THE GOVERNMENT JO, THE MOST ABUSED SPECIES IN PUBLIC SERVICE

by Dr. Roger B. Rueda

Let us speak of the government Job Order worker—the employee who works full-time, thinks full-time, sweats full-time, but is paid as if labor were a hobby and survival an optional add-on. The JO is the only creature in the bureaucracy expected to deliver outputs with civil-service efficiency while enjoying contractual security roughly equivalent to a paper umbrella in a typhoon. In ASEAN folklore, this figure is familiar: like the water buffalo (carabao/kerbau) praised for strength yet fed last, or the anak-dalangin of Malay tales who bears the village’s burdens without inheritance, the JO is valorized for endurance while denied protection. This condition is not accidental; it is what sociologist Guy Standing identifies as the deliberate manufacture of the precariat—a workforce kept flexible, anxious, and politically quiet (Standing, 2011).

From the lens of Sikolohiyang Pilipino, the persistence of the JO system is sustained by culturally potent values such as tiis, pakikisama, and utang na loob, which quietly moralize endurance and discourage complaint. As Virgilio Enriquez argued, when survival is framed as virtue, structural injustice is easily misrecognized as personal sacrifice rather than institutional failure (Enriquez, 1992). The JO is thus trapped in a double bind: culturally praised for resilience yet structurally punished for asserting need. Like the aswang’s victim who is told to stay silent lest the village panic, the JO learns that speaking up risks social sanction. In this way, folklore, psychology, and modern labor economics converge—revealing that precarity survives not only through contracts, but through stories we have been taught to endure rather than resist.

They are told, with a straight face, that they are not employees, merely “engaged services.” This linguistic acrobatics allows the State to enjoy their labor without the inconvenience of benefits, tenure, or moral discomfort. In ASEAN folklore, this is the old trick of renaming the burden: like the trickster datu who calls forced labor “voluntary service,” or the Thai phi that drains life at night while insisting it offers protection by day. Words are used not to clarify reality but to soften exploitation. Max Weber would recognize this instantly—bureaucracy rationalizing itself out of ethical responsibility by hiding behind technical language, converting moral questions into administrative categories (Weber, 1922).

From the perspective of Philippine psychology, this denial is made palatable through hiya and pakikisama: the worker is subtly taught that questioning labels is impolite, disruptive, even ungrateful. As Virgilio Enriquez observed, colonial and bureaucratic systems survive by training people to internalize restraint, mistaking silence for harmony (Enriquez, 1992). Thus, “engaged services” becomes not just a contract term but a psychological leash—employment by denial. You work, therefore you exist, but only until payday, and even that is negotiable. Like the folk hero who saves the village yet is written out of the ending, the JO labors in full view, then disappears from the story the moment rights are mentioned.

Government JOs draft reports, manage offices, teach classes, process claims, respond to emergencies, and keep agencies alive while plantilla holders attend seminars on “work–life balance.” Yet when JOs ask for security, they are accused of being impatient, ungrateful, or—my favorite—political. As if wanting PhilHealth were a revolutionary act. Labor leader Leody de Guzman has repeatedly pointed out that contractualization in government is not an economic inevitability but a policy choice—one that transfers risk to workers while insulating institutions from accountability (de Guzman, 2019).

Let us be clear: defending JOs is not an attack on government—it is a defense of its credibility. A State that preaches social justice while running on disposable labor is practicing ideological plagiarism. Karl Polanyi warned that when labor is treated as a mere commodity, detached from human life and social protection, society pays the price in instability and moral decay (Polanyi, 1944). You cannot sermonize about dignity while institutionalizing precarity. That is not governance; that is gaslighting with letterhead.

Some argue, “But they agreed to the terms.” Yes—and people once agreed to indentured labor, too. Consent extracted from economic desperation is not freedom; it is coercion with paperwork. Philosopher Martha Nussbaum, through the Capabilities Approach, reminds us that work must enable a life worth living, not merely prolong survival (Nussbaum, 2011). The JO accepts not because the system is fair, but because hunger is persuasive and rent does not wait for plantilla items.

Government JOs are not asking for privilege. They are asking for the radical idea that if you work for the State, the State should not treat you as temporary furniture. They want benefits because sickness is not contractual. They want security because rent is not seasonal. They want respect because patriotism does not pay electric bills. Futurist Yuval Noah Harari warns that societies that normalize worker insecurity in the name of efficiency are not preparing for the future—they are breeding anxiety and resentment (Harari, 2018).

So let us stop pretending that Job Orders are “cost-saving measures.” What they save is not money but conscience—by outsourcing injustice to the most powerless workers. Storyteller George Orwell showed us how systems endure by normalizing humiliation until it feels ordinary (Down and Out in Paris and London, 1933). The JO system survives not because it is right, but because it has been made routine.

