Dinagyangman

fiction by Roger B Rueda

Crowds of people poured into the streets of Iloilo City Centre. I pushed my way through them.It was hot and getting hotter.There was a great crash and then a long roll of drums.The first tribe to perform was something to get excited about. My camera started clicking as soon as the tribe stepped in the performing area. I didn’t bring anything except my Galaxy S3 – I was well aware of pickpockets.

I entered into the spirit of the occasion and stood beside a man who was beside himself with excitement. He turned to look at me. I smiled at him. His eyes smiled up at me.

I was all alone in the middle of the crowds, enjoying my life as throughout the street, the views were a constant source of surprise and delight, vibrant rhythms all over.

‘Excuse me,’ the crowd were enormously enthusiastic, so it was not easy to get through.The heat and the noise made me sleepy. I began to get dizzy spells.I looked at him again; his neck had henna tattoo. He winked at me, as if he knew I was thinking the same thing that he was.

I took a step away from him, but his face lingered on in my mind.I walked away, eyes shut, body tense.I began to perspire heavily.  My skin was tanned and glowing from my day at the Dinagyang.

I edged a little closer to some buildings. I trudged wearily down Mapa Street. After quenching my thirst with a long drink of cold water, I needed to snack on some sandwich and tea. All the shops were congested with spectators.

I went in a small café in a lobby of a small hotel. I sat in the corner and browsed through the pages of a magazine, some newspapers lying on a nearby couch. I had been to the café several times, so it was such a comfortable haunt to me already.The server appeared. ‘Do you have Darjeeling?’ He nodded and smiled.

After a few minutes of sipping at my tea, fresh groups of guest arrived. Suddenly, the lobby got crowded and noisy. Judging from their looks, it seemed they were all worn-out. After drinking cans of juice, they noisily slipped away. One guy came and sat down on the couch. His breath came in short pants. He turned his head left to right. Out of the corner of his eye he saw that I was looking at him. I was painfully shy of him – he was the guy I had seen in the crowd. The tea gave me a choking fit.

I turned my chair to face the door and continued with my reading.

‘I’m Ralph,’ he tapped me on the shoulder.He had a big smile on his face. I gave him a hearty handshake. He stood still for longer than a few minutes – it was quite a shock to meet a handsome man with a beautiful voice.Then, I had thought someone came to me, but it had just been a dream.Now, it was real.

‘Please take a seat.’ I smiled warmly so he wouldn't see my nervousness.We exchanged addresses and numbers. He ordered a beer and a sandwich.

We chatted about many things. He was quite an interesting man. We eyed each other thoughtfully.

‘Where are you from?’ I asked.  I was intensely curious about the world he came from.

‘I am from San Miguel.’ I didn’t know much of San Miguel. I only knew one there – Rowena, my co-worker.

‘How about you?’He lifted the beer can to his lips and sipped.

‘I’m from Mandurriao.’ I bit into my sandwich.

‘So how’s the Dinagyang?’ he asked. ‘I like the Panayanon,’ he added.

‘Romel Flogen choreographs the tribe,’ I told him.

‘Really, I thought he choreographs the tribe from Fort Sant Pedro.’

‘Yes, that was last year. See, now, that tribe isn’t joining. That’s why he accepted the job.’

‘I’m really amazed by their performance. I thought the Panayanon is from Fort San Pedro.’

‘Hahaha, it’s of the Iloilo City National High School.’

‘I need to go,’ his mobile phone was ringing off. He said a hurried goodbye and walked out of the café.

‘I’ll be at the ASAP 18 later, in the sports complex. I think after I’ve eaten lunch,’ I shouted as he was heading the main entrance of the hotel.

***

While I was lying in bed, my phone tweeted. ‘i’lb in smallville. jst mssge me wn ur hr. c u.’I didn’t go to the sports complex. I was getting bored, thinking how crowded it was – it was like spending an hour or two in torment.

I had a shower and went out early – I needed to be there earlier than him. I fell under his spell, perhaps. There was something about him that mesmerised me, I thought.

It took a long time to wash the dirt out of my hair and my whole body. I wore my cleanest pants, a clean shirt and a navy blazer.

***

As one might expect, Smallvillewas full of partyers.The cars choked the roads. As the taxi drew off in front of CoffeeBreak, I got off. I felt a little nervous. I was in a state of great excitement.

‘Vir,’ someone called out my name. Ralph was sitting all alone at a table outside the coffee shop. He waved at me as if we were so familiar – as if we had met and known each other since long time ago.

‘Who’s with you?’ I greeted him with a smile.

‘No one.’ He looked at me openly.

I pulled a chair and sat facing him. ‘Wait a minute,’ I told him. ‘Do you want something?’

‘Just buy prune juice,’ he replied as I was meaning to stand.

I went in the coffee shop and ordered some tuna casserole and black coffee – a bottle of prune juice. Ralph was busy browsing through his iPhone.

I went back too soon – the server was the one to bring all my orders.

‘Do you have a boyfriend?’ he asked as I was trying to transfer some of my things to the other chair.

‘I had two – but now I don’t have. It has been years.’ I looked at him with all honesty.

‘Me, too,’ he mumbled as the server was placing the order on the table.

We nattered into the night. A spot of rain fell on his hand.

‘Let’s go,’ he suggested.

***

His car was parked up across the street. ‘Let’s go to my car,’ he told me pointing his lips at the white car.

I was confused to where we were heading. But I just entrusted myself to him as sort of instinct. I didn’t know why I believed a stranger I’d never met for my whole life.

Photograph by Greg Delos Reyes

Fatherhood 2.0

fiction by Roger B Rueda

Near the gate of Chung Shan Public Elementary School, some rare birds flew down on a bough and began preening themselves. The pupils were walking into the entrance or went out into some shops. But Peregrino’s eyes were holding a look of envy with children positively revelling under the sun, and then the birds.

Yes, Peregrino envied the birds as they were perching on the boughs, soothingly, the tree flowers scenting the air. The perfect spot for an afternoon nap. He wished he could do the same - join the birds on the boughs and magically stay there as he closed his eyes and fell asleep.

His head was bobbing, his eyelids drooping. He didn’t sleep the other night. His shoulders ached from sitting hunched over the steering wheel of a taxi for close to 15 hours a day. And his hands had developed hard skin at the lines on his fingers that divided them into three neat segments.

The only place he could nap at the moment was the lawn that lay sprawling endlessly in front of him. Why not, he thought. But his only concern was he might start drooling as he often did when he slept, mouth wide open. Sometimes, he would somnambulate.

Peregrino’sflat in Wulai seemed so far-off to him now. An entire 60-minute train ride away. Even if he was to be sent to it without delay, he was sure that his insomnia would recur as soon as his jagged bed was within his grasp. So, he just sat on the bench looking on to the trees, holding his very old mobile and an airmail envelope in which the letter of her family was. It was in Tuwa's hand.

The paper smelt like Burayoc, their barangay. Even after all these weeks of being kept in his coat pocket, if he closed his eyes and took a scent of that paper, he could remember what his girls and their house smelt like, the way dust rose when a tricycle drove past, the way it settled in edgings of dresses and resided inside noses.

The handwritten letter in Panda pen ink was beginning to fade away. Some of it had gone in places. But he had read the text enough times to recite it in his slumber. The missing ink hadn’t bothered him before, but for the past few days it seemed to bear a growing space between the sender and him.

Peregrino’s daughter Tuwa, who was all of twenty, was getting married in three weeks. Three months ago, she had sent her father a letter asking him to come home to talk to the man’s family and make the troth official. But Peregrino had been unable to make it home early enough so his brothers-in-law, his wife’s brothers, had gone in place of him.

Tuwa hadn’t spoken to her fatherfor days for fear that he might be disappointed, she was with child for five months. But she was confident that everything would come out OK in time.Her boyfriend was a very responsible sort of person and had finished his university already, andthree months after she would graduate from university, too, so nothing to worry much, she thought.It was love at first sight, and he proposed to her six weeks later. Their love for each other had been increased by what they’d been through together.

