Our Work to Tally the Losses

Our sad work is to tally the losses
After each storm and flood we go through
In this republic of our grief that refuses
To leave us, in our homeland
And in each episode of our grand
Narrative of having been vanquished
For all time and in time that we
Have now seen this as our gods’ wishes.
We die a thousand times each time
We go through this but we cannot be alive
For too long to remember that this
Has been going on since we started
To believe in the alien and fair god of the those
Who came to announce his almighty power
In the heavens and among us small
Mortals of men from these islands
Of our aloneness before Time overtook
Our romance with dates and years.
Our act is plural, a noun too, after
A verb, that tells us of fear we need
To fight against, and the daring
We have to have to lead on and on
In this dizzying morass of our sense
Of selves, colonized and corrupting
As ever even if tragedies leave us
Wanting for more and more about
How lives, our stories woven in them,
Are to be lived out without the blood
And the ceremony of having it poured
On parched lands we till so the planting
Of food and the sowing of goodness can go on.
Overcast are the sacred skies even above
The old churches where the ancestors
Prayed for guidance and grace
And the slow, clean rain they gathered
In cupped hands, supplicating and
Supplicating some more for the other side
Of imprisonments we have come to believe
It is our gift from the penitent priests
Of our altar grounds we have turned into tombs
Where there we die but come to life again.

Hon, HI

There are rough roads in the journey

The roads are not even
in the journey
to other cities,
other countries,
other memories.

The unpaved land
is all over the place,
its contours that of
an ugly face with crooks
and crannies looking
like foxholes in a desert
where war is fought
each dire moment.

We trip some of the time
to remind us of
the need to fall
on the wayside.

We remember the wound,
on the knee as on the spirit,
and the sorrow we keep
in our pockets.

It has to be.
There are no sweet
and holy angels
on the road.

There are no mothers,
there are no medicine men
to give us the dirty bandage
but these robbers and cheats
who sell our copious tears
to those who believe
in instant miracles.

Today you feel betrayed
by it all, by all these
these lessons in double deception
that can only come
from highway thieves.

They are not the road makers
but those who gather around
manholes ready to push you deeper
and deeper into the crevices of journeys
of the last searching self.


Hon, HI

Losing your lane on a freeway

Today, you lost tract of the sun,
its rays, bright and blinding, telling
you of other ways to get to the hunt.

We live in cities, true, but we
are savages for that which saves
us from having all the trouble
in these dire times when to travel
is to move with unsteady feet
like the unsure hand on the steering
wheel when mornings come as distractions
from the good life we should receive.

You have lost your way before
in this same freeway by the stretch
of fields and burial sites
the Hawaiian people say we have
no right to cement, make monstrous
visions out of rails and streets
jungle pavements where we rush
to navigate what silences we need to learn
when we reach the place where we work,
all of us, from the time we set foot
in search of what we did not have.

You lost your way today
when one car did not give
you the chance to move another lane
but push its way to rush ahead
and hit the road one more time
so its driver can sell his sweat
to hotels and tourists and to the sites
and scenes for sale in this city
you have come to.

You take the other route, longer,
with a view to the mountainside,
the sea on your right spilling out in
early morning brilliance, pearly
and radiant, with the luminescence
of a falling star.

You remember to make
the sign of the cross,
one mechanical duty of your hand
you have not done for a while.


Hon, HI

Losing the Words

We lose the words many times
from places we have come
like migrant birds unable
to flap their wings to search
for spring sunshine. In moments
of hesitancy, we are the blank
stares we remember on walls,
ruined and standing by the wayside
to remind us of journeys
we have gone through
across tragedies we have not redeemed
from the laughter of our broken hearts.

We lose the words
and in the infinite mercy
of love, we come to our sense
of what love can gives us back.

Today, we turn the homeland
into a phrase to start to recall
what we have not dreamed of
for a long, long while.

It is is like this sudden urge
to make that phone call
to a daughter, young still
but younger when left behind,
to say Good Morning after one
sweet dream of abundance,
the numbers in lotteries
we want to buy next time around
to spite the president and her men.

