The Devil

a poem by Roger B Rueda

It's green with envy, its life a confusion,
a denunciation –
it doesn’t want others to be jubilant.
All it wants is misery of others,
its dream devastation,
its mind disloyal to its god, its creator.
It smiles like an angel,
its words dignified,
its swarthy heart
filthy & faithless.
It takes in everyone.
It doesn’t want to see the truth –
All it wants is its lies had faith in
to be real, to be unspoiled.
Its pride brims over,
its horns so sharp & pointed.
It is ready to ram anyone
against it, bitter & cross.
It tells of untruths –
its flesh is redeemed,
free from pain, and its soul
put on the rack, every piece
of it will be squashed & turned
to piranhas looking ravenously
hungry in the conflagration of vermilion water.

hahahahaha

Goldfishhood

a poem by Roger B Rueda

You’ve turned red, orange, white, black, blue,
chocolate brown, yellow, red and white,
black and red, black red and white, calico –
your skin’s  hardened.
Your back is gently arched, until it
reaches the caudal peduncle,
when it sharply angles downward
and meets your tail,
your eyes fluid-filled sacs
forming on each side of your face.
Your tail tends to flare out
and looks fuller than
that of the comet.
Now, you love playing all day
and exploring your aquarium,
your everlasting,
swimming with the nose down
and tail fin up.
You relax and let yourselves rise up.
You hide behind a plant
or in a cave when you feel in danger.
We’ve had a good feed for you:
I want to tell you something,
but I know
goldfish live inanely –
I think it’s nice if I let you be, lovely pets.

Mangoes

a poem by Roger B Rueda

Don’t pluck a stalk of green mangoes
from the tree –
then I was only ill once
and that came
of eating unripe mangoes.
They were acrid
even with honey.
Always choose
firm, but ripe mangoes.
Wait about –
they’ll fall when they become fully grown.

The Box

a poem by Roger B Rueda

has stiff sides, it is too dark inside to see much.
Yes, your imagination is vivid, like a kite
flown in the air, with a long string attached
which you hold while it is flying.
You dandle every sheet of veneers,
every crevice and every chasm
of life and your whole fantasy.
You hypothesise and speak
words of great wisdom.
You surmise when there is so little
to go on, to live on.
You believe you’re telling –
an immortal, a god (with death).
You speak of adages and dictums,
your mouth sharp and quick-witted,
your words fire to the shivering depth.
Outside, the box is a presence wrapped
in a pink SM gift wrap, its ribbon
a roseate satin strip, likeable and secret.
By it are a Galaxy S3 and my bag.
After a while, the birthday party begins.

Saccharum officinarum

a poem by Roger B Rueda

as the day breaks they are cutting the cane the slave cane

whose nightflowers of rubicund and rosy

are hiding their revelries from rays and view,

that rears over its cutters cracking and whizzing

with the immobilised vigour of a hungry peasantry;

that is a nightmarish crowd of androids, a ferocious

thick inflow of spikes and flapping buntings,

surging recalcitrantly and unable to rush onward,

checked by centuries of slavery that have bred it almost

seedless and sterile, needing man for

each new generation that's grown from the speartips

of those cut and crushed

by cohorts of men who are barely more free:

and where the cleared ground ends

they antagonise each other

the cane that is slave to its planter and cutter,

the cutter near slave to the owner of cane

in the dizzy heat of midday they are cutting the cane

bottles of water and white rum lie in the shade of slashed branches

with white rum and red wrath they are cutting the cane

hewing the thin skeletons for the marrows melodiousness

with cutlasses that live in contempt of bone

the bone of the neighbour who looks at your wife

the bone of your wife who's run back to her mother

the bone of your friend who's been seen with your boyfriend

every livid grievance can be cut out with a cutlass

but not the protest of cutting the cane for a pittance:

both cane and cutter carry leaf blades for the owner

in the calm of the evening they are cutting the cane

the infinite cane, the cane they make infinite,

the cane like themselves, like the arms of the starving,

the sweet cane that leaves an acerbic taste in the mouths of its reapers

The Other Night

a poem by Roger B Rueda

On the side, my mate lighted
a candle.
Fireflies balled
beside the fire,
pricking the black
about us.
From each end
of the shrubbery,
crickets whirred the warm,
slick air.
I thought of those who have
loved me,
gone like summer drupes
plumped from leaves;
their shadows
followed me
into the house. Now,
by the moon, a fading star.

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[A Plain & Practically Lucid English] Grammar

Product Details
Paperback: 320 pages
Publisher: CentralBooks, Quezon City
Language: American English
ISBN: 978-971-691-990-5
Product Dimensions: 6 x 9 x 0.7 inches
Price: Php 650
Contact: rueda215@gmail.com/0917 799 8660

Learning grammar is a way to devote to yourself. You don’t need anything more than a couple of good writing resources and an eagerness to take the time essential to sharpen up your skills. At first, it might be a drag, but ultimately, all those grammar rules will turn out to be second nature and you will have become a first class writer.

Mother

a poem by Roger B Rueda

She still minces it in little bites, the pith of a banana,

mung bean sprouts slick and shiny, lumpia wrap

blooming  from the pads  of her fingers,

until each seam gleams from her mother’s touch.

