It's not mine, and that's why it's sooo gooood...

Tenderness
aaaaStephen Dunn

Back then when so much was clear
aaaaand I hadn’t learned
young men learn from women

what it feels like to feel just right,
aaaaI was twenty-three,
she thirty-four, two children, a husband

in prison for breaking someone’s head.
aaaaYelled at, slapped
around, all she knew of tenderness

was how much she wanted it, and all
aaaaI knew
were back seats and a night or two

in a sleeping bag in the furtive dark.
aaaaWe worked
in the same office, banter and loneliness

leading to the shared secret
aaaathat to help
National Biscuit sell biscuits

was wildly comic, which led to my body
aaaaexisting with her
like rain water that’s found its way

underground to water it naturally joins.
aaaaI can’t remember
ever saying the exact word, tenderness,

though she did. It’s a word I see now
aaaayou must be older to use,
you must have experienced the absence of it

often enough to know what silk and deep balm
aaaait is
when at last it comes. I think it was terror

at first that drove me to touch her
aaaaso softly,
then selfishness, the clear benefit

of doing something that would come back
aaaato me twofold,
and finally, sometime later, it became

reflexive and motiveless in the high
aaaaignorance of love.
Oh abstractions are just abstract

until they have an ache in them. I met
aaaaa woman never touched
gently, and when it ended between us,

I had new hands and new sorrow,
aaaaeverything it meant
to be a man changed, unheroic, floating.

The Drought

Say, if I told you,
I’m listening to sad songs,
songs of departures
and I’m drunk and I’m alone.
Would your chest fill, too
as if with swirling winds
of a storm; your heart,
will it clutch in desperation
as before the tearing?

I have tried and tried,
and I wanted to tell you:
I want to wake up beside you again.
Or, I want to feel the rough
stubble of your cheeks on my skin.
And, I don’t want to forget
the sound of your laughter.

Inside, my chest
is an ocean of tears,
rolling and pitching and never still.
But my eyes are dry,
and my throat is parched.

And we are both silent.

Nostalgia

Here, take a seat
with your grandmother and listen
to her breathing:
Does the rhythm sometimes falter?
And with it your heart too, stutters.

Fast forward to the time
ahead. Days, weeks, months, years
when you sit on this same bench alone.
Suddenly your heart roars in protest,
and you have to stop the hands

from grabbing her; clutching her
to your side to make her stay!
But I tell you, listen.
Her breaths whisper, Be calm,
I am here yet with you.

Take this time
now. Imagine yourself
Odysseus on the shores of Ithaca.
The journey must occur.
And home, home will always wait.

Different Versions

I wonder why it comes as a surprise: It's difficult to write when you've just come from a workshop.

I guess the critic's voice is still too loud in your head, or you hear your poem crying everytime you try to touch it. (Oh god. That did NOT sound right.)

But still. You did something wrong the first time (or even on the seventh, eighth version...) and you need to take a step back before you can get a handle on it again. Or so this is my excuse.

I've been re-writing, kind of. But only those poems that were not tackled during the workshop! Haha. So here's a couple: I think the older versions are buried somewhere in this blog.

*****

Forgetting is an Erosion

So here, now, let me paint you
a picture: There is a fountain.
The girl, her head bowed
as the coin flips in the air,
is in the middle of a wish.

The morning is blue and gold,
and a slight breeze is stirring
the leaves of the trees.
On the corner, the baker’s
wife sweeps their storefront.

With this picture, know:
I am the unseen baker,
as I am the wife.
I am the girl; I am the breeze;
I am the fountain and its eternal flow.

Yourself, re-paint this picture
in your head, in your heart
for I leave all this to the rain.
But as the colors wash
and bleed to nothingness,

picture the coin, that glimmer
of promise suspended,
the wish spoken, though yet unfulfilled.
This is for you, what you want most
to last forever.


How to be Cold

How cold begins: a mass
in contact with a hotter entity.

How at a touch, at an instant
heat is transferred, absorbed, sucked
into the frigid body
desperate for equilibrium.

How my fingers steal
the warmth from your cheeks.

