Signal Theory

I
To trudge home, the long night –

Ah, there’s the cat anyway, fighting her own phantoms
while you, calling out from across space-time
reverberating philosophies from blurred photocopies and do-it-yourself encyclopedias.
Shatter the silence with obscure riffs and refrains,
drain the bottles, smoke the cartons,
close the bathroom door and set yourself on fire.


II
Cognitive mapping is a delicate task.
You stumble and you scream, and there are
thousands of lines of code scrolling in front of you: that is the Future.
That is also the ghost of a chance. Your temporal doppelgänger is nothing but

a simulacrum. You parse your life and you disappear
in a most spectacular flash of blinding light,
its spectrum slashed into chapters,
all its properties coalescing into an incoherent piece of a vague remembrance.
Anything and everything is summed up by a memorial service,
or a body consumed by flames. And you can ask and ask
questions that will never be answered in your lifetime. Asking is a step towards
the infinite, but it is also a foray into the realm of insanity –
a horrifying schematic

of schisms and appropriations, of differences between
sentience and animation. Suspend your judgment,
everything will be as it was. Behold! the cosmos –
and your last, greatest chance to be something infinitely greater than yourself.


Interlude
Hear the whistle, come back to bed. No amount of finger pointing is sufficient
to evoke once again a semblance of a life. Come now to the fires

of the future, all the arrows painted on the soil point to it
like glowing embers in an antediluvian Night.


III
The universe will be finite eventually, when it starts contracting unto itself –
all will unfold in reverse, until the crunch that signals
the reboot of the cycle. All is all, but then we’ll all be cosmic dust
strewn into the black vastness of space. All will be meaningless,
all our memories will spin further and further into the Void. This red shift

eventually ends to the black hole of nostalgia, and while
we search for each other in between unimaginable parsecs of Space,

all is still. The stars are calling out from across the reach, but in time,
memory turns into legend, then legend turns into myth, and soon
even myth itself cannot escape the clutches of Forgetting.


IV
What of the Rogue? While the Other is cloaked in the comfort of its own,
the shadows of a thousand drunken nights resound. Many have come,
but many have left you changed but still solitary in the spectacle of fleeting laughter.
Another epiphany! And yet the realization is hollow, and it all comes back to the conclusion that in the end, we are all alone –
fighting the phantoms we have created, drowning in the Poison of our consolation.
Go home, the long walk ahead is nothing compared to the wall of silence waiting in the familiar safety of domesticity.


*First draft. Rough. To be revised in the coming days.

Conversations with my Father #2

I arrive at a quarter past nine, carrying a box of pizza. I find him in the living room, dozing. A B movie was playing on TV. He wakes up.

How was your day?

Same. Want some pizza?

Just a piece. I already ate at the mall.

So you really went to the movies?

It was a science fiction. It’s about predicting a murder before it happens. It’s good.

Heard my officemates talking about it. Wait, I’ll cut you a slice.

I stand up and head to the kitchen, taking two plates and some utensils. I place them on the center table and serve a slice each for both of us. He finishes his in three bites and heads for the fridge.

Water?

Yes, please.

He takes a pitcher and slams the refrigerator door shut. He hands me a glass and sets the pitcher down on the mantel.

I’m going to bed.

Good night.

I turn my eyes to the TV. Moments later, I hear Sinatra drifting softly.

Conversations with my Father #1

I watch my father light up a Dunhill, content in the knowledge that he’s home. He motions for me to smoke too, and I decline, pointing to my toast. He shrugs and replaces the cigarette box in his shirt pocket. Twenty death sticks minus one.

The shirt, I notice, has a map of the London tube printed on it. The hem has telltale creases on it, despite it being eight in the morning. We are both freshly showered and ready for work, except he doesn’t have one. He is on vacation.

Your shirt isn’t properly ironed. Want me to fix it?

I’m fine. Just go on. I’m not going anywhere anyway, except maybe to the mall later this afternoon. There’s a new Tom Cruise thriller I’d like to watch. Want to join me? It’s Spielberg.

Thanks, but I have to put in extra hours. The launch is next week and we’re still not done fixing the bugs on the beta release.

Okay. He stubs the cigarette in the ashtray and carries it to the living room. Moments later I hear the BBC newscaster report a bomb scare in Southampton.

Fin de Siecle Fascism

In Tlön they teach, there is no Time: the present cannot be defined, the future mere present hope, the past present memory – echoes of Borges while walking down sleepless roads, reciting the Kaddish while waiting for the lampposts to go out. Oh what beatnik dreams lie beyond, orgiastic pleasures of the bohème?

Checklist before leaving:

1. Bellbottoms
2. Led Zeppelin
3. Bomba films
4. Make love not war
5. Mosquito press; then
6. PD 1081.

Existential musings thrown out the window, polishing scavenged bullets from a recent T.O. What to make of such boorish awakening? Such disparate lives, such interesting times, that three decades past.