She tweaks sticky rice, each grain

twice-rinsed, to free the starch,

to feed this son, strengthen the march

of those suckling’s legs she recalls, the thump

and pull as he swam up from

the hollow sway beneath her ribs.

Her hand cupped on her middle, back

then she imagined him a sharp-tailed prawn,

fizzing pink curl of flesh,

anemone in a sweetened sea.

He belongs to me, she had held,

hollowing mangoes with the bowl of her spoon.

Giving she knows: to live. So even now,

Molo balls grow fat and rich in broth,

gabi, bangos, radish, string beans,

tamarind leaves  for soup. He will always

want sinigang, when he comes.

She’ll boil water later, sauté aubergine with eggs,

as good as that wife might wish

she could make, that wife who keeps

him, so distant, for years now,

in a country she’s never seen,

where she knows, just knows,

the bangos is never fresh,  the sinigang

so saline or  bland from lack of tamarind sap.

Tiwi

an essay by Roger B Rueda

A tricycle-ride away (60.42 metres) from the town proper of Barotac Nuevo, Tiwi is seat of the Iloilo State College of Fisheries (ISCOF) main campus. Tradition-bearers recount that then a dark cloud of tiwis would come swarming out of their nests and the mangrove swamps all over the ponds or rice-fields. Since then, the place has been called Tiwi by the local folks, who were originally fishermen, who were dab hands at culturing bangos and oysters along the coast. (The cluster of shacks and shanties, grey and weatherbeaten, covered in faded bamboo shingles, was then a scene to see in this peaceful village.)

The bird inhabits the marshland of the place, at the ponds. They have reclusive nature. Cautious and well camouflaged, the tiwi is hardly ever seen these days. They must have gone off somewhere very far in a sulk.

A wading bird, the tiwi eats a variety of bugs, earthworms, small molluscs, shrimps, and some vegetal matter as well as occasional seeds and berries. Its beak is long and flexible, able to find food by feel alone. When I was a young boy all of nine or ten, I saw some tiwis while slogging around swamped bottomlands. When startled, the birds would fly off in a zigzag pattern while emitting a high-pitched call. For one, not confident in its camouflage, being the same colour as dried grass, the tiwi can not stand still when it feels danger.

Their nests are dry grasses put together in a grass tussock at the edge of slushy areas. Usually, the hen lays four blotched eggs. Then, after an incubation of 18-20 days (shared by both parents), the eggs hatch. Like other ground-nesting birds, the young leave the nest almost immediately after hatching and are able to follow the mother in search of food. Within a couple of months, the small tiwi can fly well enough to fend for themselves.

The tiwi measures about 10 1/2 inches long and weighs about 4 1/2 ounces. It is most comfortable in shallow, freshwater marshy ranges. The tiwi’s brown, black, and grey feathering makes for superb camouflage in brambles and low-growing grasses. Its legs are shorter than most wading birds' legs.

I'm afraid that someday the bird will vanish without trace. Most Tiwinians must have not seen this bird. Conservation projects are the only hope of the bird to be kept for future generations. Locals should take pictures of the bird they happen to spot - to capture life that is transient and elusive. For one, the bird stands for the barangay and its people.

Tiwi is the most populated barangay in Barotac Nuevo. In the world of magic and myth, they must be tiwis incarnate, quick-witted and sprightly. And these days, most Tiwinians are no longer fishermen. There are some who are and most of their fishing effort and harvest is focussed on five species: bangos, tilapia, seabass, prawns, and mud crabs. Each morning, you can still see local fishermen unload their catch and an early get up is rewarded by the most spectacular sun rise.

[Did you know? The first settlers of Tiwi were the Bayogoses, the Baitos, the Belgas, the Benbans, the Barsaleses, and the Bondads.]

The Adjective

an essay by Roger B Rueda

The adjective delimits (or limits) the noun or varies its meaning. A simple denotation can be deepened or changed or confined by an adjective.  We can grasp everything - from concepts to images - considerably or unmistakeably through the adjective.

Personally, the adjective helps me enchant my readers to slope into my imaginings, my ideas. It builds a tone for them, it generates a frame of mind, and it shows rigidity. It enlivens my writing to them, translating an experience or idea into written words that let them visualise the situation.

The art of playing with the most fitting adjectives is the key for making a writing work well with the reader, I believe. Using a wide array of adjectives in a writing is indeed effective in the sense that it does not only drive away the readers’ encumbrance but also kindles their curiosity, to scour the whole texts for clues, for its drift.

That’s why as a writing teacher, when I teach sentence stylistics, my efforts are centred on the adjective – essentially, on the noun phrase, whose other component is the adjective. A writing can be well organised for one thing but can be rather dull without the sense of balance in the noun phrase. The adjective colours a writing and divulges the true nature of the writer. It gives anything we say some kind of configuration and piquancy and impression. It spices a writing up quite a bit or further, or somewhat. It calibrates the abstracts and feelings by helping the noun to be more perceptible and discernible. 

