Healthy in Paranoid Times

I'll be having my mid-year three-day vacation in a few weeks time and I have so much things to do but so little time. I miss home. I miss the serenity of the farm. I miss the mango tree in our sideyard. I miss the starry night on a clear summer sky. I miss deciphering clouds. I miss the MellonCollie and the Infinite Sadness record. I miss the feeling of being invincible that only youth can offer. Time is such a relative concept.

Few days ago, I had a coffee with a very good friend. We were just having this trivial conversation about relationships when out of nowhere, I cried. So it was like three times that I cried in public when I'm with him that I rushed to the comfort room to finish my pathetic stunt discretely. Looking back, it was not really pathetic. I feel like it was just one of those moments when my hormones are low that made my tear gland reacted so spontaneously. Oh well. It's good to be alive.
I saw this line from the site of Our Lady Peace, one of the good bands of my youth, "Healthy in Paranoid Times." How fitting.

Breathing Octavio

One of the poets that always leave me breathless is Octavio Paz. Paz is a Mexican poet who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1990. He is also an essayist. His poetic corpus is nourished by the belief that poetry constitutes "the secret religion of the modern age." Got here three of my favorite poems that could suffice for one meal.

No More Cliches

Beautiful face
That like a daisy opens its petals to the sun
So do you
Open your face to me as I turn the page.

Enchanting smile
Any man would be under your spell,
Oh, beauty of a magazine.

How many poems have been written to you?
How many Dantes have written to you, Beatrice?
To your obsessive illusion
To you manufacture fantasy.

But today I won't make one more Cliché
And write this poem to you.
No, no more clichés.

This poem is dedicated to those women
Whose beauty is in their charm,
In their intelligence,
In their character,
Not on their fabricated looks.

This poem is to you women,
That like a Shahrazade wake up
Everyday with a new story to tell,
A story that sings for change
That hopes for battles:
Battles for the love of the united flesh
Battles for passions aroused by a new day
Battle for the neglected rights
Or just battles to survive one more night.

Yes, to you women in a world of pain
To you, bright star in this ever-spending universe
To you, fighter of a thousand-and-one fights
To you, friend of my heart.

From now on, my head won't look down to a magazine
Rather, it will contemplate the night
And its bright stars,
And so, no more clichés.



Between Going and Staying

Between going and staying the day wavers,
in love with its own transparency.
The circular afternoon is now a bay
where the world in stillness rocks.

All is visible and all elusive,
all is near and can't be touched.

Paper, book, pencil, glass,
rest in the shade of their names.

Time throbbing in my temples repeats
the same unchanging syllable of blood.

The light turns the indifferent wall
into a ghostly theater of reflections.

I find myself in the middle of an eye,
watching myself in its blank stare.

The moment scatters. Motionless,
I stay and go: I am a pause.

Stuck and Cursed

Time and again, traffic is one of the curses of the so-called civilization. Santolan to 20th Ave. would only take 15 min. on a clear road but on a chaotic 9 am road, it took me an hour. Added to the curse was manong driver's radio station that is the pinnacle of "ka-jologan". "Manong, pwede po palipat sa 107.5, NU?" He tried changing station for a while but his radio's frequency was seemingly stuck in ___#$. "Okay na lang po." I finally surrendered. I got an hour experience at Hades. So that was the start of my so-called thursday morning.

A Chronicle of IT Training Foretold (Just random thoughts, really)

In a few days time, the training will be over. I never thought i could survive the 130-day training given my so-chaotic schedule, but I did (thanks to coffee). It feels like finishing a very good book, you just feel so amazed that it's over. I remember the first day when i really thought the seminar would only last for a week and i had a shock of my life when i heard that it would last for three months or so, hah! I had some apprehensions at first because I imagined my classmates to be computer geeks who eat computer programs for lunch, and I hardly passed Wordstar back in College. But I learned later that i am not the one who is IT-challenged in the group. I felt relieved. My learnings are so many that i wish i could have much time practicing it. Everything is a matter of habit.

My classmates are weird mixture of humanity. Given the differences in language and culture, it was a very interesting group. I am just lucky, in a sense, that I could speak several dialects. They could not backbite me so easily, if its enough consolation, hehehe. We really blend so well, not only because of the weekly alcohol binge or downloading galore, or for the petty gambling (that leaves some broke for a week) but on the common passion to learn and to explore.

As the training about to end, I remember the feeling a day after a very big concert, I feel dazed. It's nice and sad at the same time. But everything has its ending. And this ending prompts us to a new beginning. The training, the friends i made, the learnings i gained(sometimes overloaded), all these experiences whether mundane or sublime, are all part of a cycle. And I can't wait for the next encounter.