Hon, HI

A Country from my Window

A grieving country appears from my window,
my own, forlorn and destitute. It is the clouds,

hazy and uncertain before the blustery winds
that make the treetops dance to the tune

of alleluia. It is our way, as it has always been,
of swaying to what alien force of bad histories

we have got, on our tables as in our memory.
We have lived far long into the faraway distances

of our dreams coming in between peaceful revolutions
and mourning for our dead, kins and brothers,

as well as our old gods who no longer respond
to our supplications even if we kneel in prayer

from morning to forgetfulness. We have come
a long way from where we first began to declare

what love for a homeland is from epitaphs
of secret words we uttered to last a lifetime

and more even if the fallowed fields we grow
our hopes do not yield the goods we seek.

A country, sad and sadder, appears from my window.
It is afternoon over here and the hours are sad

like the clouds running through the dark skies
in this Manoa of a day I remember to sing.


Hon, HI

A Bag Lady at Spalding Speaks

Today I am a living witness
to what recession of love
and social justice means.

It is death to our beautiful dreams
of dancing to the tune of goodness
we have not met along the road,
this dance delicate and delicious,
even in these times of want.

I am this bag lady with my
smile announcing my coming
or your later afternnoon existence,
which is which, escapes me now.

A moment ago, in your class
pelting capitalism with its lies
its centuries of deception making my woes
and anguished heart into things,
you talked about your regrets in leaving
your homeland, the exile in you
in search of what cannot be found
from the sad place he comes from.

You are a bag man of memory,
I know, the nostalgia you gather
each day from teaching
what liberty is left after deducting
all our collective sorrow.

I used to be a dance student, you see,
and then went on to nursing school
to care for the downtrodden that gather
the refuse of the wealthy from their trash
to care for the sick and the poor
and those ready to die and I am 65
and I have nowhere to die
as I have nowhere to live
except to fill these plastic bags
with the refuse of the young:
soda cans in various shapes
and misshapen possibilities
hoping that with five cents
tagged in each
I could buy myself some drink.

And now you come,
telling me you have more of these
from the 4th floor, those you
picked from your wanderings
from corner to corner in this earth
and now these are all mine.

You think you do not need
them even as I wish I could have them all?

You think you do not want
them these cans that will promise
me a meal in the morning
until I can extend it to kingdome come?

What do you teach?

Do you teach about the ways of men
that brings about this want I do not know
one I have never known in my lifetime?

I have become a bag lady now
and each afternoon
I look into bins, green or black,
they do not matter to me.

I look into their insides spilling out
what food I can order from McDonald's,
a senior's coffee perhaps,
the tumbler for refilling until
I have all the sugar in my shrunk body
the taste of soya creamer
and the bad cholesterol that makes me forget
I am hungry for the anger
I have not found.

Thank you for the bag of empty cans
for the possibilities I will have
for the morrow that I hope
will still come.

Tomorrow afternoon
I will see you here even as I see you
each afternoon passing by.

Say, say, what do you teach?

Say, what hidden sorrows you include
in the life of repentant exiles?

I want to come to your discussion,
share the knowledge I have gained
from picking from the rubbish
of mankind. I am bag lady,

and I wish that you will give
me the chance to tell my story
to come to voice with my song,
a dirge indeed, to make me cry.

I speak and it is evening, young
with so much promise in this valley
where the rainbows always come.

In the small hours between now
and the moment that I lose my tongue,
I go look for love in bins and this betrayal.


Hon, HI

This War in Our Loins

War is a drug. The Hurt Locker

We are men and this war
in our loins makes us so.

We become hunters of other men
and their good thoughts of kindness

and their salving fears
making them come to kneel

before reason and its shadows
and their knowledge why they hate

the derring-do we have in strange cities
them who see the moon differently,

red crescent and courage in the iridescence
of that afterglow we do not see

but exists in between believing
and raising our hands in prayer

even as they do the same
in whispers, before early sunrises

and after when, in the long lines
of waiting for home away from home

they spell freedom with their callused
hands marked for the betrayal

we are about to commit.
It is this gospel of war

we announce in codes
of the masculine that we are.