Now all that was left to do was for Peregrino to fly back to Ilocos and attend the wedding ceremonyas if he wasa guest. Never did he feel angry with Tuwa. He was rather happy.

‘I’ve sent the money already,’ Peregreno reminded his daughter. ‘I’ve bought you a new phone. I’ll bring it when I get home.’ Every week, Peregrinowould look forward to talking to her daughter by phone, though sometimes he spent more than he would send home. After trying to make his wife realise that there was nothing to get so concerned about anything, he just stayed silent as he pinned his ears back to her unrelenting chatter on the other end.

He always found himself smiling when she talked because although most people would call it irritable, he was really paying attention to her voice. No different voice that he had fallen in love with when he heard it across a high wall for the first time. ‘Oh, Calliope, I love you.’

The girl with that voice at the time had come to visit his aunt and was calling to her seated on a jute makeshift bed nearby, cooling herself with a hand fan, asking whether she needed to debone the bangos. His aunt was a fisheries professor at the IlocosNorte Regional School of Fisheries.

All of twenty three, Peregrino had come out in the backyard just then to fetch his father’s snacks when his ears perked up at the sound of the voice, which he couldn’t define in any other way but like heavenly music, coming from the other side of the walls. He couldn’t see the person, but her voice to him was angelic. That afternoon, he teasingly asked his mother to examine who the young guest was around the corner.

‘Mother, Aunt Xenia has a visitor? Is she her student? Can you know her name for me? Peregrino’s mother was woozily happy to know who that girl was. Neighbours gossiped, shy eyes met and a couple months later, Calliope and Peregrino became man and wife under the shade of a mango large tree as the rest of the barangay celebrated around the love-struck couple. Twocarabaos and five pigs were butchered. The governor of IlocosNorte and the mayor of Pagudpudwere present, and they had sixty primary sponsors. That was 32 years ago. That was the time when Peregrino’s family had a farm to cultivate. They sold it for his father’s frequent hospitalisation.

On top of the three short years soon after their happy day that Peregrino and Calliope had shared a bed, a home, a life, time had gone by in the midst of them, with only these weekly phone calls holding them as one. That, and the three lovely children they had managed to produce in interjected moments spent together. If not Peregrino had lived on his own in a tiny flat in Wulai since 1997, when he had left Pagudpud for Taiwan.

He left his job as a security guard of a milk company in Pasong Tamo in Makati and decided to stay in Laaog for good, but employments were difficult to come by then in Laoag. And opportunities were not favourable. It means it was a dull life, nothing exciting to look forward to, nothing worth reflecting on. Peregrino, then in his mid-twenties, had a young wife and a sister in-law to support. After a dialogue with Calliope that stretched through the night until dawn, he decided to look for work in Taiwan. He had known Taiwan then when his two schoolmates had got married to a Taiwanese. Every year the families would visit Pagupud. And he had hear their companies continued to thrive. Their parents had moved to big houses.

He got to Taipei. He got a cheap ticket on-board a Chunghsing bus from the airport to the house of his friend to begin work for the agency that had hired him as a taxi driver.

Day after day, Peregrino’s day began at 5 AM, with Sundays and holidays. He could never sleep in an extra hour or stay underneath the over-blankets, however cold it was outside. And it was often cold outside in this city. He would slog himself out of bed, get dressed, and drive into the Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport.

There, he would turn into the next side street and park his taxi and wait for a harrowed traveller to come into view from the building’s sliding doors. If he desired a change of sight, now and then he would drive to the more placid Tianjin Street and wait there instead, but carrying outjustno different duty.

It would be unfair not to acknowledge the enthusiasm that his customers brought to the job. There were mothers rushing to kindergarten to drop off their children before work during mean phone calls from their boss because they were late just as the sitter said she couldn’t take the children this afternoon. There was always a drunken passenger on the weekend.  The kind who was so inebriated that they forgot where they lived. This was commonly a student from one of the many schools, or it was that young couple who kissed and cuddled in the back seat for heat and other reasons. But he was just another taxi driver in this city of two-and-a-half million and Peregrino longed to be back in a place where he was recognised as more than that.

What had he got in all these years that he had lived away from his family? True, he earned more than he ever would have if he stayed in Ilocos. It was enough to send home and live contentedly. But he had lost out on time rocking his child to sleep, falling asleep next to Calliope as he stroked her hair. He had missed special Sunday breakfasts of sinanglaw and watching boxing matches on television with the neighbourhood.

He was still treated as something like a god each time he returned, which wasn’t frequently. If the captivation didn’t stem from the fact that people were seeing him after so long, it was mostly because he was still amongst the handful of people in his family who had it, made it in a foreign country and coped to stay, as against those who ran back ina couple months, intenselybothered by what it meant to live outside IlocosNorte.

And many of them, at least of the younger generation, were waiting for their pair of rubber shoes or a new watch or a packet of cigarettes, which meant Peregrino’s coming meant more to them than anything. But now he desired to be home to be the father of his children. How he desired, not in Wulai, but in Burayoc, where he could participate in the pre-wedding madness that is a staple feature of a Filipino home. But because he was so distant, these choices were restricted to Tuwa’s uncles and male cousins.

So he just waited for the day that he would fly home. It was for keeps this time. He had turned in his papers a few days and said goodbye to fellow taxi drivers who were the closest he had to family. He had packed his valises with 15 years of musings and things, which remarkably didn’t go in for much space.

The last time Peregrino had been home was when his father had been diagnosed as having cancerten years ago. The old man was helpless and his dying wish was to see the son that he adored one more time before he close his eyes on the world for the last time.

This time, Peregrino was going back, not only for one or two weeks, but forever. He was bidding goodbye to the only life he had known for what had seemed like never-ending. He looked at his TransAsiaticket in disbelief, shaking his head. It almost didn’t seem real.

Peregrino set off for TaiwanTaoyuan International Airport in a taxi whichhe didn’t drive himselffor the first time,on the day of his travel. He got out, got his luggage, and generously tipped the driver $10. Making his way inside the airport, he checked in his luggage, took his boarding card, and headed for security.

During the checking procedures, he was called aside and given something the once-over. His things were opened and repacked. After an abrupt smile from the officer in charge, he was allowed to go on to the departure lounge while the authorities continued to shoot sly doubtful looks over their shoulders.

The plane ride seemed interminable. There wasn’t enough leg room and the meals seemed too small. Peregrino was sitting next to a larger toff who occupied most of the space available. That he was seated close to the washroom did not help his wish to get some sleep during the trip. Even the on-board entertainment couldn’t addle him.

Hours later, the plane landed on solid ground. After a brief period in transit, the plane landed on the Ninoy Aquino International Airport. He was relieved to be back to his country. He spent the next hour thinking of his family, of Burayoc.

The next time when the plane landed, it was in Laoag.

As subtly as possible, Peregrino tried to take in the air while still inside the aeroplane to check whether he could smell the familiar smell of Ilocos, of home. Nothing yet. His family would be coming up outside. He tried to be as good-mannered as possible to the other passengers as he quickly grabbed his cabin luggage from the overhead compartment and made a beeline for luggage claim.

He was cleared quickly. Stacking his belongings on to a nearby trolley, he was just aboutto run outside. And as he rushed through the sliding doors,a lot of things had changed.Laoag was no longer the city he used to know. The new Laoag was buzzing with so much energy.

A wave of Ilocos gentle wind greeted him.

The smell of the familiar, the smell of family. There she was, more lovely than he recalled - dark brown eyes, thick brown hair that peeked out throughout,and herangelic smile. She was a vision of loveliness.

‘Papa, Papa,’ called out Tuwa as he was coming near.Her voice was girlish and eager.

There were tears, embraces, and joy-filled cries. But the details are indistinct. After a two-hour taxi ride that had no space for silence, Peregrino was finally home in Burayoc, Pagudpud. He felt like he knew his future son-in-law more than he would have if he had spent three months with him. Tuwa’s animated chatter made it seem like she planned to tell her father five years of stories in one afternoon.

