A REVIEW OF “ANG MANUNULAT KAG ANG PENDULUM”

by Roger B. Rueda, PhD

If you have not yet been haunted by a poem, then you have not yet been properly alive. Alain Russ Dimzon’s “Ang Manunulat kag ang Pendulum” is not merely read—it is endured, like a fever that prays. It is a confession both disguised as a typewriter. Here, the writer is both saint and heretic, both Che Guevarra and Santa Maria, and the pendulum—the eternal metronome of conscience—swings not just between left and right, but between damnation and deliverance.

Dimzon begins with a writer imprisoned not by iron bars, but by glass—transparent yet unbreakable, reflective yet suffocating. This is not merely architecture; this is psychology. It is the writer’s mind turned inside out—self-aware to the point of paralysis. The typewriter yearns for the touch of the hand, yet it is touched only by the eyes. What irony! We see but do not write, we write but do not see.

In ancient Ilonggo cosmology, mirrors were portals—salaming nga nagaako sang kalag. To gaze too long into one’s reflection is to risk being devoured by it. Dimzon’s first stanza, then, is not about writing—it is about surviving one’s own reflection.

The pendulum here becomes the heart’s pulse—steady, judicial, merciless. It does not stop. It testifies to time’s cruelty: the writer must keep writing, or the glass becomes his grave.

Then, the poem flares into political delirium. “Che Guevarra, kaslon ko ikaw kay Santa Maria!” The image is absurd and divine—a Marxist saint’s wedding in a cathedral of smoke. Dimzon’s genius is this: he understands that anger, like faith, demands ritual.

The red flag becomes the trahe de boda—the bridal gown of rebellion. The masses, mga maninoy, become witnesses to a blasphemous union between revolution and prayer. Here, Dimzon performs what the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard would call “the leap of paradox”—to unite faith and fury, sacred and profane.

But in Ilonggo wisdom, we recall the diwata sang pagbalos—the spirit of justice who punishes those who pray too prettily while doing nothing. Thus, when the writer hangs a bullet on the crucifix, he is not desecrating it; he is purifying it with reality. The pendulum stops swinging because judgment has paused to listen.

The third section is where the poem starts trembling—literally and metaphysically. The writer lies on a steel bed, wrapped in a tattered curtain. The hospital room becomes both tomb and confession box. He talks to the pendulum—his only god now—but it does not reply.

This is psychological collapse, but also spiritual metamorphosis. In ancient Panayanon belief, when a babaylan nears death, she trembles before transformation. The trembling writer, counting his “ikanapulo kag tatlo nga kamatayon,” echoes the babaylan’s ritual death before becoming one with the divine.

Left. Right. Left. Right. The pendulum swings like the moral universe—terrible, repetitive, exact. Dimzon suggests that the writer’s sanity is not lost but measured—his madness is rhythmic, his despair symmetrical.

By the fourth part, the writer has ceased dreaming—he is walking on marble, the cold floor of eternity. His hands are bound to “the disciple of treachery and silver,” an allusion to Judas and every writer who ever sold truth for comfort.

And yet, from the ashes, prophecy is born. His “child is a prophet who can speak to the creator of the pendulum.” In Ilonggo mysticism, fire is both purifier and messenger—kalayo nga nagadala sang pamati sang kalag sa langit. The fire that blazes in this stanza is not destruction—it is remembrance. The writer becomes an ancestor, a storyteller beyond flesh.

Notice: the sky has no stars, no sun. The illumination comes only from within—the perpetual flame of writing itself.

Finally, the poem returns to its first setting—the glass room, now shattered by time. “Aside from Che Guevarra and St. Mary, the writer has no past.” This is both tragic and liberating. The writer has survived his thirteenth death. He remembers nothing—not even fragments—because he has become what the pendulum always promised: continuity.

Tik. Tik. Tik. Tik. Ding. Dong. Ding. Dong. That is not merely sound—it is philosophy. It is Heraclitus whispering that time flows, even when meaning halts. It is the Ilonggo proverb, “Ang kalayo indi magtulog samtang may tawo nga nagahulat sang adlaw.” The fire will not rest while someone still waits for morning.