And in the holy mourning
by the morning of grief we deny

that it has come, the enemy
concocts a word that enchant

us so war will not become us
so war will not become our name.

This war in our loins
makes us men and we are not.

Hon, HI

Dogo Nahawa

It is official, this number of dead
men, women, children, dreamers,
dreams. And this homeland
of the Dogo Nahawa where terror
is everyday now, offered for morning
meals and news and the gospel
of false lullabies. Bodies, rotten
and rotting, must go back
to the gaping whole of an earth
that knew kindness and love.
But now it is all over,
this ritual of grief on the face
of the sun that knows how
to weep far longer than rain
or the breeze. Hundreds are dead
one morning from machete
and bullet and this betrayal
only believers can do,
their prayers for gods who cheat
on all of us for the life
we need to live.
It is all over, this story
of the Dogo Nahawa.
It is in my homeland,
the country I left behind
in order to see it coming
everyday, on papers and TV screens
and from the rumors of peace
and quiet from peacemakers
who sell tanks and drones
and bombs and hatred
for profits that do not know
the meaning of a poem
or a revolution or a prayer
for quick relief.

Hon, HI

Mirage

Yeah everybody wear da mask but how long will it last. From, "The Mask"

Far off, in the distance
between a merry memory
and this sad loss, personal
as in the freezing rain
on my old man's face
the fierce wind on my neck,
I see you with your mask.
It is fear itself, this presence
of colors from the early morning
light of Waipahu reaching out
to the Kapolei hills, barren
and waiting for warmth,
this mask of you coming
into a form, shape, substance
and offering itself to the absent sun
in these islands that dreamt of you
going away into the temples
hidden by walls of secrets
even as you dreamt as well
of landlocked journeys
of happy hills and verdant valleys
and merciless mountains
from the fruitless adventures
of your father abandoned by love
who had come a long way
from his only war
he never waged, his uniform,
dark khaki to allude
that crisp sound of firing his first riffle
against the enemy with no name
and the indebtedness of his soul
to fields fallowed by betrayal,
a cold one, calculating
and tangential against his fidelities
he alone knows like this mirage
he could not figure out
where it comes from
as if a whirlwind had come to whip
the plains and there leave behind
the seed to rot, the bird of prey
awaiting the skeletons of plants
that would not bear fruit.

Somewhere, in those proud peaks
touching the gray clouds. is the sulking
self looking for a mirage that would not come,
no, not today, in these dire times
of allusion and illusion where the word
you speak is the bronze bullet you bite.

Your wounds are everywhere in your
father's body, in your man's body,
in your rebel's body, in the nobody's
quality of your speech even as you declaim
the virtues of poems you write
for our forgotten liberties.

You ran away from all these
only to end up in the same beginning
where the revelation of nothingness,
in the leaf of the blade as in the edge
of an alien life not lived, is real.


Hon, HI

The Capital City At Nighttime

The capital city at nighttime
is an wayward sinner, recidivist
in the full sense of penance.

There is no indulgence here,
not anywhere you want to look
even in the vicissitudes of repentance

sugarcoated so the bitterness
would not be tasted in the meal
we partake to celebrate the loss

of our sense of relief.
In these interesting times
in the land, ti refuse to believe

is a virtue come alive.
We live longer lives this way
more colorful and exciting.

Hope is not for us after
a millennium of madness
a thousand and one years

of leaving us bereft, useless.
The bad dream of politicos
are on the streets, banner after

banner announcing what to expect
but which we know we will not get.
Not this time around, no,

with actors and sons of land-grabbers
getting the mandate from their history
of delusions to lead us to greatness.

We call out to virtuue, our own.
Better be in this unbelief than
resurrecting our dead and dying dreams.

The capital city at nighttime is this:
we celebrate another year of grief
with the promise of EDSA come to waste.