Peregrino got out of the taxi and stood in front of his parent’s house, the old home where he had grown from a boy to a man. His parents had left this world some time ago. His father left first and then his mother years ago. He had happy and sad memories of their house.

He opened the rusty gate that led to a front yard, which smelled still of rain. The sight of the gate was inexpressibly poignant to him. A small dog barked at him.  Yayay, their neighbour, who had been with the family since before Peregrino was born, came hobbling out, using a wooden stick for support. She wore a blouse and an abel as her skirt. She was a sensitive, lovable woman. She was weeping with tears of joy.

‘You look rather frail,’ she said, touching his face.

Peregrino’smoustache was as coarse as her palm, the result of more than 40 years of untiringly performing domestic activities. Peregrino just smiled and kissed Yayay on the temple.He laid his bag on the floor and opened it to get a watch for her.

Once the jet lag wore off, Peregrino was able to meet the guests who had started pouring in long before he was up. Some for the wedding, some for him, some for what he had brought with him. They shouted, pulled at his cheeks and asked him questions.

Fresh groups of guests arrived. After a while the room was filled with cases of liquor. They boozed all night. Calliope was sitting beside her husband, a little aloof and detached. He seemed not tired and exhausted.

***

One afternoon,Peregrino’s brothers-in-law introduced the two outside a coffee shop in a public market. He was a shrinking boy whose eyes appeared to say that he loved Tuwa perhaps as much as he loved his Calliope. That was good enough for him. All he wanted was a man who would love his daughter like the way he loved Calliope.

On the morning of the day before the wedding, the decorators had a spot in the garden wreathed so quickly. The florists transformed the front yard where the wedding would be held in a few days. They made an awning made of bamboo. They prepared everything in front of the house. The monobloc plastic chairs were arranged carefully at every table on which there were three plastic roses in every vase. With its simple decoration, the yard was a peaceful haven. Every neighbour then knew that Tuwas was getting married. Having a wedding reception at home was no longer popular in Burayoc, but Calliope liked it.

The caterers talked over particulars of the menu. Calliopeand Tuwahad several menus to choose from: goat caldereta, ox-tongue, lechon, carne frita, nilaga, estufado, and valenciana. The sweet sellers - leche flan, sorbete, buco-pandan salad - did the same. Peregrino was slightly astounded by all the bustles, a marked difference from his more than quiet life in Wulai. Being back after so long, he kept thinking that he could hear the bells of the train outside his window. He seemed of Wulai, and it followed him even in sleep.

He kept waking at 5 AM, getting rattled that he had slept late and remembering that he could sleep in as long as he liked. It felt wonderful to be back with Calliope again, falling asleep in her arms, his head against her chest that rose and fell with each breath that she took.

He tickled the hairs on the back of her neck. He was gently stroking her black hair. It felt so wonderful to be with a woman after so long. But they had so little to talk about. Tuwa wanted to move away to another city with her husband who had found work there, but Calliope didn’t like the idea. Peregrino promised to babysit his forthcoming grandchild, his first grandchild. So there was no reason for the couple to move away. He suggested that Tuwa’shuband-to-be could commute to his workplace every day.

In 15 years that he spent as an OFW, Peregrino had never felt completely accustomed to there. He couldn’t believe how he had coped with working abroad. And now that he was back, how could he feel so incongruous? He was surrounded by people he loved, by his neighbours, by his relatives. How come he felt so alone? In a bustling home preparing for the first wedding in years, why did he feel like he was crying, yet nobody heard him? Why did he feel he was living with strangers? Why did he sadly miss something he couldn’t recognise?

He would have to give off Taiwan to start out on Burayoc again. He would have to connect up with a wife who had turned into a stranger. He would have to find the familiar in what he always thought of as familiar. In the face of travelling so many miles, Peregrino’s journey was beginning with the fatherhood he had never experienced as his children were growing up, his eyes filled with tears, with pang of conscience and validation, with sorrow and contentment.

Now he was looking forward to having a grandchild soon as time was sitting in his hair.

Politics

a poem by Roger B Rueda

is a beast, its size and shape too small to see,
yet it is as colossal as our imagination.
It is calm but when it tousles its wool,
no one can hold sway over it –
politicians have tried out many things:
They lined up loads of rues
to break in the indefinable beast;
all didn’t come up to scratch.
They thought badly of each other,
calling upon that someone mounting
on it alight and leave off.
They came together at Edsa,
Dragooning the frontrunner into leaving.
A woman,whose husband was slain on the tarmac,
came from evasion and mounted the beast.
It jolted into motion and ran more wildly,
shaking its head confusedly.
A lot closed their eyes and heaved a sigh.
Some squaddies made a grab for a rope
And tried to usurp control of the beast.
They all bit the dust.
Another frontrunner came.
The beast quietened down a little.
His challenger provoked him into a boxing match,
accusing him of cheating, a cynical ploy.
Then another frontrunner came.
Clinging to the withers,
he was dragged off from the beast’s back
at Edsa again and sent down.
Everyone conspired so that he would turn
a somersault down the feet of the beast
and be trampled underfoot.
Another woman mounted the beast.
Her nemeses flung many expletives at her
as she seemed to have no plan of alighting.
Their swear words are soaking into her fame
now as she is kneading her aching neck,
her pride and honour hemmed in by rigid laws.
Her 25th December is not a red letter day.
The son of a previous frontrunner
has mounted the beast, gnashing his teeth.
He wants to turn round the straight way.
He has chucked the crown of a justice
in the dustbin and dismissed it with ignominy.
He has smashed the pork barrel
into the face of his cohorts, feeding them
another unknown nourishment
like a mysterious fruit in a covert.
Bearers of the cross hardly dare open their mouths.
Will the beast put its feet up and become
visible and  untroublesome and gentle?
A hush has fallen over the crowd, its drift pendent.

Beauty

by Roger B Rueda

Most Filipinos esteem beauty as it makes life more charming and fair and diverting. We are in awe of beauty in whatever we do and see. Our mind's eye is keen on beauty as perhaps it is highly enchanting and eye-catching. We are intensely eager, indeed avid, for beauty. Unmistakeably, we have generated beauty pageant machinery as every culture upholds beauty. Miss Dinagyang or Miss Sinulog or Masscara Queen or our Miss Barangay stands an example for this. Hence, this year Miss World and Miss International have been won by the Philippines. Our country has become a marque of beauty all throughout beauty pageants in the world. It’d be incongruous for the Philippines not to be on the top 10 list as Filipino beauty queens are distinctively graceful and jauntily confident and know their own mind.

The beauty pageant has become a way of life to many of us as we weave it into our life as we celebrate the beauty of life in the midst of our struggles. It gives our people individuality and style, helping them boost their morale and their true selves and implicitly raise the value of life in every way we think to be beautiful.

As a country of cataclysms and misfortunes, the Philippines has to be irrepressible and dynamic, making beauty as a means to deflect itself from the ordeal and pessimism and defeatism. It has to use beauty to overcome the dreariness of life and the desolation of its people. It has to exploit beauty to keep its difficulties and predicaments forestalled.

I watched the Miss Universe 2013 twice over. I stayed up late for Miss World 2013. For Miss International 2013, I just saw some posts of my friends on Facebook. Quite frankly, I didn’t expect that Bea Rose Santiago would make it, so I didn’t bother to keep tabs on her. I was in a state of great excitement when I read her name entered on the shortlist of 10 and 5.

I really expected much of Ariela Arida, but her gown was a jinx, a hoodoo. She had a very good answer during the Q & A, but her tawdry gown made of some cheap material withheld her of the Miss Universe crown. She looked then like a fake Barbie doll, two a penny at Jaro plaza. It was really naff. Had she been given the best gown, she could have been adjudged Miss Universe 2013. It was a wasted opportunity.

What I like of Ariela is her piercing black eyes. She looks slender-waisted, resilient, and very beautiful. Her waist-length hair lustrously cascades as she does her catwalks. She appears poised and calm.

