Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Going Back to Poetry


It's been more than six years since I last wrote a poem. The life I found as an adult in the big city, the new people I met, and the internet came into my life and, it's as if I have forgotten the art that has been my companion growing up. It saddened me to realize this, especially knowing how much poetry, as a form of expression has helped me survive the most difficult times of my life as a teenager. Good thing I got to reunite with Athena Garcia and Rey Carlo Sajulan, two of those people whose mere presence, not to mention, poems. reminded me of what it is that I lost and that I have to regain. 

Here's a poem I wrote recently as an attempt to resurrect the little god in me by creating a little world, through the power of words and imagination.


Poetry and I

When I think of poetry, I think of a precious gem,
Teasing me from a place so high and too far for me to reach.
It's an uphill climb,
A foggy mountain top
Which chokes me as I raise a foot
And move towards it.
Veins in my eyes get visibly bold,
Glowing like neon lights in downtown whorehouses
And on otherwise dark alleys with dancing and flying candy wrappers,
Flattened cigarette butts,
Corners that reek of the smell of old and dried urine.
Places, I think, you'd cringe even at the thought of visiting alone.
And those veins, they're lights that grow bigger and bigger
And then burst.
Blood splatters
And flow like lava from the angry volcanoes
which are my eyes,
I'm blinded.
I can't see my paper
Nor feel the presence of my pen.

It's an uphill climb
Every word, seems to give more strength
To that hand that pulls me down
Tightens it's grip in every attempt to conceive
A line that contains both truth and beauty at the same time.
I haven't gone that far
'Cause I am being pulled down.
My own shadow, my past, pulling me down
As if preparing me to drown
And die from that quicksand below
Where my doubts, my feeling of hatred towards myself
Are calling me, asking me
Begging me to join them in their misery
After I buried them deep on the ground
Not too long ago.

Quicksand, tomb of my past.
It's filled with thumb- sucking, jackstones, magazines under the bed, used rubbers,
Crucifixes hidden in the drawer, dusty, untouched rosaries, dried tears on my pillows
Forming dead shadows of that world that exists only in my dreams.

I am being pulled down, blinded and out of breath
My hands, shaking
My feet, groping the floor for the pen
And where it went, after it fell, I don't, anymore, know

So here I am together with the sound of the crickets
And spirits that watch me from afar
Making sounds that seem to celebrate my failure
Snickering at the thought that the art of poetry
Remains distant to me.
I give up.
I can't touch it.
It's a mountain I can't climb.