Manila, on the 24th EDSA Day

Flag flying free on the Black Virgin

The Philippine flag flies free in front of the statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary at the Edsa Shrine, once part of the People Power revolt, which resonated and inspired countries around the world to break free of their chains 24 years ago. R. Lerma, Inquirer, Feb 23, 2010

These are two witnesses to what were
what we have become. A flag flies free
in a wretched land, a black virgin
watches over the people with her
sacred countenance. To the cloth
and to the woman of the cloth
we gather in supplication, both
in an act of defiance and desistance
one for making us believe that indeed
we started it all, this quest for more
this struggle to make us see
that it is not a gift, this life we lead
but had to fight it out all the time
from morning when we pass by her
this black virgin, sullen as the sullen hour
and the flag does not move without
the breeze in this place we call
the no-man's land. Like now,
when all you see are announcements
of EDSA that have come to pass
not one life good enough to make us
see the light even when the president
has said so that in time we shall all
be glad. But this is a promise whose
ending we do not know. Even its syntax
is one of pleading from the patron
saint of loves and lost causes.
It flies free, the flag and we remember
the night, four of those, spent on street
pavements, on rough days with the insult
of soldiers and the mocking men of God.


Hon, HI

First Acts in Going to Places

Your first act in going to places
is smell the morning if you came

in early. Or if the afternoon
finds you an alien, you search

for churches where you can imagine
what it is to live like a pilgrim

in faith, kneeling and bowing
like the sea to the moonrise.

In Iligan, you do the same thing
after bargaining with the PU

for that holy ride to the temple
of your God. The singing, in English,

of the praise songs by chanters you
do not see fills the air even as

two candles you buy from a tubercular
lady vender keep their light for you

in this late afternoon that you came
around to seeing Iligan for the first

time. God's place is decent and simple.
The opulence is by Saint Michael's

on the other side of the street
and the businesses laying bare

what goods and services they can offer
to make our lives better and better.

From there you walk the stretch
of the highway brimming with people

that leads to Gaisano, this box
of a building like the American

temples of goods to make you feel good
if you buy them most of the time.

Jollibee here is proud with its colors
and invites you to get in and partake

of its array of meals only a few can afford.
You believe in these lies, in the commerce

of eating fries and chicken with crispy skin.
Children, old and dirty and tired of the city

stretch out their arms to passersby with the looks
of kindness about them. Night falls in Iligan

and you walk once more even as you hear
stories of two dead people at the recent

fiesta carnival. Other stories you hear
are the four habal-habal young drivers trying

to earn a living like the way old proud men
do only to die in young people's hands:

robbed of their earnings, their motorbikes
stolen for what value they can give

their young bodies that knew hardship
left to rot in the city's dreary streets.

This is life over here, a narrative of flight
as well. You run to the bus terminal

kilometers away, with the stars guiding
your way even as you count your blessings

on the PU that brings you back to the city
two hours away. Night falls, and then morning.


Iligan City, The Philippines

Bus Ride to Iligan

This bus ride to Iligan is one for the moon.
It is a dream come true. You have made a pact

with yourself to see this city in the springtime
but you came during the dry spell when thoughts

do not come freely as they should.
It is two hours of seashore and mountain

and the leaves of bananas on hillsides turning in
to the afternoon sun as if palms outstretched

in prayer, cautious and serious for the falling
of rain at this early in the tiger's year.

The news of recent murder reaches us
in whispers. This is not Ampatuan, you see.

It is the place of people longing to be free
from the all the burdens of the everyday

from the dull propositions of greatness
we have never seen, not in the wretched

life of beasts who are us running after
what riches there can be from taking

the pilgrimage to one city after another
until you lose your sense of meaning.

Some thirty years ago you had always
wanted to come here. You were a man

of God then, or one purported going
through the motions of becoming one.

But you never had the chance, you see.
there are covert operations even in Heaven

among priests as amorous as a jilted lover
with one hand in that altar of the holy

with another in the altar of the flesh.
So to Iligan, here I come. I search for

cathedrals in cities where I go,
small churches too and people

with the intention of bringing out
the best in all that bus rides give

on roads to alibis and half-truths.
Iligan, you know now, is a prayer come true.


Iligan City, the Philippines

Waiting at a street corner

Stranger of this city:
You wait for the right time to come.

It is like a street corner research
but yours is with the intimations
of lie and desire and other things
that come with the promise to wait.

