Sometimes, while you’re trying to outsmart time behind your work desk, you meet with your thoughts and ask questions you dare not ask your kitties. Then you try to find a way to impart that conversation to any surface you can find. And when you do find it, the universe simply opens up its doors to usher you in.
Lost Rhyme, ink on paper, March 9, 2017.
View more sketches and scribbles here.
Piso pa rin ba?
O mas malamig pa sa piseta?
Ang agahan, pananghalian
at hapunan na pinagkasya
sa isang maliit kakarampot na supot
para ipagpalit sa pangarap
na papsikel, tutunawin lang
nang panandalian, isisikmurang
sa paparating na pantawid sa tag-init.
Pabili po ng ice candy…
Piso pa rin ba?
-Armineonila M., 2017
A shelter of robins, his heart
breathes into mine flowerbeds
of ballads not thorned nor pitted
heartbreaks upon which spikes
may delay the casting of spring
when seasons run miles apart
to dance rivers with our thoughts
our fountains, deep in the roots
will meet among the shadows…
–
Now, if only…
these words were so a garden of ours
as if I were a Wordsworth, rhymed
and you, a village his, a path shared
with the daffodils in a dream without
but we are no such garden, still, under
the metal clouds, wired with gavels
silver chains to our roots, rust a staple
and time, our enemy, is a wall sprouted
by shallow ponds, pawns to vultures
for within its arms we’ll one day wither
and settle unto grounds, craving for rain.
–
-Armineonila M.
Half-empty words wash away
the narratives, spilt favours,
modern fatigue —
we owe the landowners —
as our worn out pleas
flee in silence.
Our kins rode the wings of fate
in begging fashion,
shoveling their own
craving for death.
We mourn for old debts,
for we are tiny pebbles
in a shore of gluttons.
What purpose do our lips serve
when we speak pass the clouds?
While we cease to embrace
the pen with our tongues?
We dug out the snare, fist and spine.
They fed on our spirit.
–
-Armineonila M., 2016
It’s been a while. But I’d like to share this piece I especially wrote for Pluma’s third year anniversary (September 14). Visit Pluma’s official website and blog for more features.
–
If only the burning of bridges
remains an idiot’s idiom
and we could still dream of flowerbeds
and never hear gunshots
of freedom from a remote uproar
lay the sword to rest –
what powers does it hold under a child’s gaze?
even time halts for mourning
when the sharp edges of tyranny
dug deep down their tiny bellies
Telling them
Told me
why must we smell the flowers?
read people with dead shot eyes
after a while
the trees shall whisper
some so-called heroes’ anthem
who spoiled the soil that fed them
while our ruins
are traded for inorganic memories
or so history went
and thought free verse rhymes
or weaves a synopsis of the future
but we refuse to breathe
the putrid lies
our masked men feed
a gold miner’s poverty
we tread
alongside fragile footsteps.
–
-Armineonila M., 2016
–
Mini musing: The pen is mighty until its ink had dried out.
On Jacket 2, Divya Victor writes:
While polarity has often characterized these discourses, it is hard to pin down even contingent names for the resulting dichotomies: Conceptual Writing vs. Lyric Poetry? Conceptual Writing vs. Political Poetry? Conceptual Writing vs. Positivist Representation? Avant Garde Aesthetics vs. Activist Poetics? To speak in the idiom of Maestro Ilayaraaja, my muse while I edited this feature: How to name it? How to, indeed?
…
This moment, like many significant moments in literary history, requires better questions: questions that do not demand denouncement, do not enforce allegiance to a certain aesthetic, do not automate categorical definitions; questions that challenge how writing is institutionalized, incorporated, or made hegemonic and complicit; questions that clarify and document the contemporary moment as it is, rather than answers that produce easily instrumentalized narratives.
So, instead of asking practitioners who they are (i.e. the questions of inquisition), I asked writers why and how they work (i.e. the questions of exposition). They told us, in return, how they lean and how they work through, beside, outside of, and within what we’ve come to understand as Conceptual writing. They told us how they have grown into, grown from, outgrown, or forborne its possibilities. To pluralize prepositional relations to the thing seemed like the best way to counter polarizing discourses that focus on select individuals in an otherwise highly diverse, striated, and divergent network of poetic practitioners.
Read more on Conceptual writing (plural and global) and other cultural productions
~ O ~
Mini Musing: It’s either you write to inspire a middle finger, or you write a manual. – A.M.
Sharing my haiku poems published in World of Haiku: Poets of the Philippines by The Haiku Foundation. Browse the digital archive for more haiku from around the world.
Haiku No. 1:
pabrikang baboy
bahag-haring panaginip-
organiko
Translation:
factory pig
dreams of rainbows—
organic
Haiku No. 2:
kalbong akasya
umampon sa mga bubuyog
wallpaper
Translation:
bald acacia
births hiveless bees
wallpaper
