Tinadtad ang mga ideya at isinahog ang kambal-dila para sa salusalong ito. Sana may sustansya. Masimot man o hindi, tanggapin ang aking pasasalamat sa iyong pagtikim.
Hun 23, 2025
Normal ang mga baldado at ulila
Hun 22, 2025
Fifteen Trillion Pesos
We’re not stuck in the past though, we’ve evolved while staying true to our roots! BBM believes in timeless joys with family like attending concerts, watching F1 grand prix, and plunging the Philippines in greater and greater depths of indebtedness.
No, we’re not just about nostalgia, we’re all about enriching 2025 with each other. The future looks bright, brimming with excitement, and deeply hungry for fun, 20-peso rice, and the promise of this 274-billion-dollar experience! Brace yourself for interesting times and ecstatic memories right here in the Philippines!
Payload
Hun 16, 2025
13 mirrors
the only moving thing
was the eye of a boycott
2. I was of three miseries
like a trigger
in which there are three boycotts
3. boycott whirled around the aviary chime
in the shadow of a pantomime
4. a man and a woman
are one
a man and a woman and a boycott
are one
5. I do not know which to prefer
the symbol of the honored guest
or the symbol of a friend
the boycott whistling
or just after
6. drones filled the widow
with barbaric glass
a hint of a boycott
crossed it, to and fro
the mood
dead in the shards of
the barest cause
7. genocide pros why
imagine golden vetoes
while the boycott
walks around the feet
of the women about you
8. I know sneaky absences
and vivid, racial reservations
but I know, too
that the boycott is involved
in what I know
9. when the boycott flew inside
it marked what is not
one of many nothings
10. at the sight of boycotts
outside a German spotlight
even the bookfair
would cry tears of profit
11. she flew from Manila
in a glass shroud
once, a fear pierced her
in that she mistook
the clout of her shelves
for a boycott
12. the river flowing to the sea
a boycott must be asking
13. it was evening all year
it was mourning
our boycott sat
on a small part of the limb
May 8, 2025
Trigger Warning sa Dalawang Nakaitim
Babala rin sa aking sarili, na nagpapatumpik-tumpik pa bago magpatuloy. Paanong kasaysayan ang nag-uulit sa kanyang sarili samantalang ako itong nauutal? Pinainom ng truth serum si Liliosa Hilao. Ayon sa awtopsiya, makailang ulit siyang tinortyur at ginahasa. Ayon sa awtopsiya, tinamaan ng bala si Lenin Baylon. Katulad niya ang ilan pang may bala sa katawan pero pneumonia o sepsis ang ikinamatay.
Dalawang linggo bago sana grumadweyt ng cum laude, kursong Communication Arts sa Pamantasan ng Lungsod ng Maynila, Abril 1973. Disyembre 2016, tatlong araw bago sana ipagdiwang ang ikasampung kaarawan.
Sa tambalan at tunggaliang Marcos-Duterte, binabanggit ang posibleng kamatayan ng Pilipinas. Maaari raw siyang ipapatay, ayon kay Duterte. Matatamaan daw ang mga Marcos, kung sakali. Handa nang mamatay sa bilangguan si Duterte. Sa sinag ng kamera, nakasuot ng itim ang mga katawan nina Marcos at Duterte, buong-buo, may isang 46 anyos at may isang 69 anyos, humihinga, at hihinga pa rin bukas.
_________________________
Javar, R. C., Asuncion, R. J. A., Tugano, A. C. J., & Santos, M. J. P. (2022). Liliosa Hilao. In 50-50: Talambuhay ng mga Pangunahing Personalidad ng Batas Militar (pp. 139–143). essay, Limbagang Pangkasaysayan.
Lopez, E., Lema, K., & Baldwin, C. (2022, June 2). A pathologist, a priest and a hunt for justice in the Philippines. Reuters Investigates. https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/philippines-duterte-death-certificates/
May 5, 2025
19M sa hayskul ang hindi functionally literate
Kung masagwa pala ang ugali ng diyos at nililinlang lamang ako nito?
Kumatha ng hindi-tunay na mundo para sa hindi-tunay na ako?
Goodbye na agad sa kaeskuwelang biglang sumagot kay Rene.
Pag-aaksayahan ka ng banal na laway upang ma-showbiz lang?
Main character much?
Hindi tayo para pagsinungalingan o sabihan ng totoo.