Time is eternal, though, and this forever
is in the hours you spend seeing people
for the kind of care they carry with them.

The dirt-filled cemented road of the city
thin out every now and then
but the traffic of rushed feet
and this sense of going home
both gain ground soon after.

This is the longest time you have put
in to kill time for nothing, murdering
every second of it to count the cars
that pass by and their load of love
and its absence. This night scene
is not pretty but swallows you whole.

You wish there were validations somewhere,
this waiting that should not have been there
in the first place. There is the language
for fear and you do not give in to it
if you have not seen courage in dark streets
where the unknown remains to be so.

Three hours from the ninth and you stood
your ground. It is the night that matters,
not the story of regret that comes after.

You learn along the way, this spirit
of loving for something grander like
a memory that will live forever.

In time, the feelings get settled
and you fly out of nowhere to get
into the music of leaves that ruffle
that in this breezeless night
will not happen out of a miracle.

You say goodbye to this city, the act
a tenor of lullabye to will yourself
to sleep tonight. This city does not sleep
but you will sneak in to catch what sparks
are in there after the ritual bereft of caress.

No, the Qoheleth is sometimes right.

Yes, the Qoheleth is sometimes wrong.

This is the city that you have come to
for the first time and you vow to return
the second time. You remember Istanbul,
the same faraway land you have come to
with your English becoming useless?

It is the same feeling, it is the same cry
of anguish in your stranger's soul
and you know you do not live here.

The roads give the same betrayal from
the tulips by the blue mosque.
But here, it is the cross of streets with its people
and the waiting that is too long.


Cagayan de Oro City/Philippines

This City by the River

It could have been called the city by the river.
And it is. Bridges in steel and concrete
arc through its gateways and lead to the commerce
of this place like the cathedral with its cross
and memory of a God that came in a long time
ago in His immaculate whiteness, His skin
beyond our imaginings as its countenance.
We could not have known about the vicissitudes
of conquest like we do have now
with the speed of motorela faster
than our rapid response to fucking shit!

It is a city with the flow of water
as it is a city where they seed the clouds
because: number one, the rains forget
what they are for in this earth, and number two,
the floods are for other cities like my own
and there leave their footprints on the number
of bloating bodies and dead dreams.

You have come here to word what word
is in this struggle we have since waged.
We hope magic will come to all these
like the enchantment of lovers
without their beloved but with all
that which is theirs in the first place.


Cagayan de Oro, Philippines

Habal-habal Ride in Cagayan de Oro

Now you can say, it is this habal-habal ride
In Cagayan de Oro, this city that tries
to sleep but can only fake it at sometime
in the night. Like you, like everyone else
strangers and residents who need to watch
the breaking of day to await what is left
after praying for mercies to the patron saints
in their glory and inaccuracies. It was
the Wednesday of the ashes when planed in
to see for the first time what moorises
keep to keep us from this aloneness
so deep we forget our birth names
but remember only the aliases
we answer to as our way of revolting
what is there to revolt with thought
and word but never deed.

On this night, you declared you freedom
from this cheap lodging place without
the windows but have walls all over
and the announcements of God's grace
for its billboard, way past the endlessness
of streets unpaved as of yet. The scene
was like your dream when you woke up
with the call of morning noise
the frenzied steps of domestic helps
answering to the dire call of coffee
and its promise of relief. It is your story
as well, your tactic for each day
of flowing on and on.

On this night, you take the habal-habal
wherever it goes and there, in those roads
going to the remote feelings of the poet,
you saw what is there as a reason to live.

Back from the habal-habal ride,
you go to your speech and animate
the slide show that today you present
for all the world to not understand
that the life of a poet is seeing
even in the instertices of loneliness.


Cagayan de Oro, Philippines

A Morong 43 Raises Her Clenched Fist

A Morong 43 raises her clenched fist.
It is her picture on the Inquirer
that speaks in the silence

we know but cannot speak.
It is this land in the centuries
past and present. The betrayals

are everywhere. The hope we need
missing where it should be.
We need to serve our people

in their quest for what is,
the life, good and promised,
absent in our homes out

of thin cans or the refuse of others.
There is roof on our heads, true,
but all this is in the mind,

the shape of this fantasy
in this our clenched fist
we have learned to do to fight.

