Oo

Di mo lang alam, naiisip kita
Baka sakali lang maisip mo ako
Di mo lang alam, hanggang sa gabi
Inaasam makita kang muli
Nagtapos ang lahat sa di inaasahang
Panahon at ngayon ako’y iyong iniwang
Luhaang sugatan di- mapakinabangan
Sana nagtanong ka lang kung di mo lang alam
Sana’y nagtanong ka lang kung di mo lang alam
Ako’y iyong nasaktan
Baka sakali lang maisip mo namang
Hindi mo lang alam kay tagal nang panahon
Ako’y nandirito pa rin hanggang ngayon, para sayo
Lumipas mga araw na ubod ng saya
Di pa rin nagbabago ang aking pagsinta
Kung ako’y nagkasala, patawad na sana
Ang puso kong pagal ngayon lang nagmahal
Di mo lang alam ako’y iyong nasaktan
Baka sakali lang maisip mo namang
Puro siya na lang sana’y ako naman
Di mo lang alam ika’y minamasdan
Sana’y iyong mamalayang hindi mo lang pala alam
Di mo lang alam, kahit tayo’y magkaibigan lang
Bumabalik lahat sa tuwing nagkukulitan
Baka sakali lang, maisip mo namang
Ako’y nandito lang, hindi mo lang alam
Matalino ka naman
Kung ikaw, at ako ay tunay na bigo
Sa laro na ito, ay dapat bang sumuko
Sana’y di ka na lang pala aking nakilala
Kung alam ko lang ako’y yong masasaktan ng ganito
Sana’y nakinig na lang ako sa nanay ko
Di mo lang alam ako’y iyong nasaktan
Baka sakali lang maisip mo namang
Puro siya na lang, sana’y ako naman
Di mo lang alam ika’y minamasdan
Sana’y iyong mamalayang hindi mo lang pala alam
Malas mo…ikaw ang natipuhan ko
Di mo lang alam, ako’y yong nasaktan.

(Up dharma Down)

***

In Fleetwood Mac fashion the rain has failed to wash all avenues clean so there’s no epiphany, and instead there is nothing but a struggle against the flood. No tide to speak of—everything is just stagnant, but devoid of calm. And you have no idea. No idea at all.

A Tree Telling of Orpheus

White dawn. Stillness. When the rippling began
I took it for a sea-wind, coming to our valley with rumors
of salt, of treeless horizons. but the white fog
didn't stir; the leaved of my brothers remained outstretched,
unmoving.

Yet the rippling drew nearer - and then
my own outermost branches began to tingle, almost as if
fire had been lit below them, too close, and their twig-tips
were drying and curling.
Yet I was not afraid, only
deeply alert.

I was the first to see him, for I grew
out on the pasture slope, beyond the forest.
He was a man, it seemed: the two
moving stems, the short trunk, the two
arm-branches, flexible, each with five leafless
twigs at their ends,
and the head that's crowned by brown or gold grass,
bearing a face not like the beaked face of a bird,
more like a flower's.
He carried a burden made of
some cut branch bent while it was green,
strands of a vine tight-stretched across it. From this,
when he touched it, and from his voice
which unlike the wind's voice had no need of our
leaves and branches to complete its sound,
came the ripple.
But it was now no longer a ripple (he had come near and
stopped in my first shadow) it was a wave that bathed me
as if rain
rose from below and around me
instead of falling.
And what I felt was no longer a dry tingling:
I seemed to be singing as he sang, I seemed to know
what the lark knows; all my sap
was mounting towards the sun that by now
had risen, the mist was rising, the grass
was drying, yet my roots felt music moisten them
deep under earth.

He came still closer, leaned on my trunk:
the bark thrilled like a leaf still-folded.
Music! there was no twig of me not
trembling with joy and fear.

Then as he sang
it was no longer sounds only that made the music:
he spoke, and as no tree listens I listened, and language
came into my roots
out of the earth,
into my bark
out of the air,
into the pores of my greenest shoots
gently as dew
and there was no word he sang but I knew its meaning.
He told of journeys,
of where sun and moon go while we stand in dark,
of an earth-journey he dreamed he would take some day
deeper than roots...
He told of the dreams of man, wars, passions, griefs,
and I, a tree, understood words - ah, it seemed
my thick bark would split like a sapling's that
grew too fast in the spring
when a late frost wounds it.

Fire he sang,
that trees fear, and I, a tree, rejoiced in its flames.
New buds broke forth from me though it was full summer.
As though his lyre (now I knew its name)
were both frost and fire, its chord flamed
up to the crown of me.

I was seed again.
I was fern in the swamp.
I was coal.

And at the heart of my wood
(so close I was to becoming man or god)
there was a kind of silence, a kind of sickness,
something akin to what men call boredom,
something
(the poem descended a scale, a stream over stones)
that gives to a candle a coldness
in the midst of its burning, he said.

It was then,
when in the blaze of his power that
reached me and changed me
I thought I should fall my length,
that the singer began
to leave me. Slowly
moved from my noon shadow
to open light,
words leaping and dancing over his shoulders
back to me
rivery sweep of lyre-tones becoming
slowly again
ripple.