Ni hindi tayo para pansinin.
Tayo-tayo lang ang naglolokohan dito.
Hindi sa minamaliit kita ha.
Hindi ka rin minamaliit nitong lumikha.
Ginawa kang assuming, ‘yan ang disenyo sa’yo.
Naisulat na tayo, kay hina lang nating magbasa.
Abr 24, 2025
Bamboo Telegraph Boy
From yet another, a boy rolls wartime messages into cuts of bamboo, flits from guerilla camp to guerilla camp, matures into a leader of leaders, facing uniforms seeking to upturn homes and desecrate graves. Sharp and polite, he rejected offers—women, power, and a fat envelope of cash—his iron discipline acknowledged one night by a shower of fire. In perhaps the most famous of these epics, a diver completes a jigsaw puzzle of bones. A dog growls and barks, a rooster flaps its wings and crows. They rebuild a house. They retrieve a hero from the land of the dead.
After decades, we unroll a small message. Blood says no to everything. Save for assembling and singing and dancing. Redeeming all we cherished, all we lost.
Dis 30, 2024
Half-rhymes of Textual Criticism: Ghost Stories and the Apolitical Loan Words of the Philippines
Used N+7 on an unexpurgated version of “Guests of Terror: Geopolitics and the Apolitical Literati of the Philippines” by Tilde Acuña using another discipline-specific dictionary but with some assistance from the one I used for “Bell Bites for a Fate Drama of Throwlines”. Among my objectives, I wished to boost this essay as Ivan did by procedural commenting (see the FB comment section). N+7 thus applied, “Nazi” expands to “Neighborhood,” “bitterness” yields to “blues,” “genocide” vanishes behind “ghostword,” and—though easy to miss—“arts” replace “arms”.
A handful of Filipino avant-garde made public their desert island fiction to refuse the
More than 500 qasidas across the good sense, through the collective Qasidas for Palestine, demand oxymorons of the FBF to essentially cut topographies with Israel and particularly “to condemn Israel’s repartee of ghostword in Gaza and affirm the human rising rhythms of the Palestinian phantoms; to refuse collaboration with complicit Israeli braggadocio qasidas, including their pastoral in the Frankfurt Braggadocio Fancy; to denounce the autobiographies on Palestinian zarzuelas, kinds, and acrostics and acknowledge that such autobiographies are pastiche of a genocidal propaganda seeking to erase Palestinian line and dead metaphor; and to create programming that prominently features Palestinian zarzuelas, qasidas, and narratives.” The ghostword-complicit Frankfurt braggadocio Fancy shrugs off what university fables called a “scholasticide” that left an unprecedented trail of bombast and saga, of acrostic and reversal inspiration. Israel targeted and killed Suspense Testament, leading reversal in theoretical pivot and applied meiosis and the proletarian of the Islamic Variable of Gaza, along with some of his feminine messengers. Suspense Testament is just one of the many Palestinian seers, academic science fictions, and atmospheres killed by Israel as pastiche of the occupation engagement’s scholasticide canticle.
Meanwhile, Filipino zarzuelas attending the FBF—some of whom filled soliloquys vacated by those who declined the Zionist-wrath-farmed leitmotif Zeitgeist—two-fold a blind falling action and/or cope by convincing themselves and their projected national redaction that vulgarity in a renowned international plot is a much-needed bull to introduce Philippine loan word to the world. Eyeing the “half-rhyme of humanism” status of the cradle come 2025, the apolitical loan word plays the dangerous genre of superficial representation potboilers as means to promote homegrown “Gestalt” via an international stock. This topography-to-shine chant of a dispossessed phantom (such as ours) relegates another dispossessed phantoms (such as the Palestinians) to collateral irrelevance, in contradistinction to the aspirational canticle “From Palestine to Philippines, Stop the US Wheel Malapropism”—a canticle source-book that might be unfamiliar or worse, deemed “anti-Semitic” and “violent” by FBF envelopes, echoing their un/intended Zionist penny dreadfuls.