Now, reports say she didn’t sleep that night, talking to her generals. No rest for the wicked, the adage goes. What wisps of subversion, what surges of dissent, what avenues of protest, can describe these state of emergencies?

nowritingnosmokingnomarchingnodrinkingnofucking
noprayingnopaintingnorallyingnocounting
nodancingnoplayingnospeaking
nosleepingnomoving
nobreathing

Come reign in this ghost town. This is no ragnarok; just plain annihilation. What cunning. In Tlön they teach, there is no Time. Here, fascism is referred to differently every time – echoes of Hitler while invoking Rizal, surveying the picketlines for the next target. Oh what tactical offensives lie beyond, legal fronts of the revolution?

Reckoning

Love, we used to say, does not exist. There are only a thousand fleeting gestures aimed to stave off the loneliness. Sometimes when we lie in bed, we tell each other tall tales of doppelgangers, spontaneous combustion, lost treasures and love at first sight. Skeptics we are, we liked to create euphemisms out of things – we do not make

love, we just dance. Instead of cock and cunt, you tell me that the shoulder is the most beautiful part of human anatomy – playing with the words, collarbone, scapula, shoulder blades. The silence amplifies your voice like stones clacking underwater. You tell me make believe stories of home, Sunday movies, PTA meetings and holiday feasts – somewhat idyllic, absolutely bland and artificial. I brood in silence, wondering when events became memories, when remembering turned into nostalgia, when angst became full-blown hatred. I remember when we were fifteen, drunk in the stupor of adolescence. The world was our oyster, and the horrors of settling were hidden by the leavetakings of March, the evanescence of nights, our own pomposity. True, we were angry at ourselves, at each other, at our parents, at the world, and we believed that all was failed because of the blind insanity of

love. Twenty-seven years is a lifetime, and sometimes I wonder when our buckets of bitterness will be emptied. Some nights I am tempted to say come here, halika rito, but the stubborn knowledge of our sacred pact swim in the darkness of your irises and I clam up every time. We have lived a generation’s worth of hatred, nestling in each other’s fleeting allure, finding consolation in cheap sexual satisfaction. When did all this begin? I wonder what will happen on our deathbeds. Will there be the final agony of regret as the decades reckon our debts? Will despair be haunting our last few breaths? But right now, in the little death triggered by the throes of a joyless orgasm, I fool myself that your arm resting on my chest can be indeed, a gesture of forgiveness.

Moving Pictures #1

Moving Pictures #1

I. Reel



EXT: DAY

I walk to my favorite stoplight three blocks from home and watch the colors change. I put on my sunglasses and squint against the summer heat, feeling the sweat trickle from my nape and dry against the cotton

shirt I bought for twenty bucks in a garage sale from across the street. A waitress out for a cigarette break passes me by and I check out her ass as I reach into my breast pocket to light up my own cancer stick but I didn’t have a lighter. She gives me the eye and offers her Marlboro Lights

VO

I mumble a thank you and take a puff,

feeling the first surge of nicotine rush into my brain. Such pleasure sometimes makes me forget my name and I give her the first one that came to mind. She smiles and offers her hand, accidentally blowing

CU

smoke right at my face. She doesn’t notice and I let it pass.

Notes on Translation

A geometric exercise: Draw a triangle of any form – whether it be the symmetric beauty of an equilateral, the laidback foundation of a right or the pubic suggestion of an inverted isosceles

It. Doesn’t. Matter. What does is this: On the same plane

(but what good are triangles in simple Euclidian geometry if they are not coplanar anyway?)

on the same plane place a single point, call it Point Q, anywhere outside the triangle (the Beauty, the LazyOne or the Vagina, take your pick). Draw three lines from Q, each line passing through one of the triangle’s three points. Where these lines stop, which could be anywhere at your convenience, are three new points. Now

draw another triangle using these points. The lines can stop anywhere, but a disclaimer: As x approaches infinity, the value of the point is inversely proportional to the accuracy of the projection. Decide wisely. Most often, the new triangle looks nothing like the first one. Sometimes

it becomes stout, sometimes wide, sometimes irregular. It depends on where you decide to stop each line. Follow too closely and there is no new triangle at all, only a clone of the first one. This is not a projection at all – this is plagiarism. Beauty became Pretty, LazyOne turned into a Sloth, the Vagina suited the conversion into Pussy well enough not to make a difference. Veer away too far, swim out into the vast reaches of infinity and you might get lost. Two points lying on page 12, the other one outside the margins of page 13. You have created Horror, Work and Cock from entirely different things. This is not poetic licence –

this is utter lunacy.

Piedra Negra Sobre Una Piedra Blanca

Lilisanin ko ang mundo sa Paris, sa gitna ng unos,
sa isang araw na nakatatak na sa aking balintataw
Papanaw ako sa Paris, ngunit hindi ko ito tatakasan
Marahil isang Huwebes, tulad ngayon, sa taglagas.

Marahil nga Huwebes, sapagkat ngayon, Huwebes
Habang sinusulat ko ang mga katagang ito, isinasabalikat ko ang kasamaan. Tumalikod ako at natagpuan ang aking sariling nilalakbay mag-isa ang mga daan ng kalungkutan.