Defending government JOs is not charity. It is constitutional housekeeping—the unglamorous but necessary act of sweeping injustice out of the very institutions that claim to uphold social justice. In ASEAN folklore, the house that refuses repair eventually collapses on its own occupants; the bahay na binayaan in Philippine tales rots not because storms are strong, but because caretakers look away. So it is with the State: a government that tolerates injustice within its own workforce cannot credibly lecture the nation on fairness.

As F. Sionil José reminded us, injustice persists not because it is unseen, but because it is tolerated when convenient—normalized through habit, excused by procedure, and justified by silence. Philippine psychology names this dangerous accommodation as sanayan sa mali: the slow training of conscience to accept what should have been resisted from the beginning (Enriquez, 1992). This tolerance has gone on long enough. What began as a temporary arrangement has hardened into institutional neglect, and folklore, psychology, and history agree on one lesson: when injustice is allowed to settle in, it does not stay small—it grows roots.

I hope that they be given at least a minimum wage of ₱800–₱900 a day by 2026, especially in a country where billions are routinely wasted on ghost projects that exist only on paper and in press releases. In ASEAN folklore, the village that feeds its idols while starving its people is always the one cursed with drought; the gods, after all, do not eat cement. Philippine psychology would call this a failure of kapwa: we invest in abstractions and monuments while neglecting the living humans who keep the State running day to day.

Their existence is worth more than any project that never materializes. A road that is never built does not feel hunger. A bridge that exists only in reports does not get sick. But Job Order workers do—and they still show up. As Amartya Sen’s human-centered view of development reminds us, the true measure of progress is not infrastructure counts but the expansion of people’s real freedoms and well-being. If the State can afford billions for nothing, it can afford dignity for those who actually make government function.

 

THE CONTRADICTIONS OF CHRISTMAS IN THE REPUBLIC

 by Dr. Roger B. Rueda

That season when the archipelago is punctured by both cash bonuses and conscience deficits falls on the Philippines is a kind of ironic halo. Christmas in the Philippines is not so much celebrated as performed with the devotion of a Shakespearean tragedy and the consistency of a government alibi. We are, as Gabriel García Márquez might sigh, in a Season of Miraculous Forgetting. 

Right now, in some shanty village of the Philippines, a mother is stirring a pot of instant noodles and calling it Noche Buena. She is neither a snob nor an idealist. Pure of heart and simple in spirit, she is, after all, following the example Christ himself set: “Man shall not live by bread alone,” as Matthew (4:4) tells us. But alas, reader, sometimes there is no bread—only boiling water and borrowed faith. And yet, the Department of Trade and Industry—a veritable master of comedy in the guise of public service—has the nerve to say that a ₱500 Noche Buena is all any family of five needs! My goodness! Somewhere a senator is robbing ₱5 billion, a governor hiding ₱50 million in confidential funds, and a mayor “auditing” her conscience with a designer handbag. And there comes DTI to tell the poor to make up low-fat meatloaf or imaginative sardines.

This is not economics; it is theology in drag. The miracle of making do without any money is, in substitution for loaves and fishes, merely survival against shortages all around. So when DTI grins and says, “₱500 will do,” just remember—it is not a budget; it is an obituary for dignity, delivered with press releases, straight faces, the lot!

When poor people sing Christmas carols wading in floodwaters, they are more than just hopeful; they do resilience as the national pastime. They are true disciples of Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, finding purpose in suffering while those in power look for a way out. Their parol is not made of capiz but of courage; their nativity scene, persistence, not porcelain. And somewhere in the same archipelago, politicians and high-ranking officials are pocketing billions, grinning like choirboys in congressional hearings. Meanwhile, the Department of Health has left its so-called “mega health centers” halfway through, hardly constructed, so that all they stand as are concrete carcasses to mediocrity. The irony? Poor and sick they may be, yet it’s a sick land that awaits them—“under construction.”

We are told to wait, patiently endure, as if divine mercy were a substitute for good governance.

My friends, this is not faith. This is state-endorsed martyrdom—poverty as policy, resilience as anesthesia, and corruption as the country’s only illness that even the DOH will not admit. Yet somewhere uptown, the officials whose neglect turned this annual Atlantis into Christmas Chaos parasol in their solemn annual handouts, distributed with flood bolts labeled “From your public servant.” They call it charity. We call it crime with ribbons.

For the corrupt Filipino, Christmas is the Fourth Quarter of Damnation. Luke 12:15 warns us, “Take care to guard against every kind of greed, for even though he is rich, the man’s life does not result from all his possessions.” But our political class treats this verse like a footnote that didn’t get it.