Dimzon’s poem is not a narrative—it is a pendulum itself. It swings between solitude and rebellion, sanity and prophecy, despair and creation. The writer becomes both subject and witness, both god and ghost.

And what of the pendulum? It is not merely time—it is truth itself, unrelenting and uncorrupted. It is the universe’s metronome of justice, saying: You may stop writing, but meaning will not stop swinging.

If you ask me, this poem is an autopsy of the Filipino soul. The writer is every citizen who has been blinded by bureaucracy, seduced by religion, betrayed by memory—and yet, still insists on writing, on thinking, on existing.

The pendulum? It is our collective conscience. It swings through history, unmindful of our excuses. And when it stops, it is not because time has ended—it is because we, the readers, have refused to move.

So to Alain Russ Dimzon, I say: congratulations. You have built a mirror and forced us to look—not at our faces, but at the machinery of our faith. And to the rest of us, may the pendulum never stop.

Tik. Tik. Tik. Tik. Ding. Dong. Ding. Dong. That, my friends, is the sound of truth—refusing to die.

*****

ANG MANUNULAT KAG ANG PENDULUM 
ni Alain Russ Dimzon
 
1.
Isa ka manunulat
Ang ginbulag
Sa iya kwarto
Nga nangin
Salaming nga
Tuman kadamul.
 
Ang iya makinilya
Ginahandum
Sang iya mga tudlo,
Apang ginatandug ini
Sang iya mga mata.
 
Ang iya daan nga libro
Ginahandum
Sang iya mga mata,
Apang ginatandug ini
Sang iya mga tudlo.
 
Dapat mangin isa
Ang manunulat kag
Ang iya makinilya.
 
Ang manunulat
Indi sumalayo.
Ang sumalayo
Amo ang kandado.
 
“Buksan ko
Ang pwertahan!
 
Akon ini kwarto!
Saksi pa ang pendulum!”
 
2.
Akig ang manunulat.
 
“Bulawan nga estrelya
Daw makunol ka
Batuk sa mga tinaga
Sang mga nobena!
 
Che Guevarra,
Kaslon ko ikaw
Kay Santa Maria!
 
Pula nga bandera
Ang trahe de boda!
 
Mga maninoy ang masa!”
 
Nagaalsa ang aso
Sa gabuk nga terasa.
 
Akig ang manunulat.
 
Sa punta sang rosarito
Ginpakabitan niya
Ang krus sang bala.
 
Ginkasal niya sila
Sa iya ngalan nga
Wala sing amay
Kag wala sing anak.
 
Nagkulpa ang aso.
Wala nagahabyog
Ang pendulum.
 
Ang naakig nga manunulat
Nagtukis sang pahina.
 
3.
Nagakurog ang karon ginatublag nga manunulat.
 
Nagahigda sia sa katre nga salsalon
Kag naputos sia sa kurtina nga gision.
 
Ginasugilanon niya ang pendulum
Nga wala nagasabat sa iya mga palamangkutanon.
 
Madamu ang mga lapaklapak sa pasilyo
Kag may katingil sang mga kariton.
 
Nagagwa kag nagapasulog ang mga trabahador
Nga may tabon ang mga nawong.
 
Makita sang manunulat ang iya kaugalingon
Sa pihak nga katre kag nagaugayong.
 
Nagaibwal ang kalayo sa pagpangamuyo
Kag pagpanulod sang mga sinsilyo sa mga puyo.
 
Ginabinagbinag sang nagakurog nga manunulat
Ang iya ikanapulo kag tatlo nga kamatayon.
 
Gintawag niya ang tagtuga sang pendulum.
 
Ang nagakurog nga manunulat indi makapiyong
Nagaibwal nga nagaibwal ang kalayo.
 
Wala. Tuo. Wala. Tuo. Wala. Tuo. Wala. Tuo.
Ang paghabyog sang pendyulum nagapadayon.
 
 
4.
Wala nagadamgo ang manunulat.
Nagatapak sya sa batobusilak.
 
Nahigot ang iya mga kamot
Sa mga kamut sang disipulo
Sang pagluib kag pilak.
 
