wings.

And listening to music, I preen my feathers and smell the breeze.
It’s time to take wing again, a little older again and where I am is not changing.
I’ll fly at dusk, as the vermilion slowly becomes muted by the coming night.

For the time being I’ll look around a little more, tasting and speaking.
It has been a comfortable nest, and I guess a bit of nostalgia will settle after I fly.
hold some thoughts to keep me warm in my evening flight.

And shake sleep off, I havent been up there for years,
I foretold some loss of innocence, and it has come to pass.
the times I mistook it for growing old, when it was innocence fading.

For now I'll listen and lipsync with some of my old songs and wait;
wait for the passing of days as the rains have come again.
couldn't have wished for a better time. I can feel the wind again.

soundtrip.

This is listening to songs again for the reason that some parts of it are just like some parts of you right there unraveling. And listening is like hearing stories about yourself. That are true. A rehash of harsh romantic truths and sometimes a helping of your own brutal honesty.

Then listening (sometimes) takes you back more than a few thousand hours ago, and going back, you kind of settle down, like being home again when you are thirty years old; and knowing that you will never be home again. Never.

Just a small sliver of that feeling in the space of a few minutes; then you can feel yourself breathe again.

Then the next song comes in and the world changes…

sporadic again.

GE.

To be so cold that I could freeze your hand off if you held it in your
painful exquisite fingers. Even with the knowledge that chances are, my
hand will die warmly instead when our fingers touch.

-o0o-

Nightglow again.

And everything looks freakish enough for me to want to fetal curl and wish I was back in Naga but this is everyday, every night and every breathing second that I happen to be here. And you get used to it after some time, but in the same way that you'd get used to, say, having someone thwack your head every minute or so. Which you don't get used to it at all.

And homesick suddenly becomes the new painful word.

summer dummer thoughts.

cruel world.

just said hello again. I have no plans of saying goodbye.
because I have a lovely daughter and they still play the blues
somewhere. and I miss my wife.

a good evening, my dearie, when I am up working at night and I go to
sleep in the morning when everything else melts along with me in the
summer heat. lava lamp my ass.

the world is not cruel after all, the people are.

-o0o-

so, if this were some other thing.

Like if things were a little colder and things were a little farther away and things were a little faded to see anymore, and if things seemed like they were not there anymore, and if all familiar things seem a little smaller and if things were a little desperate and if things were so changed they were not the same anymore and if things were so harder than ever before and if things were numbing you down to ice and if things just shouldn't happen and if all these things were getting more serious than yesterday.

Would you still call it your life.

Or some other thing.

tangerine tofu.

I remember a morning, still dark, I burned my tongue on hot tofu, and tasted sweetness at the same time. Not a contrast, but pain and sweetness seem to be strange bedfellows.

So, this is Manila in another way. and being alone.

And yes, don’t forget the rain.

You know, you still pull my strings however far. I should wash my whatifs with the purple rain that would be falling this afternoon.

-o0o-

vertigo and tunnel vision.

I mean right now, and there’s this tic in my lower right eyelid. and perhaps hunger plays a large part, but the food I am looking for is miles away.

Like everything is miles away.

Or kilometers, or whatever way you want to measure it.

poop.

I think I am trying not to write because too much of myself will bleed over into these letters, and I still cannot stem the flow, and trying to get my mind off it all the time, but the pain still kicks in some time or the other.

looking out a tall building before sunrise and before sleep.

The cranes are still dead, looking very much like skeletons if handguns had them. And the vermillion sunrise has come and gone in minutes, the morning is now at the mercy of the blues and greys; the moments before the unfettered sun comes.

We have silence for the moment, and coldness. This is much better.

I don’t want to watch the city wake up, no innocence or the magnificence when Rain does.
By the time I have to go home, the city would have woken up and will meet me with the hunger and the veiled desperation. The cool pastels are retreating now, the sun has shed her clothes. Whites and yellows. Radiance. Even the clouds scatter. I can only hope to dream in her fever and harsh rays. Then my dreams go translucent, and eventually transparent enough that my own sweet silent desperations can be seen, cooking in her heat.

Coldness is an eternity of reminisces away.