of nothing else but my insides, which were effectively being clobbered and pulverized by sheer nervousness.

It was terrible: when my turn came, I could hardly read the words on the sheet I held in front of me, and spasms rocketed down my legs – out of the corner of my eye, I could see my right knee jerking this way and that. It wasn’t an encouraging sight. And I couldn’t control my voice, I was so fucking nervous, I felt as though I would shit in my pants at any given second. I am not kidding. The worst of it was that I neglected to read out one crucial word in the poem’s last line, something I realized only after I stepped off from the stage.

I don’t understand why I am just now getting this crippling sort of stage fright; I’ve been doing this kind of crap since I was in Grade 2, year after year of harrowing declamation contests. And I can no longer count the times when I had to stand in front of the entire student body and read sections from the Bible(!) for our First Friday Masses. And although I did get the requisite jitters, the nervousness was never ever this bad.

Well, at least I’m writing again. Here’s the poem I read out last Monday, which still begs to be revised a little more.

I Have Faith

I have faith in the ordered
Stirring of stars when dusk lowers
Itself onto the earth,

When the streetlights blink open
One by one across the city. I have faith
In the clamour of these streets,

Their self-sustaining roar a promise
Of the next day’s easy unfurling. But also,
I have faith in the young woman

In the coffee shop, a book open
On her lap, and I can tell that the room for her
Is no longer there, but the book still is.

Already, her cup of coffee has grown cold,
And people cross and re-cross their paths
Around her, small rivers, one roiling

As attractive as the next.
But for now, she will not know
Those waters and their currents,

Because on this evening,
A universe has risen from a single page,
From a sentence she has just read,

And which has cut her open, the way
A knowing knife splits ripened fruit,
So that one finds sap, flesh, seeds –

I have faith in the elegant math that finds
Eloquence in the muteness of the heavens.
I have faith in the heavens,

Whose fiery bodies keep this land
Illuminated, and I have faith in the truth
And turning of every life’s rivers,

Their tributaries driven by the current
Of so many stories. But most of all,
I have faith in the lady in the coffee shop,

How her heart quickens in recognition
Of a world suspended in a word.
Oh, it is only a book, and it is only

A sentence, but I have faith in those
Same words, I have faith in the spaces
Potent and humming between them,

What they contain,
What they do not yet contain.

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My current project is to learn how to wiggle my ears. It has always caused me great sorrow, how my ears will not yield to the command and natural authority of my brain. I have beaten my chest and howled at the moon in my boundless grief. I say Wiggle! but neither ear budges, not even for a fraction of a millimeter. O the torment. O deep dank well of despair! Romeo romeo wherefore art thou o romeo you handsome little fucker you.

Well, that’s about to change! In fact, I’ve been practicing how to wiggle my ears whenever I can, I have gained some mastery over the muscles responsible for their movement. I practice while walking to the office building, I practice inside the elevator, and I practice while commuting. The last – practicing while commuting – isn’t a very smart move. I was trying to wiggle my ears in an FX last Wednesday, when it occurred to me that the other passengers were looking at me funny; only then did I understand that I wasn’t wiggling my ears at all. I was flaring my nostrils instead.

I’m making some progress now, although three problems have surfaced so far:
1. It’s difficult to wiggle my ears when someone asks me to.
2. It’s difficult to wiggle my ears in front of a mirror.
3. I can’t seem to wiggle my ears more than three or four times in one go.
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Still, I’m pretty optimistic about where this is headed, and the initial difficulties do not deter me. Practice, as the saying goes, makes pudding and pie so that all of the adorable bandicoots can mosey right into the picnic grounds and give us some tips on how to make the best tacos in the world!

I’m kidding. I just wanted to say that practice makes perfect. Wish me luck! Wiggle wiggle.
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