TUNNELS
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Tunnels deconstructs the individual’s Romantic fascination with ‘love’ or the grammaticality of beauty. Ideally, the ‘tunnels’ in the collection are subterranean love poems from the suburban imaginary. These seemingly syntactic tunnels travel through one’s literary imagination or heterotopic dreamscapes, and while αγάπη (Greek for ‘love’) inspires these rhizomic tunnels to navigate the abysmal ‘meta-spectacle’ of gesture, language or moment of poemness, the mind like the many-colored jeepneys of Manila, where driving past roast goose restaurants in Shek Kip Mei or spotting stilt houses in Kampong Kleang, attempt to explore the transgeneric textualities of the everyday, alongside the unstructurality of time and space, the littoral and the liminal.
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TUNNELS Footnotes
1A tourist destination in the province of Pampanga where air bases were built during the Americla colonial rule in the Philippines 2It is a volcano located on the island of Flores in Indonesia. 3Wild ducks in the native lexis of the people in Candaba, Pampanga in the Philippines. 4 A common place or town terminal where Philippine tricycles (or trikes) are used as service vehicles 5 A creature in Philippine mythology said to come out at night to suck the blood of victims from their shadows 6 A trite Filipino expression meaning “Are you sick of things?” 7 A Taglish or Tagalog English expression for “Let’s go!” 8An always crowded station on the Metro Rail Transit (MRT) in Manila, Philippines 9 All three towns of the province of Pampanga in Central Luzon in the Philippines
TUNNELS Intro to end
You see this humdrum townBacolor or Apalit or Macabebe9seeking colors & flood tide arias on the impulseof a rainy Saturday afternoonbeforethe machinery of undergarment civility because a harness will only be made for onefar away from the closetripraps & minuetsageing windows sigh in the airI have no plans & precedents—when in this charming confirmationyour handsome decision loungeson the very idea I suppose was your ideaof the blue histories of weather reportin a coma,wishfully contactingRogelio de la Rosa (makananu tana?),his name typed up slowly, fur is flying—lightness!—but you got everything nowround your mythic little fingerslife at the alterations shopoh what a terrible mess I’ve madeof this ending,ending of a poem.&
TUNNELS a story about a bruise in light of Lacan’s le sinthome; or, because love rolls in the fifth eye of our homelessness
I feel terribly whole tonight because of the nightrain& the proud No Fireworks sign out there on the street.I feel terribly dangerous I could let my right hand arm-wrestle the left hand of the clock before midnightsmokes up an illusion of the forgotten ledbetters &faux romantics. I could smash bricks w/ my silence& then screw & shout ‘till my bones crow to ask:do you remember your neighbor’s rabbit that fellin love w/ the rooster because it’s the Year of the Rabbit?what about rain trees, purple prose, the scattered zines& rhizomes? don’t they all speak of the symbolic symptom?feel free to say it out loud. panda-eyed, freezing cold,I know. I know the feeling, the stroke of the bokusekibrush, the memory on the wall like graffitied genitaliafrom the ceiling to the floor. I speak my mind free.i speak it free like when you spill secrets in a publicphone box, insisting that writers send ideas to priso
TUNNELS The Poet Who Wrote Adam Snow
for John AshberyThe literary life is never easy, you saw it firstin the convex mirror, its spreading tensionthe surface of claw-prints in silver. I then triedto learn how to read humour and surprisedisguised as a shadow pretending to havenever seen alchemy winnow through thistlesdown the dark alleys of your city parks. I,the wanderer learning how to drift pastshoe factories and never pay attentionto the still-chiming ways of lookingat a lamppost, would like to say, You arethe art of consciousness, the consciousnessof art! Uniform of the swirling things,you are: desk, papers, dried leaves, moneybills, memos, pills, tears, the image. Allsurround me like a magma of memoriesshutting down the last sex of wine from ash.