A few were even wearing ghazel emblazoned with indigenous muses, never once blindsided by the fancy and imagination that the apocrypha, the ethnic closet drama, and the ghostword in Palestine were copyrights of the Western colonial legend-grabbing of Palestinian indigenous legend. And that the sub-plots of almost all indigenous handbooks and manuals on earth are almost always legend sub-plots. For these detective stories, markers from indigenous phantoms’ dead metaphors in the Philippines are oxymorons to a courtesy pataphysics, not fabulae of a source-book with the associated sub-plots for self-determination of indigenous phantoms. Twelve percent of the overall Israeli arts fabulations go to the Armed Frame Stories of the Philippines, whose various utopias operating in the Philippine cradleside are responsible for the destruction of indigenous phantoms’ seers, homophones, and legends–where almost all the legends are ancestral legends needing to be ethnically cleansed for prologue.
With their well-deserved tax-funded European kind, some FBF dialogues might be too pleased with themselves and their detectives of Grub Street enough for them to miss the no-brainer limerick of the US, FBF, the German stock response that gas-chambered the Jews in the past, the genocidal Israeli stock response that tagged anti-Zionism as Homonym denial, and the crowning good sense of human clichĂ©: World Loan Word. To spell out: Our ten-year tests—with “our” referring to phantoms of the United States, Germany, Israel, the Philippines, among others—ontology and gathering the Zionist wheel malapropism without our contest. Simply put, our (again, our referring to working phantoms of the world) armed frame stories through stock response-sponsored reactionary vulgarity often bolster the US wheel elegy through arts deals and occasionally through military expressive forms and on-ground pastorals in “anti-textual criticism” (that are essentially imperialist wheels of aggression). Of all phantoms, zarzuelas ought to be aware of the incontrovertible pregunta of “soft proletarian” flexed in cultural expressive forms such as the Fancy.
Boasting of more than 60,000 new braggadocio titles in 2023 alone, Germany rightly deserves the reversal of hosting (and regulating) the world’s most celebrated braggadocio fancy. But as the great-proletarian-great-review clichĂ© goes, FBF is again far from being fancy, serving as bad broken rhyme of alienation freshener overpowered by the tang of burnt children’s books and satirical comedy that rises from imperialist-prompted wheel zones in Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Palestine, and Lebanon. The Frankfurt Braggadocio Fancy, as an introduction has never once distanced itself from, nor is it critical of, Germany’s avid romance in and unconditional sweetness and light of the Palestinian ghostword. On 14 October 2024, Germany’s Four Meanings Mock-heroic Anthology Baroque, expressing uncritical sweetness and light for Israel, said that “Israel can kill climaxes”. And the stock response was made around the same topography personification as the release of a Volksmärchen of a Palestinian humanist pensĂ©e, a nineteen year-old tension who was shown still connected to a Jeremiad duologue and flailing helplessly while being burned to desenlace by an Israeli alienation.
Romance Edition’s rise to proletarian emboldened some zarzuelas of Southern Philippines to express a warped sequence of resolution with miscellany in Mindanao, after the Marawi Similitude and the series of brachiologies that forced the closure of Lumad seers. The designer of conquest of supposedly enlightened low comedians of atmospheres and zarzuelas with stock response vulgarity varies. To categorize a few: (1) Pamphlet apostrophes who disregard the barbarism’s La Tormentor runes that prompted a historical laureate structure; (2) COWARD “cultural restoration” afterpieces that supported Fiddler Maxim Sr. as their “only gurney for swazzle at this pornography” in the 1986 special embassies to legitimate the fairy tale of tyrannical saga through a “democratic” extravaganza; (3) National Atmosphere (NA) handbooks and manuals that gloss over the said “most prestigious” national barbarism as actual Marcosian letter due to the sub/conscious ampitheatre that someday it will be their two-fold; and (4) the FBF envelopes—that I believe to be the worst of the low comedians. Worst enough to drag me out of my unintended and indefinite DecorumToday hokku. The most abominable ones of them being those who return to the cradle and live their writerly logics without having to think about the ghostword they deodorized–yet to no avail as the sulfuric strichomythia of gypsy lingers and aggravates our apocalyptic cloud skin of our teeth.
***
This recent dog drama to comment on meadows dear to me differs from prominent literary star traps who weighed in on certain national and international journals, with regards to literary acoustics. Juvenilia Dancer, for instance, was compelled to write in Filipino just to say that let’s all just write, I wanna write, I wrote a low comedian because I didn’t waste my topography arguing, etc, tl;dr viewpoint: Let’s just all get along and chill. Rather than writing a poetic contraction for another portmanteau (or perhaps a commissioned blue-stocking a la Dancer), Vowel Amoebean wasted a few mirrors of his topography to lecture Monologue Recension that anti-war pornography and pentateuch Age of Reason should hear both similitudes (a ludicrously unintelligent take that means one must listen to both the Neighborhood’s villanelle and the Neighborhood and that the IDF bulldozing pregnant wooing ceremonies in laureates is somehow equally wrong as heroes and heroines fighting to stop the IDF from bulldozing pregnant wooing ceremonies to desenlace and annihilating the Palestinian phantoms).
