Skip to main content

Turtles

(Variations on a Theme by Arkaye Kierulf)
Lolito Go

I believe in freedom, and the freedom to believe is supreme.
I believe in Arkaye Kierulf. Yes, in the quiet dignity of horses too.
I believe in turtles, that they are better than horses, but kings and emperors did not ride on them.
I believe in Anaphora and in all it has to say.
I believe poems like this make a better day.
I believe that stupidity strengthens, depth is one of the weak’s defenses.
I believe in orgasm.
I believe that when God created the clitoris, he was having fun.
I believe in deja vu, and this is one.
I believe in English subtitles for the hearing impaired.
I believe some love are just impaired.
I believe love is better off impaired.
I believe in shampoo plus conditioner.
I believe in my hair.
I believe in every tick that lives in my hair.
I believe that behind my hair is an envious onlooker.
“I believe in America,” claims Bonasera in the opening seconds of The Godfather.
I believe in my mother’s laughter, despite the denture.
I believe in headaches, they are serious and painful.
I believe in heartaches, they are even more serious and painful.
I believe fools are but fools.
I believe death is the ultimate school.
I believe in anonymity but I like my name.
I believe you should be sad about the fact that this will end.
I believe in Samuel Becket.
I believe that when a writer wants to write, he just wants to read himself.
I believe youth is overrated.
I believe this room was once a planet, and my smile was once a moon.
I believe in moon, and she too will vanish soon.
I believe in prime numbers, in what remains after divisions.
I believe shadows that remain shadows all night long.
I believe in second hand, in second life, in second chance.
I believe in poets who can dance.
I believe in my hands, the softness of my palms, my fists like our hardened hearts, my fingers are ten unlit torches of love, I believe in my hands.
I believe or I die.
I believe or I lie.
I believe another lie after a lie is less than a lie.
I believe in the silence after the sigh.
I believe in kiss.
I believe in the inevitable and the incomplete.
I believe then I forgive.
I believe in open endings,

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Remembering Evelio Javier

Some of our heroes may have been more brilliant or achieved more greatly, but I find it hard to think of any who lived more purely and more single mindedly than Evelio... his commitment to democracy, to social justice and to a life among the poor in our land. Februay 11, 2009 in Panay Island, Philippines is Evelio B. Javier Day. It is the 22nd Anniversary of the assassination of Evelio Javier. It was a stunning and decisive event towards our eventual liberation from Martial Law later that February 1986. Many in our Ateneo community remember meeting Evelio’s body at the airport two days later, and the Mass and the long march from Baclaran to the Ateneo de Manila on Valentine’s Day, February 14, 1986. We had a Mass at sunset in the field beside the Blue Eagle Gym and ended the Mass with the electrifying experience of hearing Fr. Jose A. Cruz, S.J. read for the first time in public the letter of the CBCP on the elections. Evelio B. Javier was born to Everardo Autajay Javier of Hamtic and ...

Many Feathers

Many feathers. In the silence of many feathers. - Robert Bly Today my window spoke to me in the language of leaves, told me of gravity and the tired hands of twilight day after day pulling at the trees’ thousand fingers, the trees with their lifetime of cycles, the wind, its invisible wings. I have seen things only words will outlive , it said. But even words kneel before the silence of feathers. Once a poet peered inside the hollow of a tree and discovered words, and now I steal from him, repeat his curved consonants, the illusion of presence. In the secret, dim light I run my hands over the carcass of some dead creature he might have seen still heaving its last sighs. A window knows nothing of the sorrows of speech, the weight of things breaking as wind carries them away from tongue. Darkness moves against darkness, night dresses its sleepy body in shadows, whispers its stories, and my window speaks what it sees. While I see only what is spoken: A poet peers inside a tree and sees ca...

The Moonflowers

It's as if the dark, which had before just been context, gave to vulnerability a permission, almost: fleshy saucers of spilled cream, so many parchment fists, unfisting; and now, in pieces, the delicate mask of an indifference offered radically up against what, each time, seems as unthinkable, as unexpected, as when, in the long dream of retraction, that sea that is finally not a sea, but what else to call it, begins again its shifting, and though to every push of the will forward there's something noble—which is to say, something lonely, also—it's too late. Carl Phillips Speak Low Farrar, Straus and Giroux