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hikap
08/21/10*
personal reality photo from DA
We were like that, naked children— unafraid of the morning cold. legs of molasses and sunshine.
“your body is beautiful…this (you mean/i mean, feeling every bit of skin and humanity from you/from me)…this feels wonderful”
we talk for hours, sometimes I felt like this young girl describing to you by hands and fingers how it feels to be beside the bus window, how it feels to see the scarecrows being serenaded by birds, how it feels to be needed to such extent that you feel like a commodity, how it feels to be so near the sunset and you have a sudden stream of thoughts involving people who has left you somewhere and you just began to walk and you learned that your ankles are the most defiant pair. Sometimes, I feel like this old woman wrinkled by years, tying both her toes with strings, dreaming of her younger curvy self, dancing to that song from Vinyl across the street.
We would look into each others’ eyes for long silent moments. If there is a language that merely relied on eyeball movement, we did not know. We were just there, naked children unafraid of the morning cold— linguists of dialects that only the lips and tongues can keep untold. You fell on the thin sheet of gravity and cloth, you never said a word but in my silence, I , whispered ‘oh how beautiful you are’, just there looking at me, like how a young boy walked a dusty road, the rain start to fall and he leaped his face, he listened to the sound of raindroplets from his forehead. But sometimes, you were like this old wise man that I run to when all the poetry I could weave made no sense and you will tame the ache when you begin to let my hands caress the invisible wrinkles of your face: old, smell of archives, unpublished, un-chronicled.
We touch for hours. Hands unaware of anatomy, immensely lost in the beauty of form, breathing in the scent of the day that was and the day that is about to begin— and we both felt
that if there is a kind of architecture that cannot be defined, it would have to be our bodies. Yours and mine, azoteas.
*
hawan
08/15/10*
14/08/2010
from what was inked facing the ocean
perhaps, i tolerated all the low tides because it provided me with plenty to do in the way of shelling or clamming. but it still beat the ebb tide, when you can’t do anything but just sit there —passively by and watch while the sea turned itself around. it occurs to me just now, that perhaps ebbing can be a rest time, a “psychic slumber” from a lifetime of learning and unlearning to be a woman— a human. i never thought about just being still, caught up as i was w/ escape and all it entails.
there were points when i got tired of swimming upstream, against the current, only to arrive to unnatural destinations with little sense of where to yield, where to sow, where to ask, how to find. more than anything i wish— i wish to be carried out with the surf and be buoyed by the salt water. i need to hunker down like a nesting crab or a plump clam and take stock while the tides wash over me.
it is eerily quiet. my soul as drab as the August beach upon which i sit. i must be still and listen to the primitive squawk of the birds and breathe, breathe deeply of the moist, and be open to where it takes me.
…and away from the sea, i breathe like this:
cosmic siblings Dreamer and Treader near the gutter under the stars. talking about: alternative ways of living-building your own realities-having coffee at the shore of ysla bohemia all-baretoed-and somehow free.
sharing a dream that there is hope in children, that their dreams are the most beautiful and their gentle squeeze on your hand- irreplaceably warm and relieving.
motorbike rides, puddles and paddies with my beloved brothers and sisters. to anywhere in our little town, to anywhere where we can spread the blanket wide and we can just freefall. to anywhere where we continuously grow from another’s dreams, giggles and silence.
walking one unfamiliar city at a time. buying cheap books. finding a nest with old glass walls, surrounded by colorful barber shops.
…just celebrating every tiny moment when i get goosebumps. just sleeping when i feel lonely. just staying up awake when i want to daydream a lot even until 11pm. but sooner, i may find my self leaving all that is very familiar.
for, maybe, it is all but a series of becoming and not arriving.
*
tahaw
08/7/10*
15th-may-2007
written in a bus from Estancia
a collab with Inky Callora
“and sometimes a girl just can’t explain why it is so hard to feel safe when she wants to be like the sky, with bits of light scattered from here to infinity.
sometimes, it is damned near impossible to understand it herself.“
beautiful people, i am running “Dear Me” project and would be more than grateful if you send your letter to self: patadyong@gmail.com. i know every person has a story and across every street, pavement and oceans, you are dreaming my kind of dream. i want to read your story. really. also, the more type-away your letter is, the more tickled pink i’m going to be. if you can spread the word and ask anyone else like your house helper, your neighbor, your student, your boyfriend, a random person you meet, that would be awesome. be reminded that this is no contest, no fancies. let us put this way, i just want you to know that i care and it interests me how you talk to your self. how you remind your self that sometimes, you are not what we see in your facebook, in your photographs, in short-cut messages. that in your corner of the world, there are things that make you special, there are events that make you frail and there can be one person that pushes you to stride forward or to stay stationed in one moment of your life. i am interested in how you fight your demons, how you become a jerk, how you play voyeur in the lives of passersby and old women sitting outside Veteran’s bank. might be too much to ask for? if it is, just ignore.
and then, there’s a wall clock, you, a pen, your keyboard—- and you.
*
dughan
07/31/10*
My current mission is to walk INTO corners and make a place fall-inlove with me. (it’s given that I shall, fiber by fiber, fall in-love with it)
*
Hello. Come closer, let me talk to you so close— face to face that I can almost see your pores. How have you been?