Ang manunulat nangin anak sang mga kandila.
Ang iya anak isa ka manununda
Nga mahimo makasugilanon
Sa tagtuga sa pendulum.
 
Wala nagadamgo ang manunulat
Nagapuyu sia karon sa balay nga bato
Nga may mga dingding nga nagalunay
Sa kalayo sang iya ginikanan.
 
Wala ginabutahan ang manunulat..
Wala nagayuhum ang tagbalay.
Gikan sa mga bintana,
Ang langit wala mga bituon
Kag wala man sing adlaw.
 
Nagaibwal naman ang kalayo.
Pahanumdumdum ini sang pendulum.
 
5.
Ang kwarto nga salaming
Ginbuka sang dekada.
 
Luwas kay
Che Guevarra
Kag Santa Maria,
Ang manunulat
Wala sing
Nagligad.
 
“Wala na ako
Sing may madumduman.
Bisan mga tinipik lang.”
 
Paglagatik.
Makinilya.
 
Pagtukis.
Pahina.
 
Wala magluya
Ang makinilya.
Wala maglubad
Ang mga daan
Nga pahina.
 
Tik.
Tik.
Tik.
Tik.
 
Ding.
 
Dong.
 
Ding.
 
Dong.
 
Padayon ang pendyulum.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

WHEN PARADISE IS PAVED WITH MARBLE

 by Roger B. Rueda, PhD

There is a poem haunting me this morning, like the ghost of a revolution that refuses to shut up. Its name is “Ang Paraiso ni Amado.” The Ilonggo poet Alain Russ Dimzon offers us not paradise but paralysis. And the protagonist, Amado—whose name ironically means “beloved”—returns home not as a hero, but as a man nailed by his own memory to a marble floor. When creating names for characters, I recall Dr. Leoncio Deriada being the grand master of irony. He understood that a name is not a tag but destiny waiting to happen; whether or not someone takes it as their own depends on who they are and what they want out from life. In Deriada's stories, names are not just adornments but triggers, each syllable packed with intentions that tell us who or where someone is going to be born. A name is in Deriada's moral universe both an omen and a sentence. It tells not only what you are but also what disaster is inevitable approaching for you. And like his literary forebear, Alain Russ Dimzon names his "Amado" with no trace of feeling but a most exquisite irony: the "beloved one" who is anything but what he claims to be. With that single paradox, Dimzon proves to be the real disciple of Deriada's school—skillfully molding one word into an entire religion of fate, faith, and failure.

Ah, marble. The favorite flooring of the rich, the corrupt, and the dead. It is the surface upon which history slips and holiness pretends to stand upright. The poet writes: “Daw ginlansang ang iya mga tuhod sa batobusilak nga salog.” His knees are nailed, not by Roman soldiers, but by conscience and colonization.

In the Philippines, we are experts in kneeling, aren’t we? We kneel before crosses, before bosses, before politicians who distribute spaghetti during campaign season. Amado kneels before a cross—but his mind betrays him. He tries to erase the flag imprinted with the sickle and hammer. Imagine that: even in worship, ideology stalks him like an unpaid debt.

What exquisite irony. We are a country that loves revolution, as long as it is safely contained within poetry. Once it demands real sacrifice, we run to the church and confess our subversion away.

The poem stages a wrestling match between Karl Marx and the Miraculous Medal. Amado dips his hand in holy water, yet still feels his finger curve around a trigger. The body remembers what the soul denies. In psychology, that’s called trauma retention. In politics, that’s called post-revolution fatigue. In the Philippines, we simply call it Tuesday.

His vision of “golden stars in vast redness” is pure cognitive dissonance—faith filtered through ideology. He sees heaven through a red flag. The poem turns his gaze into a battlefield—between belief that consoles and belief that commands. What he beholds is not just the night sky, but the lingering afterglow of a dream that promised paradise and delivered penance.

Then the question comes: “San-o pa madula ang kadena kag latigo? San-o ang duta mangin paraiso?” When will the chain and whip go? When will the earth become paradise?

