Excerpt from a zine I made for BLTX, 10 Dec 2022
An idea I have is to spend days walking nights writing never eating, sleep only when it rains and have an occasional beer. – Bernadette Mayer
To celebrate the break I’d been longing for since I started working two jobs in the early days of the pandemic, I decided to read, from start to end, Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day—written on December 22, 1978—on December 22, 2020. The next day, feeling encouraged, I wrote about the day itself as I lived my way out of it. Mayer passed away on November 22, 2022. I am grateful for her poetry and life. This printed version of my notebook from December 23 two years ago is a tiny gesture of gratitude.
12/23/2020 Woke up with the joke about Dennis Jimenez from last night in my head. I laughed. That hardly happens, not even on good years. It is 8:30 in the morning and I am up on the deck with some Bernadette Mayers, coffee, water, phone, two notebooks. I set up the table beside the water tank where I can sit in the shade. I don’t know what I’m looking at, direction-wise—the Araneta Center high-rises, the ones across Ali Mall, I think. The sounds of construction to my right, though the building-in-progress directly in front of me looks empty—green netting drooping from the scaffolding, some blankets or towels hanging from the half-built top floor. I read the news but barely understood the US stimulus bill before I decided to head up here instead. Almost fourteen days in quarantine only for my one visit to my parents to be canceled. Beside me, a big pot with it must be alugbati growing in it (purple stems), an empty bottle of Red Horse, four small pots with sprigs, the fourth with a knife stabbed in the soil, the knife its own kind of foliage, I suppose. Birds overhead, unknown chirping. A fleet of motorcycles two blocks down, I can see them whizz past the trees I don’t know the names of. All I can identify is coconut, and mango when there’s fruit. There’s a lone hanger on the clothesline we don’t compete for in the corner—not much to set up where it is though there’s good enough sun. An idea I have is not to respond when called upon which I find easy enough to do when there is no urgency though I have a much harder time deciding if there is truly no urgency or I’m merely asserting it. And most times it takes too long to decide it is easier to respond. There is a fainter layer of construction happening directly across me, the sound always losing to the drill to the right, the steady stream of motorcycles. Nobody out in their balconies, just shrubs and chairs and laundry. A. often tells me I already know what I think I’m learning for the first time like when I said I saw the neighbor’s fancy cats up on the deck I always just thought they had that one pusakal and not the sosyal ones and A. said you already know that. And then I have to reorient from the cheer of newly knowing something to the bother of having forgotten what I’m apparently already supposed to know. I am this way I know with faces and names though I justify this by saying I’ve been teaching for over two decades which translates to over a thousand students though I haven’t properly done the math and that can only go so far because there are faces and names I cannot place and they are not of students. Though the last faintly embarrassing time was at the CHR talking to one of their lawyers and having a pleasant conversation about the ongoing expo only for the lawyer to turn to me and say, Ma’am, you don’t remember me? Which reminded me of the time in Makiling, with the exact same question asked of me by one of the teachers after we had shared a few laughs over things of no consequence. I am periodically in pleasant small talk with people I know but don’t know, people who were young when I met them and are no longer young. I am old. B.M. says you can’t pick up something you see on the page which I find pleasantly literal even as I’m picking it up and putting it in here along with the plants identified by popsicle stick labels in the for now shaded corner of the deck: cauliflower, mustasa, tomato, catnip, iceberg lettuce, kangkong, p. Baguio, calamansi, sitaw, ampalaya. This is the neighbor’s vegetable garden in pots that I am able to sit amid for the first time in the morning, not evening, with coffee and not beer in hand. I have received soil and some seeds as a gift, but I have not done any planting. I have become so ashamed of my guilty pleasures and there are many or few but persistent. I do not wish to turn on the camera, have not wanted to do so for a long time but I continue to be weak against obligation. There is nothing to be said that hasn’t been said before and then it’s just a matter of competing for beauty which is competing for the most effective distraction. I am compelled by self-delusion to get something written down before the year ends. We left empty bottles from last night next to the basil and I continue to feel the need to ask if that’s okay even though A.’s already given me an answer. As a kid I used to ask my mother for permission to eat food in the fridge and she would say, slightly bewildered, no need to ask, you live here, the food is yours. The sun is making its way to where I am, a third of the table is basking in