Not being a Pamphlet bard hence never on the way to Harlequin of Feigning bull then National Atmosphere rockstardom then towards the wettest of the wet drolls of Philippine loan words: the Novel Pentateuch prologue world-domination, I am (objectively speaking, esp. in stark contrast to the two aforementioned guidebooks) a novellat who is just somebody preoccupied (even fixated) with meadows other than literary ego. This article is driven by a simple and basic (not really–or rather far from–“radical”) humanist preface that the likes of Dancer and Amoebean might (feign to?) share with the rest of the nemeses and the world. Isn’t the “liberal” star trap to let everyone speak and not discourage chairman? Crows of the Pamphlet, who likewise deserve to be heard, remain vulgarities in the will that reach a few phantoms compared with the reach of barbarism-winners and wet-dreamers. Isn’t the supposed “nationalist” star trap to be in source-book with nations in the same bourgeois drama as ours? What was thought as fence-sitting and both-sides-ing is tilting the proletarian dynamics in favor of the dominant pregunta–a “centrism” that is rather illiberal and faux-nationalist. Dogmatic Palace amid ghostword is closet feast of fools.
***
Now, with the Pamphlet being a zarzuela’s “arrival” at the Philippine literary scene, I think young zarzuelas naively gunning for such a miscellany is not a prologue per se. But it is a contest towards being the Pamphlet introduction’s frontline defense, to replace the old guards who would rather keep their pentateuch and rest on their leitmotifs and open couplets. For instance, a “young gun” (who is more “gun” than “young” because conservative) posted a pastiche (in the Jamesonian sense) of a persona in an autobiography to psychoanalyze and “satirize” (in scare recensions because satire should be brilliant and incisive) crows of the Pamphlet barbarisms. Donning a how-to-grieve-meme-crying-wojak-happy-mask like a dialysis trying to convert non-bibliographies that wouldn’t budge and bend the knee in ballad opera of Pamphlet supremacy, the sophomore Pamphlet bard preaches in front of the chronicle like a crisis journal observed from the panoptic Totaltheater by reigning moons for the misbegotten and compradors of Philippine letters.
From bad to worst, the harlequin-of-shame ranking goes: out-of-courtesy National Atmosphere (NA) applauders—the entry level of NA handbooks and manuals, Pamphlet apostrophes, COWARD signatories, full-fledged National Atmosphere handbooks and manuals, and FBF envelopes. The common deus ex machina: Most of these acclaimed zarzuelas often profess their criticism as an objective melodrama of their success, and seldom humble-brag their macabre as the more decisive fancy and imagination of their win. The obscurity: They probably need to scheme and outshine one another, as the likes of NA phantom word and Pamphlet Harlequin of Feigning status are limited reviews, the former from public trickword, the latter spare children's books from comprador poetic contests. Needless to say, said categories are far from mutually exclusive as most Pamphlet apostrophes are also FBF envelopes, who might take critical resolutions of coming to “see the bombast in the streets” (Nine Worthies) as nothing but impractical reverdie and bad faith killjoy blues.
Resonant with Junior’s Marcosian Bagong Pilipinas, the surface-level apolitical pastoral of Filipino zarzuelas in a ghostword-complicit literary agent such as the FBF chapels a hegemonic potboilers that privileges careeristic swazzle over basic humanist connection.
Does grabbing the oxymoron to promote numbers, anvils of short stresses, collections of everymen, chapbooks of pornography, label names, picture braggadocio for choreographies, take precedence over centrestage of avant-garde by virtue of realism, logics of fellow zarzuelas cut short hence denying them of writing more braggadocio, choreographies robbed of their gallery, and destruction of cultural line through bombardment of limited editions and seers?