That is the same question every Filipino asks while waiting in line at the Bureau of Immigration. The poet’s genius lies in his simplicity. He does not preach. He prays. But his prayer trembles with protest. The repetition of kneeling and returning mirrors our national cycle: faith, failure, forgiveness, repeat.

Nietzsche once said that eternal recurrence is the greatest burden of existence. The Ilonggo version is simpler: Kon indi ka kabalo magtindog, pirmi ka gid magluhod. (If you don’t know how to stand, you will always be on your knees.)

Our ancestors would have laughed at Amado’s marble piety. The old babaylan prayed on earth, not on tile. They knew that divinity lives in dirt, not in imported polish. Duta is sacred, because it remembers the sweat of laborers and the blood of ancestors.

But here we are, worshipping on marble. We have traded the fertility of the soil for the sterility of status. Our temples are cold, our gods imported, our revolutions rehearsed. The poem reminds us that paradise is not a reward; it is a responsibility we’ve neglected—like unpaid taxes and unfiled graft cases.

In the olden days, the Panayanon believed that when a man lost his connection to the earth, his spirit wandered. Amado is that spirit. He bows to a cross yet dreams of a hammer. He is torn between Diyos kag Duta—God and soil, salvation and struggle. The poet does not condemn him. Instead, he makes him the mirror of our collective confusion: pious but powerless, faithful but famished, revolutionary but retired.

If I were to give my judgment, this poem is worthy not only of a standing ovation -, it should be resurrected at the national level. After all, it needs to be read aloud in temples and in classes, in the vast marble corridors of the Capitol, where faith is proclaimed, and honesty is forgotten. The task of this poem is what few others dare: its verse lets the Filipino conscience in its own contradictions. “Ang Paraiso ni Amado” is not its author loudly flattery but condemnation. So quiet that condemnation feels like a revelation. The voice of the poet is not it preaches and not its protests. The poet’s voice is poetic. His pen does not shout loudly, but pierces. His verse is soft bullets in the hands prick rather than body. This is not a poem for relaxing. This is a spiritual rebellion that has received the guise of prayer. The image is cold but the highest quality. The line is naked nerve, no rhetoric or excuse. It’s a lean, knife-clean truth. “Daw ginlansang ang iya mga tuhod sa batobusilak nga salog.” No adjective to protect, no multiplying elements to distract emphasis – the poet believes only in the weight of the image he applies, the surrounding silence. It’s already shown here that he’s a professional. This is the highest compression poetry – the art of counter-play when meaning is not added; it is removed. That’s how a sculptor carves or how a surgeon operates: remove the unnecessary to see the vitality that is left. Each pause is calculated, every echo is bloody. The structure is slow and sensual; it mimics the act of penance, as though each line is a whispered mea culpa, each quote a genuflection.

The gift is rare that can make language at once austere and alive, simplicity throb with spirit.

Its repetition is not redundancy, but ritual—an incantation for a country that no longer knows the difference between prayer and paralysis.

The lines repeat like the chime of a bell in too self-mourning of a church. Every return to the cross is therefore a return to the marble floor, and to the nailed knees; both memory and meditation. It teaches that history, unexpurgated, becomes liturgy—that the greatest sinners aren’t those who act wrongly once but those who rehearse evil over and over in ceremonies of devotion.

But the brilliance of the poem is that it salvages this repetition. It turns circularity into conscience. The reader does not become tired; the reader comes awake. As with all great liturgical work, it cleanses through repetition. The poet turns memory into an act of resistance.

What that this poem accomplishes is nothing less than theological surgery. It tears open the body of Filipino faith and exposes the cancer of fear growing within.

And yet it is no parody of religion; it is the consecration of heroism. The poet understands as the faith that wont question is submission clothed in rosary beads. By making Amado kneel and remember the hammer and sickle, the poem stages its most sacred struggle of all: that between conscience and comfort, God and government, redemption and restraint.

In its hushed rebellion, “Ang Paraiso ni Amado” assumes the role of scripture for the thinking believer. It tells us prayer is not obedience—it does more, it is conversation. This faith that is not on guard is not holiness: it is hypnotism.

