Residence

The hall was dark. 

Several voices come to me. Mocking me as if I could hear.

There was wind coming through the window. 

I felt the cold through the edge of my skirt.

There were walls to which I can lean a little, and I did.

I meandered through the empty space, as I put and lift my hand

One after the other flat on the wall.

I felt the floor. It was hard. Bricks.

Slate, uneven, they were probably chafing

Before it was coated with resin.

Flaws, unshapely deformities,

Forgotten, like how rocks usually are.

There was a time that I believed in God.

I believed in Him before I realized that the hall was dark.

And it was dark not because of the absence of light.

It is my dwelling place.

I rented it out nevertheless.

I know where the door is.

The shape of the carvings on wood.

the creaking sound if turned,

the sudden influx of light when opened.

I looked at the direction to it.

I gave it the most intent glare that I can muster.

Stare. Through the blank space called darkness.

I lovingly put down the blanket on the floor,

lovingly feeling the roughness of the resin coated bricks.

contentedly leaning my head on the wall;

Humming slow songs, screaming with upbeat songs;

Chanting the long forgotten history.

Closing my eyes, and finally turning my back to the door.

This hallway is my house.

Limited Perception

I formed papers the shape of mountains:

My vision of mountains, relatively.

For all i know, a mountain is not a plane.

I knew little about them, and seen only some of them.

My footsteps were muffled as I walked through the pile of leaves.

They were all fresh, the remains was so fresh.

My head was turned.

I only saw a quarter of it.

I could not make out of its color, or its texture.

There was only water, splashing, pouring.

Sprinkling through the rocks, reverberating.

And branches breaking of from trunks of trees.

I heard; perceived a little.

Such limited perception of things bothers me.

A sage would probably tell me though:

A fuller view would probably be bliss or the edge of a cliff.

Las Ruinas del Corazon, Eric Gamalinda

Juana the Mad married the handsomest man in Spain 
and that was the end of it, because when you marry a man 

more beautiful than you, they say you pretty much lost control 
of the situation. Did she ever listen? No. When he was away 

annexing more kingdoms, she had horrible dreams 
of him being cut and blown away, or spread on the rack, 

or sleeping with exotic women. She prayed to the twin guardians 
of the Alhambra, Saint Ursula and Saint Susana, to send him home

and make him stay forever. And they answered her prayers, 
and killed Philip the Handsome at twenty-eight. 

Juana the Mad was beside herself with grief, and she wrapped 
his body in oils and lavender, and laid him out in a casket of lead, 

and built a marble effigy of the young monarch in sleep, 
and beside it her own dead figure, so he would never think 

he was alone. And she kept his body beside her, and every day 
for the next twenty years, while pungent potions filled the rooms, 

she peeked into his coffin like a chef peeks into his pot, 
and memories of his young body woke her adamant desire. 

She wanted to possess him entirely, and since not even death 
may oppose the queen, she found a way to merge death and life 

by eating a piece of him, slowly, lovingly, until he was entirely 
in her being. She cut a finger and chewed the fragrant skin, 

then sliced thick portions of his once ruddy cheeks. Then she ate
an ear, the side of a thigh, the solid muscles of the chest, 

then lunged for an eye, a kidney, part of the large intestine. 
Then she diced his penis and his pebble-like testicles 

and washed everything down with sweet jerez. 
Then she decided she was ready to die. 

But before she did, she asked the poets to record these moments
in song, and the architects to carve the song in marble, 

and the marble to be extracted from the most secret veins 
of the earth and placed where no man could see it, 

because that is the nature of love, because one walks alone
through the ruins of the heart, because the young must sleep

with their eyes open, because the angels tremble
from so much beauty, because memory moves in orbits

of absence, because she holds her hands out in the rain, 
and rain remembers nothing, not even how it became itself.

Another Eurydice poem by J. Neil Garcia

SONG OF EURYDICES Song of Eurydice

Understand that I am dead,
dear poet, and do not need your saving.
My underworld sleeps at the bottom of the sea--
a wet conclusion I had long foreseen:
tranquil, yes, but far from dark,
for here shift fish and coral bearing the sun
in their bodies, hammered into such shapes
as only the tides can conceive. Colors? I have those:
the dappled citrons, gentians and pinks
of your hothouse blooms, worn as skin
by prey and cool predator alike.
I am never alone, sweet musician,
for this I have discovered about the ocean:
boundless as dream, it catches
every memory we may care to hold fast,
and casts it as shimmering shadow in water:
clear midnight in your eyes, moles rioting
on your cheeks, your sleek boyish head
tilting as you smile, your slightly turned
lip, the flowing length of your torso
lapping against my thigh, limpid notes
from your harp swimming to me again and again--
fleet accompaniment to the humpbacks’ songs
of mellow war and courtship. Borne out of brine,
these forms I can embrace without fear,
for they and I surge as one wave,
a spangled rhythm, repeating itself without end.
I know you wait, still and teary-eyed
upon the warm and rippled surface.
But you must see: here I am free to love you
beyond the encumbrance of a body, sad
and fickle animal always needing to be fed.
A kind of outpouring, a happiness eddies
through me with every tidal pulse,
the birth of another moon upon the world’s
nether brim, the sheerest stirrings of life
inside the sea’s lambent cradles.
From where you sit, in the pith of your craft,
I may strike you as requiring release,
and indeed your vision plummets now to touch me
with salt-edged words, your hurt elegy.
But understand it is I who have released you
by escaping into meaning’s murmurous deep:
bereft of me, you have needed to strain to hear,
to pitch the net of your voice far, far
into the vast and echoing blue. Listen.
You can sing again, my precious one.
Already you have saved us both.