Did I tell you that I felt so empty for some time? Yes, I did. But when it all happened, my eyes were open. I wanted to see sadness, creeping, swallowing my entirety. I did not ignore it because: I needed it. I need it— still. To be sad, to be alone, to engulf the emptiness without having to find holes where I can let my nose pass through. To take the curves of the road without having to cheat and to resort to a short cut. Sad, nostalgic, needy, longing, alive. So I go to this green and pink carinderia for coffee and bread every morning. It stands between commercial buildings. You can see its stall and the menu of the day, a tray of candies and cigarettes on the kahera’s table, an ever-smiling girl in ponytail and strong unibrow. You can see their kitchen, the young male cook in his apron. His morning sweat and the beautiful smoke that he is very much used to. What makes this place beautiful are the sights and sounds around it. A block away, I always pass by to sales clerks painting their faces—holding pocket mirrors with a lipstick smile, truck drivers who would cheerfully greet me “good morning!!!” (and if I am lucky enough, I get this friendly wink).
“Hey where is he?”, the girl with strong unibrow and shiny smile asked
“Ah him, he’s almost home. I am surprised you still remembered us, it’s been more than 3 months,” I felt a sudden rush of shyness and longing.
“How could I ever forget?”, she had this indelible grin— sincere, little and reminiscent.
“Yes. who would ever forget…”
And then, I’d take slow steps. Let the morning shine upon me. Let the quietness of the city fill me in. I walk slowly down my favorite corner of Iloilo. Lamp posts, green huge windows on the second floor with hanging green ornaments, random people standing beside the windows— smoking, looking at the skyline and electric wires. Maybe thinking of what I also think about or thinking what I am thinking of as they look down on me from where they are.
Sometimes, I accuse life for being so unfair. For being so mischievous that no matter how I want to live with my heart bigger than my brain, I could not help in some instances when I have to sharpen my reasons. But maybe, I am glad that what I am here for is not mere intelligence, I want to believe that there is something more filling in wisdom. That my steps do not stop at the end of my nose.
Sometimes, I question existence. Being born without your permission. Being taken away without your approval. But in sad days, the long aimless walks present to me moments of life in small, vivid, monochromatic forms and I can’t help but hold my soul and get this I-am-a-bit-sad-and-nostalgic-and-yearning-and-I-feel-how-it-really-is-to-be-alive-awwwwww.
And you?
By the way, before I hop out for some SINGGIT dreaming, never forget that I believe in love. That though I thirst for wisdom, empowerment, beauty, humor and rock and roll, these would be all meaningless without l-o-v-e. and hey hey, THAT you ARE LOVED, too.
Keveen of KORAKOR/Spread Your Love
*
swelas
07/17/10*
“That’s when you know you’ve found somebody really special. When you can just shut the hell up for a minute and comfortably share a silence.” -Pulp Fiction-
on a beautiful Friday dusk with my siblings
and so these rainy days and visits to the lonely shore nearby have magnified my love and relationship with silence and solitude. sure, i love people. let me tell you that i am in-love with how humans try to live. how they cook their meals, how they sleep on each others shoulder in the bus, how they invent passions just to get by, how they mischievously grin in secret when something is funny in a public place but it’s rude to laugh, how lovers in food courts discreetly kiss each other. i love their thoughts no matter how shallow or complex these are. and to highlight: There is beauty in transience but I fall in-love with every human being who tries his/her best to make the most out of ‘this’ impermanence. And that is, to inspire, to influence, to share his/her soul without expecting something in return and without the fear of the inevitable feeling of sadness or loss. I am inspired by a human’s way to exist and to live. And his means to differentiate one from the other. every human being i meet, bit by bit, has made me understand my self more.
but
it cannot be denied that i feel immensely myself when i spend limitless times doing nothing on a silent shore or a wide green field. just a long walk from where i live, there’s a sea and there’s low tide that allows me to feel the entire ocean under these two toes. when i rest my back and go cloud-watching, i have been in awe just watching how these lumps of soft white occupy such a beautiful space in the skies. imagine skies without clouds. imagine airplane flights without them.imagine your life without clogs of sadness, boredom and rejection. lately i have found out that maybe, life gets too tough as a struggle because people get obsessed with vocabulary. words like: happiness, contentment, intelligence, wealth, freedom and all these utopia-ish huge terms. i have to admit, i’ve spent some lengthy time trying to achieve each of those. i thank my younger, more fragile years for fueling my desire to fumble, fail and learn. but then, is there an end to this big loop of tumbling, twisting and trying? perhaps, none.
maybe, there’s no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow nor light at the end of the tunnel. if there is—perhaps, you and me, we, we’re not entirely here for that ‘end prize’ at all. and what am i here for?
i am not even sure. but all i know is this: i want to wake up and stir my coffee and see others wake up and live each day: be it in a manner that it’s like their last or in a way that they just lazily let it pass. i want to write my thoughts in mid-air and just let them melt somewhere. there are many places that await me and many people that are about to make a difference. i still enjoy the swings of moods like cry laughing or the other way around. i still want to listen to every sound that this world has, taste every highs and lows of the journey.i still want to keep my dream of one day, just walk along silently with my significant other, hold his hand and we could talk about what it means to be him, what it means to be me, what it means to love and what it means to be us. And in 10 years’ time, we could look back on that day and know that we meant what we said.
this, dedicated to my best friend-loyal listener, Ben, whose i-don’t-give-a-fuck-shirt happens to be my fave
and to the security guard at BPI who shared to me his choco polvoron yesterday
& to my charming siblings who ask me the most racist questions
*