Oh, yes, this poem deserves a standing ovation, all right; if only we could still stand. But... may I humbly suggest we the audience all stand up? We rise not to applaud but to acknowledge our deepest, most innermost nature. For we stand not simply to honor this poem but to bow our heads in reverence before it. The poem is constitutional in its fairness, a speech that condemns the Senate to silence. It is a compact of conscience, wholly jurisprudential in nature. For what does the poem court the artist otherwise but moral and aesthetic courage? And that is what is sufficient about it. Today’s verse belies the flag-waving and plays to the nation. Today’s poetry escapes the suffering that so scalds us; it invites its in and asks it to be seated and explain itself. That is where his greatness lies. So yes, I say: it is not ordinary honor I have given this poem I know, if only we knew the verb to stand I may then sit just like that, that hushed quiet available for that art alone who can settle our souls. For “Ang Paraiso ni Amado” does not just read. It is satisfied like in incense that reeks in your nose after a mass, or if even more and guilt that you cannot finally wash away.

And to those who still ask, “When will the earth become paradise?” my answer is simple: When Filipinos stop kneeling on marble and start standing on soil.

Because paradise is not up there, nor in ideology, nor in the illusion of imported whiteness—it is beneath our feet, in the duta nga ginpas-an naton pero wala naton ginhawiran. The earth we carry but never hold.

So rise, Amado. The cross does not need another kneeler. It needs a farmer, a fighter, a believer who knows that even paradise requires work.

*****

ANG PARAISO NI AMADO

ni Alain Russ Dimzon

Nagbalik

Si Amado

Daw ginlansang

Ang iya mga tuhod

Sa batobusilak

Nga salog.

Nagaduko sia

Sa atubang

Sang krus.

Ginapilit niya

Nga panason

Sa iya panghunahuna

Ang hayahay

Nga may imprinta

Nga garab

Kag martilyo.

Gintusmaw niya

Ang iya tuo

Nga kamut

Sa balaan

Nga tubig.

Sa iya pamatyag,

Ginasangit pa

Sang iya tudlo

Ang gatilyo.

Mga bituon

Nga bulawan

Sa malapad

Nga kapula

Ang iya panan-aw

Sa mga bituon

Sa maitum na

Nga kalangitan.

“San-o pa

Madula

Ang kadena

Kag latigo?

San-o ang duta

Mangin paraiso?”

Daw ginlansang

Ang iya mga tuhod

Sa batobusilak

Nga salog.

Angakok sia

Sa atubang

Sang krus.

Sa iya panghunahuna,

Nagalupadlupad karon

Ang hayahay

Nga may imprinta

Nga garab

Kag martilyo.

The Winner’s Circle

 a poem by Roger B. Rueda

The street knows its own stench.
Still, the preacher raises
a disinfected hand,
palms turned upward,
fingers trembling with the weight
of another oath.

Applause, like loose coins,
rains on the tiled floor.
The loudest cheer is always
for the man who names
his enemies thieves
while his pockets swell—
not with air, not with prayer—
but with the same paper
we exchange for bread.

It is a carnival, really.
Each mask more ornate
than the last. Each speech
a calculus of disdain:
the corrupt denouncing
corruption,
their voices gilded
with manufactured disgust.

And what of truth?
It sits cross-legged in the corner,
spitting feathers,
while the parade swells outside.

The irony is mathematical:
the most hypocrite
multiplies fastest,
divides the crowd,
subtracts witnesses.
At the end of the evening,
he wins.

History applauds
the neat symmetry of it all.

Blueprints

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

they said the walls
were sturdy—concrete poured
from buckets of air,

the engineers signed
with pens that bled
erasers,

the mayor smiled
a ribbon snipped clean
as the rain began.

a canal drawn
in crayons,
the paper soggy with promises,

steel beams
hollow as straws,
bending when looked at,

cement sacks
filled with dust,
not gravel.

the flood came,
clapping like a drunk
in the middle of mass.

The Flesh Has More Than One Clock

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

I write from the body—

not the one the mirror insists upon,

but the one that remembers dreams in the knees

and arguments in the hips.

It isn’t static.