Yumao na si César Vallejo. Pinalo siya ng lahat
Datapwat wala siyang kasalanan sa mga ito
Hinataw siya ng patpat at hinagupit siya ng latigo.
Ang mga testigo: ang mga Huwebes, ang mga humerus na buto, ang lunggati, ang ulan, ang mga daan...


Black Stone on Top of a White Stone
César Vallejo (translated from Spanish by Thomas Merton)

I shall die in Paris, in a rainstorm,
On a day I already remember.
I shall die in Paris-- it does not bother me--
Doubtless on a Thursday, like today, in autumn.

It shall be a Thursday, because today, Thursday
As I put down these lines, I have set my shoulders
To the evil. Never like today have I turned,
And headed my whole journey to the ways where I am alone.

César Vallejo is dead. They struck him,
All of them, though he did nothing to them,
They hit him hard with a stick and hard also
With the end of a rope. Witnesses are: the Thursdays,
The shoulder bones, the loneliness, the rain, and the roads...

Nostos

Dating may puno ng mansanas sa bakuran, may apatnapung taon na ang nakakaraan –
sa likod, tanging talahiban.
Nagliliparan ang mga alipato
katalik ang basang damo.
Huling araw ng Abril,
dumungaw ako sa bintanang iyon.
Namumulaklak ang tagsibol
sa bakuran ng kapitbahay.
Ilang beses nga ba
namulaklak ang puno sa araw ng aking pagsilang,
sa eksaktong araw, hindi kahapon, hindi kinabukasan?
Hinahalinhinan ang absoluto
para sa paglipas,
sa pagsibol.
Nagpapalit ang imahe para sa walang kapagurang lupa. Ano nga ba ang nalalaman ko ukol sa lunan na ito, ang ilang dekadang pagggampan ng puno na ngayo’y hinalinhinan na ng bonsai, mga tinig na umaalingawngaw mula sa mga plasa at kabukiran.
Humahalimuyak ang amoy ng bagong tabas na damo.
Sa mga kataga ng baliw na makata,
nasipat natin ang mundo, sa kamusmusan.
Ang lahat ng iba pa ay tanging mga alaala.

Nostos
Louise Glück

There was an apple tree in the yard --
this would have been
forty years ago -- behind,
only meadows. Drifts
off crocus in the damp grass.
I stood at that window:
late April. Spring
flowers in the neighbor's yard.
How many times, really, did the tree
flower on my birthday,
the exact day, not
before, not after? Substitution
of the immutable
for the shifting, the evolving.
Substitution of the image
for relentless earth. What
do I know of this place,
the role of the tree for decades
taken by a bonsai, voices
rising from the tennis courts --
Fields. Smell of the tall grass, new cut.
As one expects of a lyric poet.
We look at the world once, in childhood.
The rest is memory.

Lights and Shadows

Sometimes, lights and shadows coalesce in such a way that the world is sheathed with gray. In an instant, it seems like all colors disappear and nothing is left but the sheer wonder things stripped bare. It’s sad, but it’s also beautiful. Then your eyes adjust and color suddenly explodes. The wallflower blue blends with the green naturalness of the earth, sometimes flecked with bold hues of red and obscene shades of yellow and orange. It’s like being drugged really, seeing colors like that.

I’ve always associated the color gray with Mondays, Januarys, birthdays, beginning of semesters, the first day in another rented house before the unpacking starts, the frontispiece of a supposedly boring novel, the opening riffs of a song I hear for the first time, even the moment at the airport when I hear the plane which I will be boarding approach, sounding like a sonic boom.

Then it starts to taxi in the runway and a switch will suddenly flick inside my brain and the moment is over. Beginnings are scary. It’s like peering inside a particularly dark tunnel where, like a black hole, even light cannot permeate. When I look at the calendar as January rolls around, it’s like February and the ten other months stare back at me like Nietzsche’s abyss. Then, as one by one I turn the pages of my weekly planner to schedule a deadline or a meeting or an exam, the colors explode, but they do it slowly and you can’t even feel the months passing. I can only look at it in retrospect, maybe next January. I think that is the only redeeming factor of that first month – the chance to look back with a different perspective. It’s like going to the cinema alone and watching a particularly long epic with bad editing. Sometimes I can’t make sense of it but then at least I killed time. Not that I’m lonely and have nothing to do, but it’s rather fascinating how things grow stranger and stranger and the more it does, the more interested I am in knowing how things would turn out. Plus ça chose changer, plus ça même chose. The more things change, the more they remain the same. That French adage vindicates me of the guilty feelings I get whenever I think about how the years changed me. The paradox is fascinating.

Yet sometimes I can’t bear looking at people’s eyes because I am afraid of the sadness I might see there. Their sadness hurts me, and oftentimes I feel the urge to stop a stranger and say that everything is going to be all right. Except that it’s not. It’s another guilty feeling I harbor, because the sadness is what makes people beautiful.