Before the Miss World competition, I happened to see Megan Young on GGV. I had a gut feeling that she would make it. Megan Young has a captivating allure. She’s got a nice smile especially because she has very pretty straight teeth. She has a gorgeously warm speaking voice. She is a confident woman who is certain of her views. Her mouth is seductively fat and full. I love her interview on my favourite BBC. She is the embodiment of a perfect Miss World. Proud to be a Filipino, she thanked her countrymen. Then, a great cheer went up from the Filipino crowd carrying Philippine flags. It was spine-tingling. A cry of pride and happiness broke from me.

Bea Rose Santiago is dazzlingly beautiful. Her skin is clear and smooth. She also has a milky-white innocent visage. Her smile is captivating; her looks, alluring. I love seeing her wear the mikimoto crown and a woollen cape. She is more modest and shy, yet she tends to have an inner force.

I reviewed the video of Bea’s speech before the announcement of Miss International posted on Facebook. Yes, it was beautiful. It is particularly impressive. Her answer goes beyond being a beauty queen but as being a vehicle for her humanitarian intents.

Indeed, I can say that the Philippines is a beautiful country – a queendom for beauty queens.  It is a place where beauty is prestige and treasure and as a symbol of resilience and transformation to combat poverty, inequity, and conflicts. It holds women dear and as they are received with adulation and value. Giving women the opportunity to flash about their beauty is a sign that we as a country are progressive and more caring and genial.

Beauty then proves to be a catalyst for change as it uplifts the mind and the spirit, so it has to be celebrated as it buoys our optimism and compassion. It speaks of our amazement and greatest admiration. It is paying homage to God for giving us all the beauty life can bring. It is what we yearn for as a human being as no one likes to be ugly and unlikeable. It is our muse that fuels our inspiration to live life with hopefulness and contentment. It lightens our discomfort and grief. It shields us against our horror and inexorable confusion.

A Read Before You Get Soaked Standing Out in the Rain

by Roger B Rueda

‘A Rain Scene’ is another poem by Alain Russ Dimzon which I like very much. The poem won First Place in the Home Life Poetry Contest in 1999. That year my fellow Generoso Opulencia at the 41st UP National Writer Workshop got the Second Place for his poem ‘Regarding Flowers from La Trinidad.’ ‘Paper Boat’ by Ulysses Aparece got the Third Place,’ so ‘A Rain Scene’ had to face stiff competition for the First Place as the shortlisted poems that year were very agreeable and illuminating, making poetry a vicarious form of social life and human predicament and delectation. I am sure it was difficult for the judges to vacillate on them. If I had been one of the judges then, my preference and taste would have been ‘A Rain Scene,’ too.

Dimzon’s poem is striking with slim splits and text cataloguing. It is artfully light, yet it is very deep – it is not easy to get to the bottom of it in the beginning. It seems it is saying no more than the literal truth, for it had, as if it was a taxi, a thick perspex partition between the passenger (the reader) and the driver (the poet). The reader has to go over the simplicity of the poem, then he/she can start taking wing to the world of feminism and womanhood or impoverishment or social inequality or whatsoever.

There seems a contradiction between its form and connotations. It is his way, inventive and cognisant as he is, of compressing a weighty and thoughtful material into a compact poem. His style is slick and visually artless, moving me, so my great idea starts with it as it simplifies the complex.

It gives an admirably succinct account of a woman fish peddler, a mother who will do everything for her children and a widow/a single mother who has to take care of her children by herself despite her implicit feebleness and lack of education. She is left with trials and tribulations of everyday life, taken unawares when her husband died. It shows how Filipino women in the countryside or coastal areas need empowerment to be able to be more spirited and prolific, in control and clever, fearless and impervious when their husbands die or leave them for whatever reason.

It signals the need of the government to pass laws that safeguard widows and give them resources to support their families. It points out how single mothers in the Philippines are ignored because how treacherous the weather is, they have to work to feed their children, for even the basics of support cannot be given by the government, so poor widows need to go from house to house to sell their fish/vegetables/wares by nightfall. They need to bear their poverty and inattention by authorities, in solitude, though we’ve known now how the pork barrel of some legislators has been plundered by depraved government people. Was the government money used as it should be and in all conscience, no Filipino would suffer from extreme poverty, no Filipino would become down-and-out.

The widow persona in the poem is a very strong and brave woman. She ignores the blast of the roofs though it drowns her voice as she yells out. Perhaps, she chooses not to beg because she doesn’t want to be an object of pity amongst other people and her neighbours. Perhaps, she wants to meet their needs indefinitely without degrading her pride and self-respect. Perhaps, she wants to put her foot down despite bad nature and adversity, for her love for all her children is unconditional. And perhaps to her, the only all-enduring and selfless love is that of a mother for her children. The reader can only speculate the consciousness of the widow fish peddler because the poet presents the poem like a painting or a photograph – everything can be worked out through a scene, graphic and peripheral, physical and definite, cynical and plain. The effect of the poem is purely analytical and then that is the time when emotion comes in.

The woman is ‘isang-kahig-isang-tuka’ (one scratch of foot in the ground, one peck at a grain) as she hurries, tracing the neighbourhood alleys. Thus, she needs to work even if she doesn’t feel well or even if the rain is about to bucket down. When a strong typhoon like Yolanda comes, her family can be trapped by hunger for days or weeks. This is the consequence, too, of having a lot of children and when a husband dies, no one but the wife will have to shoulder all the responsibility of the deceased husband. Worst, the husband has not taken out insurance on his life, covering payment for his children’s food and education. It shows the plight of Filipino families struggling for survival because the government is unresponsive and inattentive. It doesn’t give communities means of support.

The poem works like fireworks to me. It burns attractively to the different levels of my imaginings, revealing different designs and shades of colours and delight in the obscurity of my intelligence and common sense. Its simplicity is illusory because it lights in my mind with varied insights and social and non-physical involvement or connexion.

I told you then when I reviewed Dimzon’s ‘Breakfast’ that he is a feminist, because of the number of poems he has written on women. The focal point for him is the women who are under social circumstances and how they delimit themselves mechanically (like the carabao in my poem ‘Carabaohood’) or imperceptibly or unthinkingly and how they give away/fight out for their rights.

Its word-based arrangement is very accurate, forming enigmatic formulary for such a thought and awareness, so it is inspiring and perceptible to me who loves poems similar to those published in The New Yorker. Dimzon is one of the rare poets in this country whose philosophy is very forward-thinking and artistically new.

Anyway, here is ‘A Rain Scene’:

A Rain Scene
by Alain Russ Dimzon

Under a sky
That is ripped
By lightning
And is about
To cry,
The woman
Fish peddler
Mounts a basket
On her head.
On her head
She bears
The fish
And the tonnage
Of a lost husband
And the lives
Of her children.
Yelling
With a voice
Drowned
By the blast
Of the roofs,
She hurries,
Tracing
The neighbourhood alleys.

Miriam

by Roger B Rueda

Allegations of brutality and smuggling and tax evasion and illegal logging and corruption have been levelled at Senator Juan Ponce Enrile by Senator Miriam Defensor Santiago. So now everyone has been particularly scathing about all these accusations. We seem to feel how foolish we are to entertain doubts, but these are heavy allegations and everything she has told in her speech can be regarded as a serious matter because though a lot say that the senator is insane, she is still high-minded and honourable: She has not been involved in the PDAF scam and all her advocacies are obviously reputable as she always takes a principled stand. She has been shown as an intelligent, courageous, and virtuous lawyer, judge, government official, and legislator. Consequently, for all her uprightness that she has shown since then, it is easy for us to consider her contentions in this era of rationality. And to judge from her productivity as a legislator, no insane woman can be as prolific as Senator Santiago has been.

As a senator, she has access to a lot of classified information. For one, there are some things that are highly classified and only circulated to a very limited group of people in this country. Thus, the role of the government is to order an investigation into all that she has said and is claiming. We can’t just turn a blind eye to what she is talking about. The government can prod her to collaborate with them as they inquire into the affairs of the people mentioned in her speech. This is yet another slur on the integrity of the people she has involved in the issue.