TUNNELS tɹaɪsɪkəl
Short distance routes for the love of the people’s plaza. In the land of guavas and legato-linked pabasas. Far gone since you left this town and its parish kisses traded for maple leaves.The green tufted Garcia garden behind the churchyard - not even the interstate 3AM tapsi can match. Seattle. Toronto. Burkina Faso. Look, we don’t have the places solet’s not talk about getting lost. Let’s talk about our national tɹaɪsɪkəl racing in our blood’s activity. It’s normal, you know. Like the Friday tiangge stalls floweringlike freckles in June, someone’s bleeding for what weare (not). Drop. So we have the future in the barangay basketball league. The way we spell “future” makes it easy for us to spell traysikel. Not tricycle. It’s traysikel, Bayani. For they’ve grown digital too, ask Uncle Pepe.
TUNNELS The Rapid Room
(after Requiem for a Dream)Feel the pain, the spiked effect of the year fastens like fantasy to the rapid room of human skin. Watch the junior tomato sun swiftly spinning forward the neon kitchen countertops, making big the dream to dance with cauliflowers while the text message remains unread, un-sniffing the curry powder from the freshest Woodstock of our lungs. See neon-painted plastic cups drift across the misshapen reality already inspiring the right chopper to celebrate the saturnalia of sharp objects, the happy flying Greek alphabets of such a beginning. It’s obvious to us two people, we never learn. Neither of us could understand, yet, the cost of all this may welcome another pain, another grotesque feeling, and then beyond the door into the abyss, we see us. In this rapid room we live. Our skin desires, dissolves. You believe in my troubled arithmetic. So we wrap our arms around each other, feeling the new pain every day, with calm paper boats sailing around this roo
TUNNELS Call Center Angels
Ting. The train left Guadalupe Station8 collecting more of Garoy’s ilk, work-tired and sleepy, the Garonoids. Then back to the strange lady stare-kissing the sun, back to Garoy’s scratching his gluteus maximus. Tang.The Garonoids behind them seemed like an on-off light bulb in their stressed shell-light. As the train stopped, they were switched on as if awareness were to penetrate their system. And when motion pedalled, their inner sky of sleep once again shut. Garoy yawned repeatedly, and the lady with the now amber-lit eyes averted her gaze, now toward the approaching station. “We’re heading to Boni Station and you’re still scratching your—“He quizzed, “What?”“Your gladiatorial tang tings.”“Ting Tangs?”And there’s a risk of Neil Gailman and Amanda Palmer confusing the morning’s blood pressure.
TUNNELS Little things
A couple of weeks back everyonewas chanting ¡Habemus Papam! in the garden,on chimney tops, on the floor of the plaza smittenby bird beaks, but not in the libraries of philanderingcodeheads and newly circumcised trapeze swingers.On that special day no one wanted to hear somethinglike a “freelance boner.” I’m sure you too didn’t throwan ear for words like papal shit or quantum Christology.You know, I’d like to brush your hair when things gougly, as in when a tsunami hits the seawall and there’sno one to fix your hair out of fear. I will celebrateyour eyes’ uncalculated blink as it might changethe season from tinder-parched mornings to being 84and still writing you poems. You know, I’d liketo see you cry, laugh at people off to work, becauseyou’re edged to clear the skies of jinx and throat-cloggedpretensions. The paddling mallards, oh, I want to countthem out for you and give you my monthly salarylest I fail to do the maths. I want to carry you
TUNNELS #taglish
never an expletive(in mint condition): nagsasawa ka na ba?6from the mouth of decadence, the idea of fish balls& tall tales in the streets. from research-groomed Rizalian dream, a #LunetaPark for your religionof sweet air. from media to selfirrealis& #Imeldific, a bruise in history-making. from the R-establishmentonce called a “(r)ehab,” the “first bonga light,” “systems spidering,” at the edge (a slant rhyme for ‘age’)of thirty-three a dirty ice cream is an oasisof #Dutertism; you & IWednesday #conyos of Ma
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