Ephemera

We called her Aling Paz. Aling Pacita, not Aling Paz, my childhood friend's mother corrects. She wore her long hair in a bun and ran a sari-sari store near our house for as long as I can remember. With her lived Mang Mando, a man her age whom some people referred to as her brother, some as her lover. He manned the store on days when Aling Paz was away to buy supplies. Pagbilan, we would call. Ano yon? He would respond, annoyed. We would point to the item. This? He would ask. No. This? He would ask again.  Aling Paz cooked well. Lumpiang shanghai, palabok, spaghetti, champorado, ginataan—snacks we usually bought on Sunday afternoons. These dishes weren't originally for sale, though. She cooked them for car-owning people who visited on Thursdays and Sundays, for whom she also closed the store until their biweekly exercise of a religion with a long name was over.  There were years when Aling Paz owned a credit list of a mother and her daughter's subsistence—shampoo

When you're trying to catch up with work but the blues catch up with you so you start questioning your life choices, like why you'd rather be a writer who writes Hi, Name. I was illegally arrested and am detained now here at Concepcion Police Station in Tarlac with Name, Name, and many other artist-peasant advocates. We hope that you could extend any kinds of support and at least call for our immediate release via your platforms and networks (local / international) using the hashtag #ReleaseTinang83. For further context you may want to read this post (link) than be one who finds comfort in the sidelines of spectatorship: tHe WoRk oF thE wRiTeR is tO wRitE , peers out the window, draws rich material from the world.

Not just because you graduated from a poetry clinic, co-edited a poetry anthology, was asked to write poetry should you write one is what I should tell myself whenever I'm dying to write one. There is so much to be done other than decide which words would appear and disappear at the whim of this ever-shifting form. To read and write sophisticated articulation is a luxury as being able to afford to sit down and think in a cafe amidst the bustling city is a luxury. To be writing this is class conformity, a fulfillment of expectations, an ultimate act of envy with those who could write like this without question, without remorse.

No, cities aren't invisible as Calvino would have them. Mine very much asserts  itself into passivity and deceptive tokens of progress.  Parks and buildings and lights render its townsfolk wide-eyed and approving even at the expense  of their speech. They don't worry. They have nothing to say.  Yours annoy differently but you love it anyway. You love its narrow streets reeking of decay, its people bumping into each other shoulder to shoulder, its loud speakers sitting at entrances of cheap malls, its barkers and passengers running for cutting-trip jeeps.  Your voice seizes me whenever I turn around that exact  corner where you narrated your nameless walks across these sad streets going nowhere in particular. You identify with these people that go by many names: the poor, the working class, the wretched of the earth.  One day I will run away  from these cities and will be addressed in a different name, pretend not to have known anyone from here. Where my birth place is? I forgot

New Year jokes never get old. Promise at 11:59; deny at 12:01. That is so last year. At least there's been a revolution in which we come back to where we were 365 days ago. Are we the only ones partying? Time insists itself, a ticking bomb that never explodes like it did back in the Big Bang. We are willing captives from the wrist to the wall to the desk where we always do the thinking: Is it a construct? No, it's an itch. The itch to go to the clocksmith, to look for working AA batteries at what-time-is-it in the morning, to rip that calendar leaf they like to call as the past. I admire those who can sum things up as the past. Does time conquer us? Do we conquer it? Abandoned alarm clocks thrown out the window are always glad to answer.

They patronize you, ask you for a review of their carelessly written books. They ask you to write things they can but don’t want to write. They send you questions to answer for their graduate studies, even ones beyond your capacity to fabricate. They email you, say they are agents of such-and-such company, would happily "hop on the phone" to discuss the matter you’ve readily deleted. They are people you barely know, strangers who owe you cash they don't have plans of paying back. They disappear for good until they come back as some starving artist, bearded or bald, who does the same thing, the same way or another, like wrapping their arm around your neck until you gasp for air in the middle of an art fair. They appear in quaint bookshops, hand you a book whose title you would later realize as a sexual insinuation, only after you've naively tried to recreate with them that film you so loved. They sit at the next table reading, white-haired, would approach and befriend