Miriam is Miriam. A straightforward woman, she is a political icon of millions of Filipinos, being a genuinely witty speaker to whom one could listen for hours. She talks over issues well-kept by fear and ignominy, so most of us find what she says entrancing and astounding. She speaks like a crazy woman, but it is her way to confront anathemas or propriety, which defences and precludes truth from coming out. She knows well how to tip-toe to the verge of lawful and unlawful, thoughtful and facetious, sympathetic and hostile, ceremonial and casual, and this necessitates finesse, so it makes no sense to belittle the enormity of the issues the senator is exposing. She is a super intelligent woman, but she is not a deranged woman - it is so obvious. Only a PR firm can say that to slate her or to enrage her or to make people not believe her to ruin her integrity. She knows what she is doing as she doesn’t go to absurd lengths. Her agenda is not discordant, nor are they out of time with everybody’s.

I think our country needs more Miriams. She dredges up everything that our memory as a country has expunged for years because we are forbearing, superficial, lenient, unaware, or fraidy-cat. She sounds unmannerly or coarse, but the silence of anyone in the senate is inimical to transparency and scruples and can be perfidious to the Filipino people. She is not our adversary here, for she is our defender. None of what she says and does is against us if we analyse all that she uncovers. All she told us during her privilege speech is a can of worms some people didn’t want to open, and doing so she knows the risk it poses to her life and her family. It could have appalled all of us, yet it made us realise a lot of things. It has spurred us into making an opinion or taking an action.

Silence in the Senate could be a conspiracy of silence. Santiago v Enrile considered as a cat-and-mouse game is politically expedient at best. It was revealing and has made the two senators more popular and unpopular, lovable and unlovable, good and bad. It gives everyone a fresh idea of what is happening in our country and what the government do to address the problems our politicians and some citizens are involved in. It also shows who are pursued by the government and who are not, who are implicated and who are passed over. As a legislator, she has no power to solve the problems confronting us all, but she can drop hints about what is happening in this country. It is up to the justice department to litigate. The justice department, however, could unsurprisingly political. It could be selective or spiteful or excessive.

We don’t know exactly what has incited her hatred to Senator Enrile. It could be purely political or personal – or theatrical. This is the thing we cannot be certain of. All we can do is speculate about it. It could be because of misunderstanding or because she really hates the crimes she is accusing Senator Enrile of or she is really a sincere public servant. Whatever it is, however, the Filipino people deserve truthful legislators and statesmen.

It is time that we got rid of bad politicians. We need legislators who don’t need a PDAF and who honestly legislate not for themselves and their family businesses but for all Filipinos and this country. We need politicians who advocate for the progress of everyone in this country, divulging everything in the government especially if it is anti-Filipino and deceitful, making effective laws that protect the welfare of the majority and making sure that all taxes go to tangible and useful government projects and investments. Accordingly, this country needs more squeaky clean people for the government to fight shy of sleaze and corruption and exploitation of the Filipino people and the environment.

Sad to say, we have a lot of potential legislators, but no one can follow in Senator Santiago’s footsteps, for to be like the senator, they need to understand all the laws in principle and intelligently, they need to be daring and fearless, and they need to be strong, principled politicians.

Passionately championing the Filipino people, the senator disdains politicians who are corrupt and thoroughly venal, and we are lucky to have her in the Senate. She is a trustworthy and no-nonsense leader, for even her jokes and anti-jokes have social and political ramifications for everyone. We can’t change her deportment and her general demeanour, for an institution herself, she is a woman of great personality. All we can do is love her or hate her or ignore her but never change her.

Alpha

Fiction by Roger B Rueda

Alpha was a shy, quiet-spoken girl. When we were classmates at primary school, she was always polite and respectful. She never had an ambition, though. She wisely contented herself with her family and her love of nature. All of eighteen, her turf was their farm. Seldom would she go to Iloilo City. She seemed very innocent.

At weekends, she would go to the sugarcane field and pick tinôtinô, or she would go with her cousins and they would bite sugarcane off a bit.  She also liked eating bananas.

We would romp happily around the mounds of hays whenever she invited us to their house. I would throw hays at our other classmates.

Her family spent a lot of time rearing free-range chickens. Sometimes, her mother would cook us nice meals. I liked her chicken adóbo and  tinúla of chicken and green papaya.

Alpha and I remained friends until high school and even college. She did mass communications at a local college; I, creative writing in another city. She became very talkative. Her skirts were knee-skimming and flirty. She told me that she had been idolising Vega, the daughter of their neighbour, when one time we met at my grandmother’s house, which was along the road to their house on the farm. Vega grew more rebellious because her father left them when they were all young. Her mother’s permissiveness towards Vega and her siblings reflected the wild abandon of her own life.

Vega was marvellously cool, so Alpha, then a young innocent girl, admired the way she had coped life.

She’d got a lot of boyfriends. She’d flirt outrageously. She was very open in her attitudes about sex. Her parents, though, didn’t know what she was doing in their community.  Her parents were naïve and innocent. They were both illiterate.

I was speechless with shock when she showed me her chest full of kiss marks. She became a tart. She would go to the ROTC building all alone in the night to meet some guys there. Young men didn’t respect her, so I wondered a lot. When we took a tricycle to the busy plaza, the driver refused to take our fare, but rather he poked her in the ribs.

Alpha was deflowered by Vega’s brother, Manny, also a rebellious brat.She had a crush on him since she was all of ten, so when Alpha was all alone he pulled her to their house, which was also along the road to Alpha’s house. She never resisted him though she already knew that he might rape her. He was sort of a maniac. But to Alpha, it was an opportunity to have a relationship with Manny though she knew it wouldn’t be going anywhere.

I thought that Alpha only behaved stupidly. She had been a smart woman, and now she was perceived as vain, spoilt, and promiscuous. All her friends and classmates knew it. She just disregarded her friends’ advice to her. She wanted a different path and so she went and studied all alone.

One of her friends locked her and raped in the toilet in school. The man was trying to blackmail her into doing whatever he wanted.She was afraid that some photographs of her in the nude might be circulated all over the campus, it would really embarrass her and her family.

***

It was only an hour or so later that her father Lando discovered that Alpha was missing.The unexpected and sudden realisation briefly panicked Alpha’s family. Her father walked to the street corner and waited for her. It was late in the evening.

Lando seemed very worried. He couldn’t explain why he was feeling that way, however.

He and his wife walked in silence for some while. They kept a vigil in front of their house.  His voice trembled with emotion.

The next day dawned sombre and gloomy: Alpha came within minutes of bleeding to death after her wrists were slashed.She told her parents that she was held down and raped by their neighbours, while she was walking a few steps to their house. She couldn’t let out a scream because they gagged her mouth with a towel. She was trying to resist it, but her might was not enough: she was weak to move. Three men raped her, according to her. She seemed to be crying with anger and frustration.

Lando almost ran amok as soon as he heard that news from his daughter. It seemed that bombs fell in the town. He became a chaotic sort of person.

An hour later, two policemen arrived on foot. They immediately arrested the three young men in connection with the rape complaint. That came as a shock to three young men. They arrived in court handcuffed to two police officers.They became an embarrassment to their parents, who were professors of the university.

They were detained by the police after further questioning. Their case was a heinous crime and they had a slim chance to be in the clear. Alpha’s family, most of them lawyers, vouchsafed to help. Actually, because they had the same family name.

For months, there had been no talks between parties. Manny’s mother was depressed, and she’d do everything so long as her son would be cleared. She was willing to pay any amount, even if that’d mean borrowing money from a lending firm.

Alpha’s family were terribly cross. It seemed that they wouldn’t agree with any settlements the other party would offer.

Being poor was the other reason that they couldn’t just agree with anything. It was an insult to their whole family if they would just give in. So, the three young men had to be sent down. Or else, they’d no face to show in the town.