How, at that touch
you flinch
and register nothing else
but the difference in temperature.

*****

There you go. One good thing about the end of the workshop, though, is that for a moment, you can call a timeout to all the criticizing. If only you could get the voice in your head to shut up, too.


PS. This is the ultimate cop-out. I had a poem called Different Versions which got butchered in Dumaguete (I was called a culprit for this one! I think its earlier self was published as Stories or something in this blog). Both need a major overhaul. Instead, I re-write these other two poems which were never tackled, and had the nerve to title this post "Different Versions." Haha. Sometimes I kill myself. Somebody slap me!

Dumaguete

In this place you could get lost
between sky and sea. Or turn away
from brilliant horizon and find

another pair of eyes,
of hands that struggle, too
and echo your own search.

In that First Place, the promise
was revoked by the burning
desire to taste the fruit.

Here, we ourselves couldn't resist.

And with juice of greed trickling
down our chins, our hearts
yearned for more than we can hold.

But here, now, we are the ones
who turn away, back to places
that have become elsewhere

while each step farther echo
clocks, and the longing to once more
return.

The T-shirt of Doom

Contradictions

Once in a mall, a woman accidentally stepped on my mom's toes. The woman apologized rightly enough. Still, my mom shot a dark look at the woman’s retreating back and muttered, “You may be sorry, but my foot still hurts.”

For such a small person, she has mastered the art of looking down her nose at the stupid. “Stupid” being loosely defined as someone who doesn’t exactly fit in her idea of how one should be—in dress, behavior, decorum, etc, etc.

I’ve been stupid recently. Or on better days, labeled hopeless—after all, we can’t have anybody insulting her daughter. I got a tattoo, pierced my navel, refused to quit smoking, and the biggest no-no of all, quit graduate school in order to explore writing.

She was not happy, to say the least.

A year ago on my birthday, for example, I met her and my aunt for lunch at a Chinese restaurant. It wasn’t anything fancy, so I came in olive green pants that hung a bit too low, a shirt that was cut a bit too high, flip-flops, and a belt bag. I got the lecture on dressing my age—I’ll be 26 this year—and on being a dignified young woman. Ouch.

But I’ve seen her give matter-of-fact, bracing advice when a cousin was drowning in sympathy and self-pity. She still helps my other sister with her rent, as my sister is finishing her Master’s degree. She has generously offered that I study creative writing, and on her expense, when I should be earning my own way by now. And she has been nothing but supportive when I told her I got into my first ever writing workshop in Bacolod City next week.

It’s been 6 months since I’ve been back from Japan, and I’ve learned to slowly, slowly try to fix the fixable with my mom. As well as to patiently, patiently pray that she learns to accept the inerasable.

Today, for the first time in the past 6 months, I wore a tank that showed my tattoo while gallivanting at a mall with my mom. In was completely comfortable, and my mom didn't say anything. Funny how something as simple as that can reassure me that everything’s on its way back to all right again.

*****

I have these dangling earrings conspicuously shaped like old-fashioned keys. Every time I wear them, people can’t seem to help but comment, Why a key? And every time I answer, Because I like them, they seem confused—as if that could not be the only reason.

This confuses me. I mean, why the hell not? Isn’t it reason enough that I liked them the minute I saw them? Why do people expect there to be hidden meanings in things that seem a little bit unique, if not odd?

I drew my own tattoo and refused to choose from a catalogue simply because I don’t want to end up naked with somebody in the future who has the exact same design. But every time I tell people this, the next question inevitably becomes, What does it mean? It doesn’t mean anything—I stayed up late drawing tattoo designs one night, I really liked what came out, decided I’d have someone ink it into my left shoulder. That’s it.

I was with someone once who asked me why I loved him. Rattled, I rattled off some reasons which did not suffice—I was left feeling foolish, while he was probably unconvinced. Finally, I shouted, I just do! I realized then that I could name a few million little things, which added up still wouldn’t fully answer why.

It seems that liking something, or even loving someone, requires not only a reason, but a rationalization. The very much hidden romantic side of me refuses to accept this. About this, does anyone care to know why?