May 29, 2016

Narebisang blurb para sa koleksyong alikabok at takot

Sa wakas at salamat namang may foliong ganito mula sa UPLB Writers’ Club. Bilang ganti, handog ko sa kanila ito ring mga linyang handog nila sa atin:
Ilalapag ni TAO ang dalawang kahon ng robot na hiwa-hiwalay na ang katawan. Pwede ko silang maging kaibigan, alaga, o gawing uwak ng mga taong ayaw ko, nakakulong sa mapanghusgang aparador at pinagkaitan ng isa na naming hapunan (kunyari).
Katulad rin ng babaeng luhaan ang musmos na kalong niya: pati ang isang tasa, at skyflakes na nakasara pa.
“It’s playtime, Princess,” pakpak ay mababago ng isang lubid na nakatali dito; yung walang masyadong balahibo.

May 24, 2016

E—

Okay. It won't happen again. You have my word.

Also, if this is the case, kindly remind your students next semester that they are not to disturb other teachers for any reason.

May 22, 2016

Hard Times × The Emperor of Ice-Cream

Trust me. The world is run on a shoestring.
They have no time to return the calls in hell

The first sentence asks for credence and negates credibility. The mention of “calls” and “hell” casts the speaker as a possible seducer/tempter. The second line also adjusts the image of the “world is run on a shoestring” from shoe to phone, and for me anyway: a phone abandoned, hanging on a wire from its booth.

*

Played a hunch that a sort of association could be made between this and a poem by Stevens. Below are the lines that seem able to participate in such a give and take—

Trust me. The world is run on a shoestring.
They have no time to return the calls in hell

The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.

And pay dearly for those wasted minutes. Somewhere
In the future it will filter down through all the proceedings

As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month’s newspapers.

Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
Succinctly they will tell you what we've all known for years:

That the power of this climate is only to conserve itself.
Let be be finale of seem.

Whatever twists around it is decoration and can never
Be looked at as something isolated, apart. Get it? And

On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.

He flashed a mouthful of aluminum teeth there in the darkness
To tell however it gets down, that it does, at last.

Will have to dispel the notion of being like all the others.
To show how cold she is, and dumb.

In time, it gets to stand with the wind, but by then the night is closed off.
Let the lamp affix its beam.

10th line of “Here Everything is Still Floating”

Occupying liminal spaces among the motifs here: the steps, the shower, maybe the bar too, and the asylum (or the mind of the person committed).

*

Ashbery came to write “Lining of fabricating living from the instantaneous” then found it beyond revision.

*

What a decisive turn from “making a living”. Could it be that “lining” produces a threshold, as in to draw a line in the sand? Except it seems as intimate as a seam or piping in the cloth, effectively keeping a body from another body. As in Genesis.

An anti-intimacy.

*

If we take “lining” as a verb, then the line reflexively calls out poetry for all its attempts to make a unified sense from individual moments. This could be seen as a central duty of literature, to bring order to chaos, a preparation of the world for human agency. As in dressing up. As in buttons, before Stein saw to them.

Then come and consider this a violation, the moments plucked from their own magic and woven into “a life”, a “history”, brought in service of a whole. The whole we find either unaware or in denial of its own arbitrariness, its fabrication.