***
A year later, the three young men were seen at the university. Everyone was shocked to see them. Never had they seen Alpha since then. The remembering of her was thin to the point of non-existence.There was a lull in her life after what happened.

They all had agreed to try to settle their dispute by negotiation.Alpha had demanded a million peso-settlement. The three suspects then had been released from detention.

Their life continued as normal. They felt, though, incredibly ashamed of themselves for being indicted on a rape charge.What had happened ruined their reputation as it brought disgrace upon them.

Years later, the three started a family. All of the men left the village except for Manny, who was a philanderer, and he was quite brazen about his life, it didn't worry him.

***
The family left the farm, their landlord had sacked them. They moved to a nipah house near the highway. A year later, the simple house transformed to a mansion, the biggest so far in the town.

A woman alighted from a limousine. She walked into the municipal hall. It was only six months before the election that Alpha announced she would run for mayor.

She had been making substantial donations to charity. A lot of poor students were going to college on her scholarship. About three thousand people held a rally to support her candidacy. Nobody had known who Alpha Focker was. All they had known was she was just a public spirited woman.

Alpha’s coming completely altered the political landscape of the town.

A big banner was draped across one of the streets saying, ‘Welcome Ms  Alpha Focker.’

It seemed that everything that had happened to Alpha was likely to sink into silence.

The Crab in Smallville (Iloilo City)

a poem by Roger B Rueda

I watched the black crab crawl across the floor,
towards my feet, which I lifted
when it was almost near.
It gave me a startled look, its large claws
moving slothfully.
I sipped from my coffee mug,
watching it over the rim.
My friend gave a deep rumbling laugh
upon seeing it, his voice strangely nervous.
It moved to a dry corner, its shell
almost dry and covered in dust.
I bit into my biscuit.
A concert was just across the road,
its music lively and recognisable.
I almost forgot the crab.
All of a sudden, it scurried to the road
and hid at a plant pot.
We turned our attention to the crab again.
It wanted to cross over.
Twice over it crept away but backed off in horror
when passers-by were drawing near.
As I stared at it I felt my throat go dry.
My friend and I were looking
at it nervously as it hung about
on the road.
Then it was all over in the blink of an eye.
We heard a loud crunchy sound
from the road and our hearts
as a tyre of a passing taxi
crushed it unknowingly, smoothly.
My friend said, ‘It’s got a new life.
It must be thankful to the taxi.
That life was boring.’ I nodded
as I hounded the place where he was coming from.

Mary

fiction by Roger B Rueda

Mary was standing near my classroom. She was talking to a colleague.

‘Hello Pax,’ she greeted me. Mary was the only friend who called me Pax. All my friends would call me Pas (short for Paciano).

‘What’s that?’ I asked. I then opened the envelope. I looked at her and congratulated her. ‘I’m happy for you, Meyr.’ She smiled her thanks.

She then left my room. I knew she was too busy.

***
The last time I met Mary was at Sbarro before she left for Korea. She treated me and my friends to some pizza.

‘So what would happen to your case,’ I asked.

Her lawyer smiled. ‘I’ll handle it.’ He was handsome and very young.

I lifted my glass and poured myself some lemonade.

***

Mary was a tutor at a Korean school in Makati: She was abruptly let go of the school managing director, Vil, because she had got married to her ex-student. Vil had imposed the rule that no teachers should engage in such a relation. To her, that was unethical. I agreed. Everybody agreed. There must have been some who didn’t agree, but what could they do? What could they do was to murmur or knit their brows when no one was around.

In Mary’s case, however, it was difficult to know if it was Mary’s thoughtful doing or not. Well, how could I? Only Mary knew what really had happened. For one, she was Mary and I was I. The point was it was difficult to tell whether Mary was telling the truth or not. That way, in my opinion, was a thing I could not consider or weigh. The basis of it was out of sight for it was in the minds of the two persons involved – in Mary’s and her husband’s. Only the two of them knew the truth of everything. But not telling me or anyone was their right, perhaps, to protect themselves – or because there was really nothing to tell.

I understand why Vil was against Mary’s marriage. She had suspected Mary then and had been vigilant about her, yet the thing she couldn’t accept was she failed to stop the relation. For years, she had been successful in stopping all relations which she thought unethical, un-Korean. But in Mary’s case, she failed to. That made her extremely upset and irrational. The rule that she had made was useless, so it made her resort to some unfounded actions, using her power. She let go of Mary although it was illegal to do so. Technically, Mary couldn’t be fired because she had never violated any school rule. The rule was clear and a Grade One student can almost understand that being a current student is different from an ex-student. And I’m sure about it, no dictionary will agree with it. The concept is very elementary.

Mary got married to her ex-student. What was wrong about it? The rule was clear that a tutor could not get married to her/his student. But Mary didn’t marry her student. She got married to her ex-student of two years ago. If there was something or someone to blame for that, it should have been the rule or the one who had made the rule. It was all her/his fault. She/he should have anticipated such a problem. The case of Mary was a slur to his/her astuteness, if she/he had.

The reason, for me, why such a rule was made is very hypocritical. Vil was a Christian and all she wanted was a Christian image.  A Christian image to her was her life. What she had was because she was a Christian. She received supports from Korea because she was a Christian even only by name. All her actions were obviously to promote her image as a Christian, but not because she really wanted to help or to be kind and charitable. Actually, if Vil had a choice she wanted to be a Satanist, but in Korea being a Christian meant  a lot. If Vil had not been a Christian, she couldn’t have been chosen as managing director of the school. I was not stupid to notice that kind of behaviour.

If Koreans had known what Mary did, her school reputation would have become unpopular. That was her reason why she was upset about Mary’s marriage. But it was her fault why a lot of people knew about Mary’s marriage. She made it big. Her reaction was too much that even those people who hadn’t known about Mary wondered about Mary. So the marriage of Mary to her ex-student became the talk of the town. So, whose fault was it? Mary’s?

Vil was an envious woman. I knew her well. So, another reason I could speculate was that she was envious of Mary. Her ex-boyfriend was a Filipino and was far much handsome than her husband, who was so ugly, inside and outside. Perhaps, she married him for money. She was poor and at the end of her tether. So it was her envy that could have been the cause of all her annoyance and difference.

She didn’t like people to be happy. She came from a broken family in Korea, so seeing people happy, especially a family, would hurt her.  She lived her life in sullen, resentful silence. She lived her life paradoxically, in lies. Her mother was in a mental hospital. Her father was a beggar.  She didn’t want to help them, so how could she be kind to others when she could close her eyes to her own parents.

I decided to support Mary because Vil was attacking Mary based on the cause which I could not see and which she could not see, either. There was no clear evidence that Mary had violated the rule. For lack of evidence, I think my decision was right. We can only judge someone or something based on significant information or proofs. How could I judge Mary then? What rule should I use? None so far. What I could do was speculate. But, legally, speculating is unacceptable. No sound person can accept any foolishness when it comes to presenting an argument sensibly. One doesn’t need to be a lawyer to understand this.
Mary sued Vil.

Some of my colleagues supported Mary. Some didn’t. Most of them were fraidy-cats. It was obvious that to them money was everything. If a person didn’t have money, to them she/he was rubbish, and what should they do with rubbish? They acted fool and stupid just to justify their decision. They even forgot their friendship with Mary. Some of them attended Mary’s wedding. Seeing themselves in the pictures of Mary’s wedding was an embarrassment they kept in themselves because the pictures were the proofs of their treachery and spinelessness. Those were ridiculous photographs. They even posted them on Facebook. Actually, what they wanted about the photographs was for social reason. One of Mary’s friends had an illusion that she had a Japanese boyfriend. She didn’t know that people around her were laughing at her obvious lies.

Some of Mary’s colleagues were envious of Mary. Mary was far much smarter and prettier than them. Some were obviously not Mary’s friends for some reasons. So it was justifiable why they didn’t support Mary. Their competence was dubious and only they could be seen without Mary. No students would like them unless the students would have no choice.