And I in terror
but not in doubt of
what I must do
in anguish, in haste,
wrenched from the earth root after root,
the soil heaving and cracking, the moss tearing asunder -
and behind me the others: my brothers
forgotten since dawn. In the forest
they too had heard,
and were pulling their roots in pain
out of a thousand year's layers of dead leaves,
rolling the rocks away,
breaking themselves
out of
their depths.

You would have thought we would lose the sound of the lyre,
of the singing
so dreadful the storm-sounds were, where there was no storm,
no wind but the rush of our
branches moving, our trunks breasting the air.
But the music!
The music reached us.
Clumsily,
stumbling over our own roots,
rustling our leaves
in answer,
we moved, we followed.

All day we followed, up hill and down.
We learned to dance,
for he would stop, where the ground was flat,
and words he said
taught us to leap and to wind in and out
around one another in figures the lyre's measure designed.

The singer
laughed till he wept to see us, he was so glad.
At sunset
we came to this place I stand in, this knoll
with its ancient grove that was bare grass then.
In the last light of that day his song became
farewell.
He stilled our longing.
He sang our sun-dried roots back into earth,
watered them: all-night rain of music so quiet
we could almost
not hear it in the
moonless dark.
By dawn he was gone.
We have stood here since,
in our new life.
We have waited.
He does not return.
It is said he made his earth-journey, and lost
what he sought.
It is said they felled him
and cut up his limbs for firewood.
And it is said
his head still sang and was swept out to sea singing.
Perhaps he will not return.
But what we have lived
comes back to us.
We see more.
We feel, as our rings increase,
something that lifts our branches, that stretches our furthest
leaf-tips
further.
The wind, the birds,
do not sound poorer but clearer,
recalling our agony, and the way we danced.
The music!


Denise Levertov

Hagel, Deutschland!

We finished third, and 21 years old Bastian Schweinsteiger was the two-goal hero of the game. Kahn looked as formidable as ever, and did spectacular saves except for that beautiful goal by Portugal's Nuno Gomes.

Gut gemacht, Deutschland!

Ang Pagpapanggap...Bow

From this:




To this:





I wonder how long we'll last, hehe.

Halo Halo

Part I. Etiquette 101

Pardon the ranting, but I just can’t understand why some people cannot operate even on the minimal measure of courtesy.

One, you don’t barge into the elevator when someone else is on his way out. Common sense would tell you to let that person out first, and then you can enter. Also, don’t make a disapproving sound if you bump into that person who has the right of way.

Second, since we’re neither in Britain nor Japan it’s a given to always keep right. It’s a hitch less in pedestrian traffic.

Third, you don’t move around too much in cramped space especially when you’re on public transportation such as the MRT train. That is trespassing on someone else’s already constricted space of freedom, which is very rude.

Fourth, it’s not really that hard to say “excuse me” or “sorry” in a very mundane situation. The only possible excuse for this would be muteness.



Part II. On The Bright Side

Proof of a few (and near extinct species of) good men: My friend Ana and I were on our way back to ABS-CBN after grocery shopping at Hi-top when a security guard suddenly comes rushing to us with a gargantuan picnic umbrella. Heavily laden with our shopping bags and walking under the scorching heat of the sun, you can just imagine our relief under the shade. Plus he’s got this big smile for us that was infectious.


Part III Wala—Share ko lang

Part of the reason I really enjoyed doing the grocery was this crazy idea Ana and I suddenly had: we were going to do some healthy eating for the week to come. We loaded up on veggies and I had fun stocking up on vitamins, which was a first for me since I’m not much of a supplement drinker. The novelty of eating healthy isn’t wearing off yet (and I come to office everyday just in time for lunch because I don’t want to wait too long hehe), as with everything else new in my life now. Like:

First Day High: My classes started and it was a mix of nostalgia and the odd. The photocopy lady (or Ate Ophel to people at the College of Music) chose that inconvenient time to rant about a non-existent lunch break, which reminded me more than ever of the never-ending pleading with the photocopy ladies at the UST Main Library during thesis days. Then during the actual class my lack of manicure expertise also became apparent, and my instructor took out a nail file and buffer to show me the proper shape my nails should take. Talk about embarrassing, hehe. Barney also gave me homework—a staggering four-chapter assignment which I’ve been putting off up to the last minute I could spare. But the day’s funniest experience was when I was waiting for a cab in the shed right across Quezon Hall. With shades on and the guitar slung on my shoulder a truckload of guys (this is literal—I think it’s some sort of a promotion campaign by Nike) hollered at me: “Let’s rahk en roll!” It was so funny and so unexpected that I couldn’t keep a straight face; I just had to laugh. And they laughed when they saw me laugh. They came back for another round sans the holler, which I attribute to the poker face I was already sporting by then.

Having my soul cards read: Just for the sheer heck of it I tried it with some friends and surprisingly got a good reading. I was amazed—not so much for the predictions she made but how she correctly read my current crisis of overspending. Hehe. It’s just nice to try new things once in a while.

My new books and Tool CD. Enough said.