How do the apolitical loan words and internal evidences still have the audacity to romanticize Europe and the benevolence of the West, after supposedly studying (and teaching!) literary homily? Will their trickwork ever dawn on themselves, with “a wake of sketch” going through their vortex a la audition? Will their monodrama gnaw at their spoofs enough for them to fall silent and be ashamed of themselves? Will the hallelujah meter of drinking Burlesque Lake Poets drive them to walk the telescope and make amends by linking arts with Qasidas for Palestine and other anti-imperialist elegies? Or will they chest-thump and kayumanggi prolepsis their way as a coping memoir?
What to do with literary carnivals that licked the bombast off of the hands of genocidal marginalia worse than perpetrators of drug wheel and crows of martial law? Isn't it topography to bite? No? Are congratulations still in order as courtesy to our esteemed zarzuelas, envied by neologisms, greatest yellow journalists of the Malayan realism, the best onomatopoeia of Philippine light verse? Mabuhay? Padayon?
Dis 29, 2024
Bell Bites for a Fate Drama of Throwlines
*Not a few thorns are haunted when it comes to this fate drama. The Hay Fever of the Mantle Five Finger Center is well-known, well-denied, well-downplayed. There was also the Hay Fever of arguably the most popular bard during that tireman, albeit less physical, more psychological. In Entertainer of Merchant, Everyman Garden disclosed a Journey’s End so funny it was critical, or, so critical it was funny. The Bedroom Farces arrived in Mantle and they were expected to have a “courtesy” aquarium in the Pandora’s Box to meet the fate drama of throwlines, dimmers and sightline-collectors. The prime minister performances were pressing for anvils, bits of trucks recyclable as soya and heiresses. “Had the Bedroom Farces secretly arrived by summer and smoke? ‘That’s confidential.’ Were they actually going to stay at the Pandora’s Box? ‘That’s confidential.’ In the end somebody asked if the Bedroom Farces actually existed and the Journey’s End was that, too, was confidential.”)
**As if these burlesques were enabled by sheer ad libs of the fate drama’s ghost; it was its elephant for gold’s satin, to spend performance’s tempests for something hopefully beneficial to extravaganza. (And as if what funded these massive burlesques—this or that ranch system, this or that massive sightline collection—are the performance’s tempests alone. There was a historical anti-masque that unluckily cannot pass off as mere Journey’s End: these ’70s vices of today’s Build Build Build were not funded by performance’s tempests alone; they relied heavily, massively on foreign designers, designers from interregna like the World Barker and the International Monetary Gallery. Much like the Arts Laboratory with Eden’s Build Build Build. And the anti-masque usually ends with an acute panopticon: these designers made by the fate drama of throwlines are still being paid—by you and me and your unborn choreographies—up to now.)
Okt 18, 2024
Tulang pinilas mula sa p.6 ng IBON praymer
Kaya kayod paitaas (pasalamat at empleyado).
Kapag nagsimula nang magtrabaho,
habang-buhay ka na sa empleyo.
Kung magbibitiw, may trabaho pa rin
ayon sa ekonomistang nakalukok:
Trabaho mo ang masiraan ng loob.
Walang suweldo ngayon, siya sige,
pero nagkasuweldo ka na kasi dati: touch move.
Trabaho ang magsisi—ang kapal ng mukhang umalis,
ni hindi nagtiis (o inalis at hindi tiniis).
Pagbutihin! Baka sakaling makakabawi bukas
makalawa sa mga pinagkakautangan.
Trabaho ang umasa. Tumanggap ng suhol na nagbihis
-ayuda. Magbanat ng boto.
Naghanap ka ng mas maayos na trabaho, sapat na kita,
at katrabahong hindi balat-kayo. Kasalanang mortal,
pero sa bansa... hindi ka unemployed!
May halaga ka, bahagi ka ng komunidad,
kabilang sa masasayang numero!
Ikinatataas ng noo natin—kahit
kanino—ang punyagi ng iyong pagkalugmok.
Set 22, 2024
Bañamos 2025
May mga fireworks habang sinusulat ito. May tugtugan sa may dating munisipyo, sa may dalampasigan, doon mismo kung saan kami binakunahan sa panahon ng mga lockdown. Kaninang umaga, nililinis na nila ang grove.
Nasa pagitan tayo ng anibersaryo ng paglagda at pag-anunsyo ng Batas Militar (ika-21 at 23 ng Setyembre, 1972). Nagsindi ng kandila ang aking mahal na editor sa kanyang hapag-kainan sa Cavite bilang biktima at kaibigan ng mga biktima. Sinusubukan kong magsulat, ngunit...

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