Missing Your City

I am missing my city, my land, my homeland, my heartland, my soulland where the streets are a democracy. And really so.
Notes from my Diary, April 4, 2006


1.
It is what you go back to,
these notes you wrote
by stealing time in airports,
notes on edges
of memory,
seamless when it comes
seamless when it doesn't.

In waiting lounges before and after
reaching your destination country,
forgetting is a virtue over here
even as you while away the hours
by killing time mercillesly,
killing time to kill all that is in there
to remember the streets of your city
as you wait for your airborn
flight to many places
not yet your home, fleeing as if
fleeing is all that matters.

You transit in these
transitory times, territories too
time guarding you
as you move from gates to gates
your luggage carrying all about you
your heart your soul your sorrow
because nothing can ever be
left to chance
or to small tales
going somewhere
to layover in dark rooms
dark alleys and all things dark
when you brood over loose leaves
of organizers that kept the feelings
when solitude is in its less holiest.

2.
This is how you do it:
write and keep the writing to hide
what needs no saying because sacred
unsayable unsaid.

As if words are what life is:
words that define
what missing your city is, in full sense,
with no ruses and lies and masks
like missing daughters and wife and son
going after years gone
the years between you and them
like warm nights so far away
from misty mornings
when the aroma of coffee
is the same barako you know
from the hills in Benguet
or the Arabica bought
ground and bought in haste
at the Robinson's
with your few dollars disappearing fast
and furious as if in their mad rush
to emptying your soul
when poverty was all you wanted
in the life you walled
your walled life for years
until you realized you were
a poet of pain, somehow.

3.
The poet could have told you again
about the sadnesses you keep in verses
but you take all, take it all in
keep them all as if the landscape
is just there, before you, its form
a scream primal and the pathos
in it are the same vagaries calling it quits.

A Solver Agcaoili
UH Manoa/Mar 8-07