One gay, the most senseless gay I had met, hated Mary because he was not even invited to Mary’s wedding. Pitiful, right? How could Mary invite him? He thought he was Mary’s friend when in fact never did Mary consider him as a friend. Well, for me he didn’t exist, anyway. Most friends of mine told me he was not worth my attention and time, but I didn’t listen to them. Well, my friends were right. He was useless. In the world of friendship, he was a UFO. When someone needed help, never could he help him/her. He was literary and virtually useless. He existed for himself, not for anyone else. He hated people for no reason at all.

It took weeks for me to decide whether I should support Mary or not, in my case. I had been working for the school for almost a decade, so I thought I needed to be loyal to Vil.  But how could I be loyal to her? Her actions were obviously selfish. She didn’t value loyalty. She didn’t even value competence. To her, what were important were herself and her pride. She hated people who were far much better than her, who were far much prettier than her.  She hated people who complained against her.  She would rather choose politics more than capabilities and abilities just to preserve her power, which is wrong, which is inconsistent to why there is a school, why a teacher teaches.

If a Christian, the one we see in church every Sunday, doesn’t want to pay the right taxes of her/his worker, do you think that that Christian is a real Christian? Vil didn’t like to pay the right amount of taxes. She told me that taxes went to the pockets of corrupt officials. She had a terrible opinion of Filipino politicians and the Philippine government. Her husband told me that most Chinese Filipino businessmen in Makati didn’t pay the right amount of taxes, neither did he, when he confronted me one time. I was shocked to hear it. And I didn’t know how he could say that. I told him that it was his speculation, but he told me it was true. Really? If so, the government needed to investigate it, I told him. He changed his tone. He changed the way he confirmed it, it was a bit uncertain then.

Vil was a proud woman. She would lie to protect and save her power. She made use of Korean language to destroy her tutors. If the tutors were incompetent, she would promote them. If the tutors were very competent and were brimming with skills, she would criticise them in front of students. One time, Vil told me that my student didn’t like my class anymore, and she told my student that I didn’t like him anymore to be in my class. I was shocked to know that. When I confronted my student, he told me what Vil had told him, so I also told him what Vil had told me. Vil even told some students that I didn’t like to study at 4 PM because it was my rest time. Two students told me that Vil had told them that. See how terrible Vil at manipulating the truth and changing it to her lie.

The tutors who supported Mary were let go by Vil. To protect her reputation, Vil thought up a lie to hide her wicked doings. She always told students that the tutors she let go were bad. I was very upset when some students told me about what she told them about me and the other tutors. I realised how Vil manipulated everything. The worst was she even manipulated the owner. The owner was like a stupid owner who followed what Vil told him. He didn’t even know what happened. All he did was believe Vil. To him, Vil was an angel. So I looked at the owner of the school as the stupidest owner I’d ever known. Perhaps, he knew what Vil was doing, and he really liked it because his image was kind and charitable and Vil did the bad thing for him, to save his angelic reputation. Or he was just really stupid.  Or he didn’t care about other people for all he cared was money and money and money.

All the close students of mine told me about what Vil told them about me and my friends. At first, it was shocking to know that, but as time went by, I realised how wicked Vil was. What she thought was wickedness  endlessly.  I thought she deserved to be called the daughter of the devil and Vil hated that fact. So every day, when I chatted with my ex-students, we would talk about how wicked Vil was. They told me that they would tell all their friends how terrible Vil was and her husband.

I thanked Mary for being a bold woman.  I also appreciated my colleagues who supported Mary. I disdained the tutors who were liars, and chicken. I hoped they would be happy in the hands of a devil feeding them every day. I didn’t understand why they hated us when what we did was nothing against them. The best thing they should have done was to keep quiet. So I called it stupidity or lack of wisdom.
My prayers were for Mary. I hoped that Vil would be punished by God for her wickedness.

When I was alone, I would look at the souvenir, a crystal flower, which I got on Mary’s wedding day. She got married in Bulacan. Mary was from Bulacan and all her family attended her wedding. It was a memorable wedding to Mary and some of my colleagues.

I lost my job, but I was happy. God opened another opportunity for me and my friends. And so I told them we should plant the mango pulps and wait until they bore fruits.

No one understood me. For then, yes. But later I said they would.

‘Hello Pax,’ a friend called out my name. I turned my head left and right. I couldn’t believe my eye. Mary was back with her daughter in pram. We kissed each other hello.

I would go to Ayala Triangle Gardens when I wanted to distance myself from the everyday hustle bustle when I wanted to relax, unwind, and get in touch with nature.

Mary and I sat on the bench and nattered away.

The Three Pufferfish on Islas de Gigantes

a poem by Roger B Rueda

They move through seawater like dry leaves,

their mouths supping the sharpness

of water on rocks, their fins

so dusky grey.

I kneel and scoop one after another

into my palms.

They puff out their fat middle

and let out a lungful

of cool breath,

grey balloons come out in the twinkling  of an eye.

I think of phobias

as I am shivering with fear.

I take them to a small plastic bottle

whose water I’ve poured out

and filled with seawater.

The fish swim in as if they bolted;

the three seem talking about the strangeness

and overpowering force –

or perhaps their shared mindfulness

and terror

are held by their muteness.

Our boat goes to another island.

The fish move their body

through the water in the bottle,

gulping air into their gills.

I am praying in my mind

the fish stay alive.

I am deeply nervous that the fish

die once we come to the island –

the fish look particularly frail.

I keep an eye on them tensely.

Finally, our boat moors on the island.

I go down and let out the fish,

the morning very radiant

and the water warm and pellucid.

In silence, the three fish swim their life

to a new abode, wrenching my imagination

to the force of the unfamiliar, of the arcane.

Douglas

fiction for children by Roger B Rueda

Douglas’s mother, Coring, was often cross at his rudeness. So, when his father, a Korean, told his mother that he’d go on vacation to Busan the next week, she suggested that Douglas visit Korea, too. He had to go to live with his father’s kin. He had not experienced this kind of holiday before, so Coring thought it’d be nice if Douglas knew, too, some Korean things and culture. He was all of six and he seemed to be very Filipino rather than being a Korean.

Douglas had erratic Korean. At home, the family spoke Tagalog, Korean, and a little English. He went to a Chinese school in Makati, so he was quite a multilingual boy.

Everywhere he went, a mischievous child, he would rock back and forth in his chair. His teacher would shout at him. He was a wicked and obstinate boy. He would sometimes pull his classmate’s hair. His candy or chocolate wrappers would litter anywhere. He’d swear at his classmates and run off. He would keep his classmates’ bags in the santan hedge. He would smile at other kids impishly. He was very noisy and boisterous. He would coax his classmates into clambering over sacksful of jackfruits at the back of the school building or catching bugs holing up underneath the firewood.

After chewing his bubble gum, he would stick it underneath the arm of his chair. He would kick the kittens or puppies hard. One time, he was bitten by a pooch as he was quite liable to be.

He removed the gills of all the fish in the aquarium in his teacher’s room. All the fish were floating lifeless in the fuchsia water. His teacher, when she saw it, suddenly fell forward on to the table and fainted. His mother scolded him for that, but he was a spoilt brat.

Every summer, usually, Douglas would spend his vacation in Davao, with his maternal grandparents, who were nettled by his manner. He was getting bored with Davao, perhaps. So that summer, Douglas was excited on a trek through the Busan shops. Finally, he met some kids of Korean descent. But sometimes he’d have a terrible quarrel with them. They would squabble over some toys and knickknacks.

One day, he was in a room with a load of drunken men who had been boozing all afternoon. One of them was his father, Minwoo. One waitron served the boy stew. He took his time and ate slowly. He liked the taste. It was surprisingly good, he thought. It was a bit hot, spicy, and sweet at the same time.

‘What was that?’ he asked.

‘Boshintang,’replied the man.

‘What is boshintang?’ He’d never heard it from his father.

‘Dog, dog stew’ came a cheerful replied from the man.