-J Neil Garcia

Sorry if it's copy paste. No time to write.

Halloween (A Murder Account) by Karla Vizcarra

There’s a corpse down the street.

A dead body covered in white, policemen mumbling in radios, a camera crew and a crowd of people: Latinos, Mexicans, Jewish kids in their hats and curls down the street yesterday morning.

Nothing moved.

I feared the body would rise if I came

too near. Besides, the policemen waved us back.

A Chinese lady, speaking to us, and when we shook our heads she asked, in broken English: The-body is yung?

We did not know.

Nobody knew.

Covered in white, still, frozen.

The murderer had a Halloween mask on, a kid said.

Leaves everywhere. Dead. We are shivering.

He must be very cold.



There was a murder down Clara street yesterday morning. I was lazy, typing in front of the computer. Looking up people that didn’t matter. Poring over their lives. Deliciously, when Ernest called.

“There’s a dead body right in front of me,” he had said.

And I dressed up in my sweater, pants and slippers, stepped out into the cold November and walked towards where a crowd had begun to gather.

A dead body in a white bag.

The police had made sure there were cars in front of the crime scene, so no one could take a good look unless they sauntered right over and craned their necks, vulgarly, blatantly. I saw the white bag. I had craned my neck just a little.

I wanted to go home.

Ernest kissed me and got the groceries. We were cooking Hainanese chicken for dinner. We saw a Youtube video, while looking up the recipe for bread pudding.



We didn’t go out last night. My swine mask and blonde wig hung there, waiting, expectant. I had wanted to dress up in sequins and fishnets and heels and a blonde drag wig and then the mask. I wanted to be a freak in a dress. A sexy pig. A fat chick. A Fascist pig. Swine flu. Pork. Oink oink.

We ended up watching Dario Argento’s Suspiria. Goblin music. Wet rain.



The dead body had curled up in my head.

We were biking down Prospect Park, leaves rustling under our wheels. It was dark, for 7 o clock. Daylight Savings Time.

We had come from a reading in a basement.

I thought I had left my hat down there. The lights had been turned off.

I had to go down the stairs and look for the lights, located not where lights normally are.

I had to go to the very back row. The last row of chairs.

Empty chairs.

I found the switch, but not my hat.

Nowhere on the shelves at the bookshop upstairs.

We went down the basement a second time.

It was even darker. Emptier.

Goblin music.



Outside, I found my hat slumped beside my bike. On the dark pavement, it looked like a dead rat.

A dead thing on my head.



We cooked Hainanese chicken that night; it was delicious.


(Very indifferent.)

Apocalypse, by Arah Rivadeneira

The blanket of shadows unfolds

A P

     I

    T of

lO s T p L ot S,

turmoil

p

o

u

r

s

b  R  e A  t  H  i  N  g  life to DEATH.

I want to live for another thousand years

Though bullets should pierce my skin
I shall strike and march forth

Wounds and poison shall I take aflee
Aflee
'Til the pain and pang should disappear

And I should care even less

I want to live for another thousand years
(from 'Aku' 1943)

Chairil Anwar

A Conversation between the Center and the Head

I made this one time when i cannot sleep... i can't post it all at once, it went up to three pages...

But don't take these seriously. They're crap...
First three stanzas



It has been ten epochs since you have been thrown like mud, Egleia.
How can you forsake yourself in such fashion?
I have not slept since then.
You have been hurt and trampled upon like rocks on an ash pit
And why Egleia?
I have not slept since then...

I have only heard a fit of rage in the message portal
You have been sent to the White Village
I had you surrounded with the muses and the elves...
Why?
After all the nails you're letting this affricate...
And once again you are beguiled!

i thought that Endymion would still be yonder awaiting there when I come back
He was standing at the foot of my abode
He said he was coming back
           He told me to hope...
                       He asked forgiveness...
I was carrying a lot of parcel then
i was weeping
A monster consumed me...
Fire?

Anger, Egleia.

One Art

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day.  Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel.  None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch.  And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones.  And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

---Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied.  It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

	-- Elizabeth Bishop