I’ve pored through the volumes of documents – novels, poetry books, journals, dictionaries, grammars – to get my hands on the adjective sequence, something that is widely held and shared. Demonstrably, I’ve incorporated it in a grammar I wrote in 2009, in APPLE [A Plain & Practically Lucid English] Grammar (CentralBooks). One thing I've wanted is to simplify the difficult task of teaching writing to beginners or foreign students. The sequence logical or practical as it may appear gives the noun phrase an element of structure, and that is important to a learner who is following a broad trail of dubiety and unfamiliarity, the trail where he seems to scrabble for ideas or methods. For one, a learner needs a thoughtful, penetrating mind, which he doesn't have yet, on the whole. A beginner learner in English might feel quite peculiar for the strangeness of language not their own. 

Indeed, I have come up with something to follow. Here is the list, a catalogue of a series, in turn; then a catalogue of examples – a sort of vade mecum for beginning writers:

(1) determiner-a, an, the, some, many, much, little, a little, a few, few, one, two, three, ten, fifty, this, these, that, those, first, second, third, my, his, her, their, our, your, Celine’s, any, several, every, a quantity of, a number of, a small number of

(2) opinion- amusing, anxious, beautiful, boring, comical, confident, crazy, delicious, droll, edgy, elegant, entertaining, exciting, fluent, funny, gorgeous, inferior, intelligent, happy, high- humorous, interesting, low-grade, mad, mediocre, nervous, passionate, poor, pretty, quality, rich, sad, sexy, serious, striking, stunning, substandard, tired, tedious, ugly, uneasy, witty

(3) size-big, large, small, thin, fat, tall, short, long, enormous, colossal, humongous, giant, king-sized, medium-sized, long-sized, short-sized, family-sized, plump, oversize

(4) weight-bulky, chunky, bantam-weight, heavy, light, hefty, thick

(5) participle-(-ing) cooking, playing, baking, dancing, swimming, writing, reading, singing (p.p.) fallen, hidden, broken, iced, baked, written, burnt, mixed, cut, sold, frozen

(6) temperature- cold, fiery, frosty, hot, lukewarm, temperate, tepid, wintry

(7) humidity-dry, wet, misty, soppy, watery, hazy, foggy, murky, cloudy, soaked, damp, soaking, drenched, sodden, soggy

(8) shape-round, triangular, rectangular, oval, elongated, circular, heart-shaped, pear-shaped, egg-shaped, spherical, rounded, globular, rotund

(9) age-old, young, new, vintage, antique, primeval, contemporary, current, previous, former, obsolete, medieval, traditional, long-established, time-honoured

(10) colour-pink, white, black, yellow, magenta, green, red, purple, blue, brown, grey, orange, sky blue, navy blue, yellow green, beige, taupe, mauve, lavender, auburn, colourless, fair-skinned, pale-skinned,

(11) origin-South Korean, North Korean, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, American, Australian, Chilean, Argentinean, Italian, Peruvian, Canadian, New Zealander, Russian, Swiss, Roman, lunar, solar, Mongolian, Philippine (culture/government/history), Philippines (news, crime, business, company)/Filipino (person)

(12) material- bamboo, cotton, crystal, egg, emerald, fibre, jade, gold, leather, metal, paper, plastic, fabric, apple, banana, beef, pork, fish, mushroom, mango, tomato, steel, carbon, coal, vinyl, porcelain, pearl, diamond, ruby, plywood, silver, rock, hydrogen, flour, ivory, wooden

(13) purpose- (-ing) , baking, cooking, , dancing playing, reading, singing, swimming, writing/ (noun) body, computer, eye, hand, pencil, school, street, table

By the way, number 5 is either the present participial adjective or the past participial adjective. The present participial adjective is used to refer to an action (perhaps developing or functional). Number 13 is the gerundival adjective. It is used to refer to a purpose. Determining the two adjectives is contextual, so the use of the two adjectives has to be executed with meticulous attention to detail and background. There are some dictionaries that incorporate these adjectives, but of course its description and definition are confined to few sentences, or worse there is nothing at all. 

Of course, the adjective has its own inflexion, but not much in English. A good memory retention is enough. There are some exceptional rules, but, well, a good grammar or a usage book is enough, to blaze a trail for you lest you are at sea. There are a lot of online sites, too, to turn to.

We can curiously intertwine our thoughts and the adjective as we draw in our bookworms to our words, as if by magic – as we quantify and limit a noun. An understanding of the adjective categorically makes anyone a better writer as well as a better speaker of English, in general, possibly - for one thing. This is because our life, every stratum of it, I think, should be pervaded by adjectives, since our life is nounlike, theoretical and more tangled than ever, yet it seems rather humdrum, you know. 

Streetchildren at Jaro Park

a video by Roger B Rueda

When I grow up, I want to work at a department store [like SM City or Gaisano] as a saleslady because I want to get an ATM card and save money in the bank. But first I need Php 60 to have my photo of me taken for me to apply for an ATM card.

I’m happy if my mum is happy and if she doesn't get sick. And I'll be happy if my father gets out of gaol.

I want to help my mum earn money - she's the only one who does that in our family. She works very hard to support us. I also have to sell candles. I always look for money to buy these accessories and sell them, to help her.