Caduceus Suki

This sickness of a brother. An ugly affair from where I stand, and no human instrument will tell me his exact pain. His face is a sweaty mask when he says it is painful, and that is that. What else can you say about that which you are trying to throw away to a skinless void? I walked to the drugstore on the other side of the highway. So up over the pass. I stand at the queue, give the pharmacist our prescription, and wait some more as she fetches the meds. Small hours, but there's never a drugstore without customers. In fact, there are so many of us that I have to quell a plural hate. A good thing everybody's after medicine, and each face represents someone somewhere sick in the dark or under antiseptic light. Maybe much more sick. So I handle a feeling of neither love nor hate, just a blank and observant waiting. It's not enrolment line waiting or traffic jam waiting. More of a ferris wheel high seat waiting with dangling feet. My spin comes at the cashiers. Her hands and eyes at the keys, she gives me a question, Do you have a Suki Card? I ask in turn, A drugstore suki; isn't that the saddest thing to have? She's still down on the digits and do not think to look at me when she says, Unless it's your ID, sir; don't go making it anyone's ID. I receive the plastic and walked back home. I do not recall ever being called sir at a drugstore.

Static

Panaginip ng videoke. Malaki ang makina at walang tigil ang kanta at inom. Hindi ko maalala ang imahe sa makina. May away na mula pa sa unang panaginip ko na hindi ko maaaring isulat. May dalang barena ang aking tiyo. Kaaway niya ang videoke na dinuduro niya ng barena. May lupa at ugat-ugat pa sa dulo ng barena ngunit kita pa rin ang tilos ng bakal. Nagstatic ang makina. Tuloy ang kantahan, medyo pabulong na nga lang. Todo ngiti pa rin ang mga humahawak ng bote at mikropono. Galit na galit ang tiyo sa videoke.

Mountain Lyric

Summer, and under the shade of a shut up Carillon, I begin the practice of distance. Beloved will work elsewhere, live elsewhere, leaving her incandescent metaphors. Co-teachers stay, but do they really? Do I know who they will be besides their same names and sane faces? Also, students go. That’s what they’re supposed to do, study and go. What I hear are tricycles and people cooing at their expensive dogs and the wind that hisses and hints at a catalog of all that I do not hear. And will never. Friends stop the flow of words dead and the only way these could live is to say them again and again until I wear the meaning out of them, like how imagine there were once cities back in the day when Makiling held back her volcano words. Then the accursed snakebird brought her a gift, the thought she might one day lose them, these people she loved. Already missing them, she sang her grief and she cried and she sang. It was in this manner of fire that she lost them. It would be 300,000 years before a university was possible. When I entered this university four years ago, there was kapok in the air and a tower could yet sing.

Cat and Cross

Was what it was. You know how it goes,
full moons and intersections.
Only, it was I slain,
Bones won, white from pink flesh.

Black cat out with agimat:
What it forever is.