A welcome surprise

It’s already after five in the evening in La Mesa, and Doro is late returning home from the provincial capital.  As he makes his way to his house in the poblacion from the main highway, he smiles at the activity filling the streets, the sounds and sights that will always remind him of home when he is away for work.  Kids are playing in the street with makeshift toys, girls and boys laughing and running together until their nanays call them home.  He sees Marie has already set up her barbeque trays for selling meryenda to those looking for meryenda as well as Ricardo with his pushcart calling “Fish Balls!” Just the words are enough to make him hungry, and he can almost taste the salty sweet food in his mouth.  This makes him quicken his pace home to his own wife’s dinner but not so much that he can’t greet the Bienvilla family and the Viloria family as they rest in plastic chairs on their front porch and lawn, “chikka-ing” about the happenings of the day.  Everyone smiles tooth-gapped grins at Doro and waves back in greeting, asking “Naggapuam?” or “Where are you coming from?” He answers with a smile and in return inquires about their families, how the harvest is going, and whether they think there’ll be rain any time soon. 

Finally, he approaches his own gate, and he opens it to enter, noticing that he needs to repaint its green-flecked surface again before typhoon season starts once more.  He is not over-worried, though, because he knows that is a few months away.  Right now, greeting his family is a more pressing matter.  He hears his wife’s small Pekingese yapping from inside the house in greeting, but Bea, his love, has kept the door closed to prevent the dog’s escape.  Carefully, Doro manages to open the door and get inside the house while being enthusiastically greeted by the dog but preventing her escape.  “Cholo, calm down!  Off!” Doro exclaims, with little impact on the dog.  But then Bea calls to her, and the dog runs into the kitchen, distracted by the optimism of food.  Or, at least, affection, for she is, after all, Bea’s dog.  The TV is blaring the evening news, but he notices his older daughter isn’t paying any attention to the headlines on the screen or his entrance into the house because her attention is absorbed by her telephone.  He notices it is tethered to her power bank, and he can’t help but wonder how long she’s been messaging her friends on the contraption.  He finds himself reminiscing about when she was still young and seemed like her world revolved around him.  She had always made Doro so proud to come home.  His reminiscence was interrupted, though, by the entrance of his young son, who was still that little boy fascinated by his father.

“Tatang, you’re home!  Look at my new dinosaur I drew!” Little Teddy was waving around a piece of lined notebook paper with a green monstrosity on it.  “Wow, Teddy, what’s his name?”   “Brontosaurus, he’s the biggest dinosaur there is, Tatang!  His neck is like a snake and his legs are like trees!” As Teddy stomps around the living room doing his best imitation of a brontosaurus, Doro suddenly hears from the kitchen, “Teddy, let your Tatang in the house.  Let him rest before you attack! And put your toys in your room.  It’s almost time for dinner.” “Yes Nanang,” Teddy answers exuberantly and stomps off with his dinosaurs in hand. 

Doro exhales loudly and kicks off his shoes at the door, walking over and picking up a plastic chair from in front of the dining table.  He carries it into the entrance of the kitchen, places it out of the way, and kisses his wife on the cheek while she finishes the evening meal.  “Good evening, amor, what are you making?” He sits down in the chair to watch her and she answers, “Pinakbet, your favorite.” She pauses, smiles, and says, “without bagoong, just as you prefer.  Sometimes I wonder if you’re really Filipino” Bea adds with a sly smirk.  “Ay sus, woman, you know I’m allergic; but what is the occasion? You haven’t made pinakbet since my birthday.” “Well, Doro, I have news.  It appears like we’ll need to finish the expansion on the house sooner than we had originally planned.  We’re going to have another child.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The waves

I watched the waves
pummel the shoreline
endlessly
a pull and tug with the moon
as the sun
lowered in the sky

The water glistened like gold
shimmering in the setting simmer
seeming solemn at a great distance while
thundering against the rocky shore
with frenetic determination

The rocks held sway in the battle
holding sand in place
but they were weather beaten
bruised
thin wisps of matter
holding onto a promise of tomorrow

I watched the waves
as one such precipice
singular in its layer of lava
a breath's thickness
was broken by the battering
ram of inevitability
surrendering in a tumble
into the water insatiable
its claim of clay and clattering
collecting above the surface
like a landed lord
gathering payment from his vassals

The sand
the rocks
the calcified remnants of
oxygen-wielding monsters
may succumb
into the depths or
erode into ash
but the water will remain

Hard Knocks

A man sits disheveledly on the sidewalk, back pressed up against the hard plastic of the bench bolted to the concrete.  He stares angrily at his feet, cursing the slippers that have abandoned them.  His toes are gnarled and his soles whitened with callouses earned step by step as he wandered the city streets, shuffling between sky-kissed monoliths, in search for a quiet corner of rest.

His eyes are unfocused and dry from lack of moisture; he can’t remember why.  If he could recollect, he would ponder on the last time he had encountered clean water, the last time he could remember eating food that didn’t come from the trash pit of a restaurant littered with pale-skinned and shiny tourists.

He looks down at the sidewalk again, barely making out the line of a sandal, dark against the light-colored cement.  Suddenly overcome with a despairing anger, he picks up the first object his hands find and begins to beat the shoe mercilessly.  If he could construct a reasoning within a public court of appeal, he might claim that exhaustion drove him to a kind of madness to lash out at the object whose absence had caused him so much pain and grief.  He might claim the shoe was society and had abandoned him to live in the grime and oil of society’s modern runoff. 

But he could not explain his motions, only continually attack the object within his sight, within his control, within his cathartic reach for release.  The sound of the beating echoed off the glass and metal giants standing quietly in reproach, ignorant of their inner complicity.

following the soap

I wash my mouth with soap
like my Daddy always told me
followed by a swig of whiskey
to get the sin back in again
the compromises of
a recovering Catholic.

nuance

she expresses emotions

in shades of white

waiting

for someone to see the colors

so she can take them home

keep them in her heart

until it wanes weary

at last

ceasing its incessant beating

Justified

More and more
butterfly corpses litter the sidewalk
choking on the absence of oxygen
falling to their doom
beauty in motion
almost absurd in its sudden stillness

A familiar refrain
on the failures of man to give wing
to potentialities
slumbering in the poorest of people
as measured in caricature
rather than character

We are Cain and Abel
amnesiac in our inability
to recognise our own brothers
while we somnambulize
through our ragged breaths
wheezing against the fumes
that keep us drugged and dreaming

We murder with pen and sword
drawing arbitrary lines in the sand
to maintain the proper colour of things
in the properest of places
and call it justified

Lost in tomorrows

anchorless by shores
foreign, without harbor, just
growing lighthouses

seas swell with hunger
jutting rocks like jagged teeth
gape for sustenance

time, but a construct,
becomes fleshy, a wet sponge
seeking to be squeezed