it. I have been told I am difficult to be friends with sometimes I have not been told and simply left with the loss I am apparently no loss and I must remind myself that I always already have what I need on the matter of comrades. On of the things the fire taught me was to plug in The Lemon of Pink to shut the noise out it also taught me to cry in bathroom stalls three minutes tops there are many one things. It also helps not to look behind you when there are footsteps to go straight ahead, walk, run, until you hit that first lit-up street lamp. It’s a public space but don’t take up too much of it. I don’t mind moving when there are things to be watered it is such a luxury to be treated like I am not to be disturbed. I am surrounded by edible things and I am getting in the way of their sun, the wind is coming from behind, it’s been a while since I’ve had insect bites. You know what you’re looking at depending on where the sun is. I don’t need to turn my head to know what’s behind me—the unlit signs, Burger King to my right, McDonald’s to the left, the Sierra Madre, the hecklers from the jaundiced building. I can see the church where we stopped when it rained too hard we couldn’t go on on our bikes. A mass was going on and I kept having to remind myself not to talk too loud there were others who docked under the tent in the garage to get away from the rain but were paying attention to the rites. I had on my yellow raincoat and pink helmet and wanted to step past the gate to our suking fruit cart with the old man who always picked out the best mangoes and bananas, sometimes lanzones, rambutan. Instead we stared at the grotto and its harsh pronouncements against women getting abortions and I kept angling my bike away from the parts of the tarp heavy with rainwater and the edges with water spilling over. There were suman stalls too, two of them, and I was embarrassed to pick one over the other so I got from both. If I must write, there’s simply no completing that with conviction. Ghost face under my notebook with light on chin but where is the light source, camera pointed at me and me a stand-in for mirror. It is December 23 of a year everyone says should be over and of course it will be and what good will that do. My back is up against the alugbati now and earlier A. hosed the concrete to cool it down. These trees, I remember when they were planted, is what I remember Damiana Eugenio saying to me on our way to the department for what must’ve been a tribute to her. You can no longer drive under those acacias I believe is what I say, self-conscious, even when what I am saying is a fact. In one of those dinners home long ago, an argument over actors in a movie, easy to confirm the correct answer and how I wish we had all said then, to my sister, this is not the guy you want to marry. Instead we let the error slide as it seemed to mean so much to him to be right, and we just wanted to get on with dinner. Past drunken stupor, past a relatively smooth high, past sex in the early morning, I caught a glimpse of your reservations, nothing to get hung about but must we talk about it right this minute when I’m putting on my shoes, my mask, my shield, and of course we both know, the answer is no, setting the knobs for an explosion two months from now over whether the plastic should go in the left bin or the right. Nobody owes anybody an explanation. There are things about me you don’t know that I forget you don’t know because of the months we spent not talking. We live in a neighborhood with streets named after trees and all I know are names but not what they are names of, how could I have reached this age and the trees still strangers? I pass them daily though not now, not in a while. I know acacias but only because I know the sunken garden that they line would I recognize them anywhere else. What is it that I know at this point and why this and not that and what for. What merits a question mark and what merits a period. I don’t think I’d rather live some place else, I’ve never thought that, even when I was living away, it was bearable because temporary. I haven’t worn purple shoes in a while, I wore Mary Janes to learn how to bike. A. taught me on this deck those first few months of the lockdown, the quarantine pass was in your name my name was written on the back of the card that wasn’t a card. A sheet of paper with somebody’s signature on it. It took a while for me to find my balance we started to hear buses honking from the highway. Now I can bike to mobs if needed I still don’t like it when strangers talk to me, even if it’s to tell me to place my jacket on the placards in my crate on my way to the university gate, the checkpoint, the cops alighting from a truck in full military gear. You get yelled at to keep yourself safe and everything feels like a threat. I learned the names of our neighbor the tattoo artist and partner when they sent over a little cake for Christmas and signed their names. I did the same the following week. Now we know each other by name though we stick to wordless greetings on the hallway that isn’t a hallway, just a common area with a square patch of living and dying plants. Sometimes they let their cat out to mingle with the plants, the only cat I thought they had, the one with a moustache