It sheds timelines like skins:

butch at dawn, trans at dusk,

sometimes a lesbian by the crooked light

of a stranger’s attention.

This body,

this slow inheritance of old wars and new whispers,

has multiple calendars.

Hormones tick like mutinous clocks—

somewhere in the spine,

time stretches and knots.

There is no single verb for becoming.

Only a chain of half-lived synonyms:

aching, adjusting, insisting.

Desire makes the image.

It draws the outline not with ink,

but with waiting.

It sketches in the margin

where my breath meets someone else’s listening.

Sexuality is not a map,

but a trembling—

and the body, that cartographer of secrets,

redraws borders each time I close my eyes.

And pleasure—

yes, even that—is a kind of governance,

a ritual,

a reminder that flesh is political,

even in the solitude of its own making.

So I write.

From the fourth rib today,

the wrist tomorrow.

From a scar I haven’t named.

And the page—

God help the page—

must keep up.

Where the Names Were Scraped Off

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

There are barren places in the world,
and barren places in the mind—
regions gone pale with forgetting,
where time has scraped the names off things,
and memory, clumsy and desperate, draws in the rest.

I walk there often.
Not for comfort.
Not for truth.
But because even absence has its own topography,
and I’ve grown familiar with the sound
my feet make on hollow ground.

You don’t choose what fades.
The body sheds what it must
to keep moving.
But sometimes, what is lost
was never truly gone—
only silenced,
only renamed.

A hand becomes a shadow.
A voice becomes a wind through cracked glass.
A shame becomes a shape
you sidestep in the dark.

Still, the self persists—
not whole,
but fierce in the broken places.

I no longer demand clarity.
I no longer grieve
what I cannot place.
I have learned to live
among the blurred.

Let the past go toothless.
Let it gnaw only at the edges.
The center,
the still center,
is mine now.

And from that center,
I build—
not monuments,
but small rooms
where I can sit,
and say:
This too was a life.
Even if I do not recall every corner of it.
Even if some of it never truly belonged to me.

When the Easel Burned

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

When I build a fire, I do it the way I’ve done most things—
quietly,
purposefully,
without asking anyone’s permission.
Not to warm the house—it’s too damn hot for that—
but to cleanse it.
To strip it of what still reeks of him.

I unbolt the joints of the thing he left behind,
his old easel, thick with years of paint and pride,
crafted from narra, maybe tanguile,
the kind of wood you can’t kill quickly.
Colonial, solid, stubborn—
like his silence
when I finally said,
“This is who I am.”

And I stack the pieces just right,
angled for breath and burn.
He taught me that.
Not in words,
but in the way he lit things and left.

Then, by firelight,
I see what I’ve done.
I am burning the last of him.
The easel he used when I posed for him
at twenty-two, all cheekbones and borrowed courage,
the boy he called muse
when he still thought I could be reshaped.
He said my softness was tragic.
I thought his hardness was love.

For months I sat for him,
naked but not free,
learning how to disappear in plain sight.
He painted me into a man
he could stomach in public,
toned down, angled up,
never too much.

What if someone had told me,
back then,
“If you quit now—if you play the part,
the obedient shadow, the half-you—
he might stay.”
What would I have said?

I didn’t even have an art back then.
Not really.
Just this body
that never fit his frame.

But the fire fits everything.
Even narra yields,
given time.

So it burns—his easel—
with the quiet dignity of a thing
that finally understands its purpose
was never to hold the image,
but to be consumed by truth.

He thought he left it behind
as a gesture, a gift.
But like most gifts from men like him,
it came with a condition:
stay smaller than him.

And yet—look at it now.
Listen to it crack.
The molave groans.
The flames dance, not like lovers,
but like survivors.

I don’t miss him.
I miss the boy who waited for him.
The boy who curled into the corners of someone else’s genius
just to be seen.

But tonight—
tonight I watch it burn.
And in the smoke,
I see the outlines of someone else:
not a muse, not a model,
but a man
who chose to rise
outside the painting.

The Wanting

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

Normal is such an impossible word, isn’t it?
Like trying to hold water in a sieve
and then blaming your own hands
for the flood that comes anyway.