In this day and age, they are like modern-day Pontius Pilates, washing their hands with sanitizer after underwriting a bloated contract—even adding that they are Scrooges without redemption. They use spreadsheets to rewrite Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth. They throw charity balls where the chandeliers cost more than the donated funds. They even quote that “it is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35)—conveniently forgetting that what they give is first from the society’s exchequer.

And when the Commission on Audit appears like the Ghost of Christmas Past, they feign surprise—as if their villas were built by elves, their luxury cars delivered by the Three Kings. Each auditor’s report becomes a morality play in which robbers feign victim, and taxpayers are the laugh of fools. They clutch their pearls, issue statements of “transparency,” and chant the favorite hymn of the guilty: “We welcome any investigation.” Of course—investigations are like novenas in this country: said regularly, seldom answered. So the public watches the game, fully realizing that each thousand pesos hence embezzled is a centimeter widening that one pothole, the next project delayed, another Filipino’s dream being whittled down.

The simple soul, like Thoreau at Walden Pond, spends Christmas in silence. One candle, one petition prayer, one song—this suffices. To him, God dwells not in theatrical splendor but in the simple fact of being alive. He knows that life’s truer meaning, like Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich, is found not so much in things as in being.

But the ambitious soul—oh, here is rich comedy and laughter! Christmas for them is, as pointed out, a PR campaign veiled in piety. They post “gratitude reflections” on Facebook with all the sincerity of a corporate press release and attend Simbang Gabi not for the novena but to be photographed. They are the epitome of Kierkegaard’s “aesthetic stage”: living in irony and excelling in profundity, sinking deeply into superfluousness.

But in the midst of contradictions, something sacred still flickers. The poor who share their last can of sardines. The nurse who works through Christmas Eve. The teacher who buys her own chalk. These are the real Magi of our age—bearing gifts of endurance. But they do not, in display, come on camels. With hands frozen from empty electricity bills, they do not follow a star but rather the faint light of unpaid bills. Every day, in the ruins of false promises and half-built hospitals, these ordinary citizens perform miracles—resurrecting hope with nothing but faith and the hard-scrabble obstinacy of the Filipino people itself. If holiness were assessed not by wealth but by sacrifice, then the nation’s saints are not in the Senate but in the slums; not in the Cabinet but on our streets, in schools and hospitals, in wet markets where piety has not yet died completely. If Christ were born today in Baseco, not Bethlehem, his manger would be a cardboard box under some bridge somewhere. The shepherds would be security guards; the wise men, Grab drivers held up by traffic. And King Herod would have his own vlog entitled “The Truth Behind the Nativity Scam.”

In the words of Dostoyevsky, “You can judge the culture of a society by going into its prisons.” But here, you don’t even need to go inside one of those bars. Just look at any Christmas party—and then see who gets their place where it says “Reserved.” A man convicted of pillaging the public purse is now the guest of honor. Perfectly healthy architects of overpriced projects are leading prayers. Those same hands which signed ghost contracts now raise glasses of merlot to “public service.” Civilization, it seems, has degenerated into this. In this republic, which has no recall, the corrupt one struts pompously upon history’s stage in sequined gowns and tells us about “nation-building.” As waiters serve lechon to lawmakers with cholesterol in their consciences, the rest of the country watches from twisted television screens. They ask not for justice but only for any crumbs that might be left over. So, before we cry out “Merry Christmas!” let us remember the Lord’s thunder in Isaiah 1:23: “Your rulers are rebels, partners of thieves; they all love bribes and chase after gifts.” But this same passage also offers hope: “Come now, let us reason together… Though your sins are as scarlet, they will become white as snow.”

The miracle of Christmas, my friends, is not in shopping plazas nor in the palaces of public officials but in the innocence and laughter when uncorrupt hearts gather lighted candles, perhaps even music! It is also among poor people who get nothing but still find ways to contribute to others. The powerful may feast themselves on tricks, but the humble already dine in grace.

 

The Pickled Poem

by Roger B. Rueda

Writing a poem is like pickling mango:
first the fruit—green, hard-headed, feigning innocence.
You cut into it with a modicum of insensitivity,
see the pallid flesh recoil, from air and meaning.
That’s the raw, defensive, sour first version.

You salt the lines to draw sweat,
to drive out of them the too much feeling,
the wrong sweetness the poets all love to keep.
Then you wait — oh yeah, the waiting is the kicker.
They never teach that in workshops.

The vinegar of revision stings your hands;
and you stir both truth and memory,
ignoring the bitterness of each in turn.
Too much sugar, and the poem is polite;
too little, and no one will taste its pain.

And then days or years later, you go back to the jar—
the poem has darkened, deepened,
tasted like something one had to put up with.
You open it carefully,
and then it meets you: sharp, acidic, unapologetic.

To write, as to pickle,
is to fix the instant before it is lost,
to trust that rot and beauty
can share the same glass.
And when you taste it—your tongue is burning,
but you ask for more.

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.