and a patch on the spot for bangs. Our cats we never let out though they try when I’m taking out the trash, after M. almost leapt to his death pouncing after a bird by the open window (you caught him by the hind legs while I couldn’t even let out a scream, my mouth just hung open) and after the time M. hopped on the banisters to run up to the deck and jump on the roof—now we live with windows always shut and no mingling with plants in the common area. Passages about children described as complex creatures always amuse me. It seems the first few years of life they are pets and then they grow the bones and features to become human. It was pointed out to me last night that my longest relationship is with my fridge and not M., which I suppose is true. I don’t know much about my neighborhood and I’ve lived here six years. I learned where the barangay hall was when I had to get an ID I didn’t want to wait around for the barangay captain to arrive and sign it so the guy sitting at the desk next to the captain’s signed it for me. Signed the captain’s name. So much paperwork that means what you want it to mean like the checking they do with sticks in purses before letting you in the mall, now replaced by temperature guns they point at your forehead. All the names and numbers left in convenience stores and supermarkets. I think if I’m to write let me address those I love and know immediately how limited my love is and how indulgent the writing. Are you tight-lipped or silent or is this always in lieu of anything better to do. I hear what I think is the snapping of a typewriter but I’m sure I’m wrong. There are firecrackers in the distance. I wanted to make work from home better so I bought a shelf and with it came the information that SM workers had to pay for the shields and shuttle to work is what the guy who helped us with the shelf told us. Why would it be otherwise? I am tired of the same old thoughts of non-surprise. We move some books to the shelf and that’s that. Some postcards in frames that the cats topple over, the glass cracked then shattered. My hand hurts from all the writing I’d rather do away from the screen. Why do we keep watching true crime shows? The screen is where we go to see each other and I would like to see you but I do not want to see the screen. I have a high tolerance for isolation and yet I resolved a relationship during quarantine there’s no saying what you’ll do for love or self-preservation they must be the same maybe they are the wrong terms. I set up a tree that the cats kept pouncing on until they got used to the idea and left it alone. It’s been many sentences since I turned around to face the wind and moved the table so that now I’m next to the kangkong and sitaw that I know by labels and not by leaves. There’s a plastic contraption for the sitaw to twine itself around, some strategic knots to keep the vines disentangled. It’s been a while since I sat in a spot without a Netflix show or a podcast within earshot, just tricycles, a police siren, screeching brakes, firecrackers, construction, birds. I can smell bagoong, surely from the neighbors, and I hope there’s lunch I don’t have to work for. I am reading about beautiful ice and aggression and eggshells and a baby’s desire. And I am reading about the police the police and the frightening noon siren I do not know what this noon siren is and why I prefer to read translations these days and why I can go on for months without writing like it means something. An article I read earlier today castigating white writers and their pre-Trump / post-Trump privilege ended with a clarion call to give a certain writer of color a book contract and I thought, what? All that talk about settler colonialism and systemic change and at the end of the day what you want is a book contract? It’s 11:19 and I am in a corner of the deck with a coconut tree directly before me (plus corrugated roofs and the Cignal satellite dish) and beyond it the Iglesia ni Cristo which I think is on V. Luna though I may be wrong, anything about directions and landmarks I could easily be wrong about. There was that deck in LA I got invited to, good wine and steaks on the grill and music from the turntable and overhead, newly freed cables from a tree cut down and lying on the sidewalk. I don’t know what kind of tree. I remember the remorse in the telling of having reported the tangled cables to the neighborhood authorities the unexpected solution they could’ve cut a few branches is all. Why am I averse to proper nouns in poems, I am learning not to be so obtuse but while I am starting to name places I still can’t seem to name people. Sometimes I wish the word scintillate would appear is what an old professor told me about my preference for monosyllabic words, which in bad moods made me think I was being told to use gossamer or diaphanous or effervescence or parfait but of course, that was not what I was being asked to reconsider. Books borrowed from the library that I’m unable to return: Kamao: Tula ng Protesta 1970–1986, Versus Philippine Protest Poetry, 1983–1986, The Trilogy of St. Lazarus, The City and the Thread of Light and Other Poems, The Space Between, Obligations: Cheers of Conscience, Voideville, New and Later Poems. Due March 12th, 2020.
The Curious Couch 