It is fighting that is left
and nothing more, and in between
one hope and another, we prepare

ourselves to gather all the strength
we need for each day that we have
to deal with the vicissitudes of grief.


Filipinas/Feb 16, 2010

Words are all we have

Words are all we have, words.
In the end, we come to terms
with the speech that comes

not from the lips running afoul
with the lawlessness of unfree spirits
but the words that reside in our:

bodies that know what delight is
souls that tell us where our earth begins
minds that tell us that our warm bodies

and our souls-in-heat come to meet
in fighting words that lie to tell us what
our truth is, this one without the ruse

of shadows passing, the daylight
masking what dusk reveals
the alonetime midnight gives

even as we welcome the crowd
in our rhetoric-filled universe
of gaiety and grief, such as here,

in this heartland that now runs right smack
into the whirl and whir of patronizing
godfathers telling us all citizens of this land

that theirs is the way to run the sad country
better than those who had done so
in the last hundred years and more

where the constant was the good life,
the staple of our myth and tales, tall
and taller as the years came by

and then a dictatorship, its agents conjoined
to the hip in hip talk and hippy gospel
of change, gave us some sense of what

this non-sense is, our own that we have
become, our words for sale now
or have been snatched of us while we

pretended we were talking or about
to give our name or the name of our dream
this act we did even after we have called it quits

this game of hide-and-seek with the powerful
with those who rode on the wave of revolutions
we called forth to get our voices back.

Words are all we have, the movie script says,
and we know that a hundred times even before
we heard that again, one more time, said

in the contest of good and evil, us on one side
the other snatcher of our intentions standing by
ready to pounce on us even as we cry.

It is 2010, the year of the lion, and the superstition
comes in strong, stronger in our midst now,
more than ever even as we fight what words are left

in the lucky colors of our cheapened lives:
green for the revolutions that is not there
white for the intimations of the immaculate

heart that that we desire for ourselves and this city,
this soil, this piece of soul-land we have known
but does not know us, not any longer even as it

coaxes us to say here we are, here we are
reveling in all the false glory of this presence
haunting us, a specter of what our words are.


Marikina, Metro Manila

Manila By Night, This One

This is your first time
To see Manila by night,
This one that hits you right

From the clouds, black and thick
Looking like mountains
With their residents that cry

Foul to what is wrong with the land
You go back to, again, tonight
From another land you wished

You had gone before all these talks
Of People Power Revolution Number One
Of People Power Revolution Number Two

And all these other faux pas revolts
All called in the name of our people
All in the name of the wretched

Who are filled with the rhetoric of alms-giving
With the promise of a nation come alive
With the promise of redemption

From the heavens, high up here, in these clouds
That form like saints, gods, and shadows,
Passing and malleable in the permanency

Of fantasy we need all the time
To forget what we cannot achieve
To lessen the pain of eking it out.

This is Manila by night, this one
Your first in the many years you went away
Your city that betrayed you, the city you left behind.


Manila/Feb 13, 2009

Witnessing for a People

Agkabannuag:

let this come straight to you.
What you do is not yours now.
It is the same old way of doing things

done in raw truth and messy blood.
Not your work now, really so
but the work of our living ancestors

on your own young strong shoulders
that will go through the weight
of each day, passing and eternal

in the way you will look at it.
It is not a paved road, this
that we all go through, we

who have seen it all and now we cannot
sleep, we cannot rest, we cannot sit still.
For here, in this nowness, here is this

lonely sacrifice that is concrete:
our hours are no longer ours to own
our names are no longer ours to claim

our years are no longer ours to lean on
for the decades to come, sunshine
or no sunshine, rain or no rain

as in these times that we do not know
who we are, where we are going
when are we coming back to ourselves

our sense of self and the sense of our
bright moons and stars, their gleam of light
we could divine from the lines of stories

we write to make permanent what we remember
to draw from this memory the rare courage
to go on and move and fight, fight

for freedom as those what will make sense
for truths that are difficult but must be there
for the courage that we need to take the first step.


Hon, HI