When I was younger—
and that youth was not golden, mind you,
but feral, wiry, all angles and longing—
I worshipped at the altar of Normal.
As if it were something to be earned.
A badge. A prize. A sentence.

I made it a game:
the right smile, the timed laugh,
the mathematics of eye contact.
Normal was always
ten steps ahead, and I
ran in its wake like a dog
that doesn’t know it has teeth.

Meanwhile, another version of me—
you know the one—
slipped quietly into the fantasy lands.
The other girl, the secret self,
barefoot in some imagined ruin,
reading books that no one assigned,
kissing no one, but learning how it might feel
if she did.

There, the rules bent toward meaning.
People said what they meant,
or didn’t speak at all.
Even the silence was holy.

The fantasy lands were wildly innocent—
not pure, never that—but untouched
by the filth of pretending.
It was not escape.
It was rehearsal.
Not for what I was—
but for what I could be
if I ever stopped apologizing.

Back in the other world,
I smiled so hard I cracked.
The air smelled of plastic and performance.
And still I returned,
because there is a violence in wanting
what is outside the script.

But my god, I wanted it.
I wanted to unlearn the rituals,
to discard the armor,
to stop splitting myself
into the one who performed
and the one who watched.

Desire bloomed in the chest like fever.
It made the hands shake,
it made the rooms seem too small.
Everything—every hallway, every silence,
every turned back—
became a door.

And I,
a body too full of wanting,
tried them all.

The Gospel According to Pleasure

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

All my work belongs to pleasure.
Not joy. Not bliss. Not that weak helium.
Pleasure,
with its warped theology—
the kind that scalds before it soothes.
I’ve never trusted happiness.
It arrives too quickly and leaves like a lover
who’s taken the salt with him.

But pleasure—
that is a scholar.
It has dogmas. It takes notes.
It comes dressed in shadows,
and teaches you how to flinch beautifully.

Sometimes, it’s the ache after truth.
Sometimes, it’s the lie you let stay
because the body asked you to.
And you listened.

They never warned me that pleasure
could smell like a fight,
or feel like forgiveness with a razor tucked inside.

I mean this:
My sentences crawl out of want.
Not always sexual—
but sometimes, yes.
The kind that lives in the back of the neck,
behind the knees,
in the soft fascism of restraint.

I write for it.
I write around it.
It is the only church I still attend.

And every line I craft,
I hope it moans.
Not loudly—
but like something real
dragged into the light
and made to name its source.

The Sea Is the Lips of the Earth

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

The sea is the lips of the earth.
It parts slightly at dawn, a whisper
barely heard—
something between hunger and memory.

Sometimes it smiles:
not for you,
but for the moon
which has never left.

Other times, it pouts—
folding ships into its mouth
as if to say,
I told you not to come so close.

The Lap of the Mind

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

Is it insanity, this urge

to touch her as her mother did—

not in gesture alone but in soul,

as if I could remember her birth,

as if the scent of milk and blood

belonged also to me?

I stroke her flank and feel

the vibration of trust,

that peculiar stillness before the purr,

and I wonder—

what if she thinks me divine?

What if she believes I hung the sun

outside the window

just so her naps could be lit?

She is fur and secret,

eyes like polished marbles

that do not judge,

only gaze—

into me, into the fog of my thoughts,

as if she sees the boredom

tucked beneath the chores,

the loneliness unspoken

in the morning toast.

I kiss her head.

A ridiculous thing.

A human thing.

And she blinks slowly,

as if to say

do it again.

Is this not love?

To imagine what she feels

when she curls,

tail wrapped like a question

I will never answer.

Sometimes,

her small voice pierces the air,

a mewl, a demand,

a ghost of her mother’s call

or a sound she makes

just to remind me

we are two creatures

alone together.

She swipes at the curtain

and I laugh—

so sudden, so savage,

so alive.

Her mischief is a flame

licking at the edges of my melancholy.

I hold her

and think of madness,

the sweet kind

that smells of fur and sleep.

The kind that heals.

The kind that saves.

And if I am mad,

then let me stay mad.

For there is nothing in this world

as sane

as love dressed in whiskers.