His eyes seemed slightly widened. He seemed surprised that he’d eaten dog. He thought eating dog was just a joke. He started to believe then that everything was possible if people wanted it enough.  He rubbed the back of his neck and smiled amazingly at the waitron.
He took his camera and asked the man to take a picture of dog stew. When he arrived home, he uploaded his pictures on his Facebook. His mother was the first to like it. But his kindergarten classmates teased him, tongue in cheek. He goaded them in response.

But since then Douglas had become a dog epicure. For months, he would run up and tug at his father’s sleeve excitedly every afternoon when his father met his friends downtown. Minwoo was a bit of a boozer. He liked drinking shochu with dog. His parents raised dog for meat.

Sometimes, Douglas observed how the dogs were butchered and their meat was hung to dry from the ceiling. The smell of the stew had become his favourite.

When his father and Douglas came back to Makati, the boy asked his father to build a hutch so that they could raise dogs and have a supply of fresh dog. At first, his mother disagreed with eating dog in general. She fell out with her husband, but she failed to convince her husband and her son. She was devoted to her family although they would squabble now and then.

The next day, Minwoo came home, bringing three mongrel puppies with him. Coring was watching a documentary on Arirang, lunch ready on the table. She had been brought up to tend to the needs of her younger siblings, and now she was good at tending Minwoo. Their house had been meticulously cleaned.

‘Oh, look at these puppies! They’re so cute,’ told Minwoo. Coring listened, her expression from poker-faced to blank. The Korean man asked for ice for his beer and proceeded to get contentedly drunk, while the puppies drifted off into a fitful sleep.

‘Lunch’s ready!’ She reminded Minwoo coldly.

Her husband just nodded and smiled. His boutique business was doing fine.

When Douglas arrived with her nanny, he saw the puppies. He took them out of the box. He lifted them out one by one and laid them on the floor. The puppies were reluctant to walk. He looked at them, almost slobbering. He thought of dog stew.

‘Papa, when can I eat them?’ asked Douglas.

‘Anytime, but let them mature first,’ his father rubbed his head tenderly, looking affectionately at him.

‘I want it now,’ he began laughing and giggling as he hugged his father, his father tickling him. The house was filled with their voices from the kitchen.

***

One evening, all at once, Douglas metamorphosed into a dog and emerged onto the street. He rose yelping and bolted into the greeneries. He heard himself gasp and cry out. His arms were tired, and his back was tense. He yawned, and stretched lazily. Well along, under the trees, he heard no further sounds. He felt asleep.

His deep sleep was disturbed when three dogs were trying to escape from dog-eaters who were making determined efforts to catch the dogs.

Douglas ran off, too, losing his nerves. He joined the dogs, the dogs his family were raising in the hutch.
He was afraid of them initially. He was shaking and deeply in shock.

‘I’m Douglas. I’m not a dog. I’m so shocked to see that I have become one.’ They four walked through the dense bush for hours. He took a breather. The other dogs, too.

The three dogs looked at him. Their legs were pitifully thin compared to the rest of their bulk. They maintained a kind of meekness. Douglas sat speechless with confusion, gazing into the sky.
‘Please talk to me.’ Douglas was a dog which desperately needed an answer to what had become of him.

The three dogs lapped the saliva from his snout, his eyes filled with tears.

‘I’m Yotot.’ The black dog started to speak.

‘I’m Maya,’ said the brown bitch.

‘I’m Odi.’ The third dog was painfully shy of other dogs. It was black with white front paws and a white splotch on its chest.

It was quite a shock to see dogs speak, for Douglas. But he asked them a lot of questions. They shared stories about them.

‘How come that I’ve become a dog.’ Douglas was intensely curious about the world he had now. But no one knew the answer. All they knew was that they, too, were kids then.

Going hungry for days, they got lost and strayed into dangerous areas. Douglas was too weak to move or think or speak. Maya scavenged through garbage. The two other dogs scavenged the bones.
‘Shoo, dogs, shoo.’ Some people avoided dogs. Sometimes, they stoned them to leave.

Towards the evening, the four dogs tried to rest their exhausted body under an elastic awning, all lying motionless. Their situation created a very special bond between them.

At dawn, they woke to find the dark place lit by flashing lights. They were sitting huddled, cornered by dog-eaters.

Douglas got very upset and screamed and swore, throwing tantrums all over the gin. He let out a string of roaring barks. One dog-eater whipped him with studded belt. He felt a sharp pain in his lower back and that caused him to settle down.

The other dogs were taken out of the gin. Their legs were tied and mouths, muzzled. They cried with fear and vulnerability. Douglas stared with a long, doleful look of disbelief. He felt a sudden tender pity for them.

One dog-eater whacked two of the three dogs on the head, causing them to spurt blood. They croaked quickly. The other dog and Douglas were in the lurch, too. He went rigid with fear, expelling   a lot of urine.

The men lifted out the other dog and sold it to another dog-eater. Douglas was held in reserve for tomorrow’s boozing. He lay stock-still, calm, his eyes weary. The uncanny situation unnerved him more.
‘Douglas, what should I do?’ it woofed worriedly.

Douglas didn’t say anything. Douglas pierced the gin with his canine teeth, on the quite. When the hole was big enough for him to escape, Douglas tore off down the street. He looked around searchingly. He was scared stiff of the dog-eaters whose faces with drooping moustaches. One man had the words ‘Dora loves Spiderman’ tattooed on his left shin.

The dog-eaters gave chase and began to shoot Douglas at point blank range with an automatic rifle. There was so much blood it had soaked through his white fur.

The dog-eaters hoisted and flung him to the ground, bleeding profusely. He had lain awake all night, tormented by Maya’s yowling, as the place throbbed with dog cries.

***

Douglas was sitting huddled on the floor shivering with fear. The room was silent except for his sobbing. His mother, Coring, entered the room briskly and gave him a hug, the barking of Maya resonating in his head still. He gave a sudden cry of pain and put his hand to his heart.

He felt his arms. His skin was clear and smooth. His spell was gone, he thought.

‘Mama, I’ll never ever eat dog,’ he said to his mother in a throaty voice. Hurriedly, he ran to see his three dogs in the hutch. His face relaxed into a happy smile when he saw the three dogs were alive. He released them selflessly, with emotion. The dogs started going ‘woof woof’ and sprang as Douglas undid the hutch door. They wagged their tails on tenterhooks.

‘Mama, meet Yotot, Maya, and Odi.’ The dogs rose awkwardly to his feet and licked Douglas's hands excitedly. They went deathly pale, but he promised to nurse them back to health because then it was only his nanny who had fed the dogs. He swept his arms over his friends’ shoulders as if they knew each other very well. He was very sorry about all the selfishness and inhumaneness he'd done. He petted and smoothed their fur.

***

Back home, he’d play with, feed, and bathe the dogs. Douglas and his parents would spend their weekend walking the dogs around their local streets. As a schoolboy, he dreamed of becoming a veterinarian and animal rights activist one day. Sometimes, the family would bring along pieces of bread or bones from a barbecue restaurant after eating out and feed their pets. The cynophiles also became very solicitous of all animals around them.

Douglas was planning to visit his grandparents in Busan and convince them to stop eating dog. For now, he wrote them a letter, telling them how shameful eating dog was. Attached to his letter were colourful pictures and drawings of his dogs and their family.

He also started to write his story and of his dogs so that kids around the world would be acutely aware that dogs had been human beings in their past lives.

He was expecting his father to publish it before long because now only his classmates and schoolmates could see and read his storybook his mother and he had made by hand.

What Is A Poem?

an essay by Roger B Rueda

I started writing a poem when I was all of seventeen. Actually, I tried writing poems when I was all of thirteen, but according to my poetry mentor, Dr Leoncio Deriada, they were not poems, they were rubbish. My poems rhymed perfectly and every line of them was flawlessly cut. How come they were not poems, I asked myself. How come those poems in Home Life, where Dr Deriada was the poetry editor, had been published, I thought. Mine sounded like of Shakespeare. Possibly Dr Deriada just didn’t like me, I began to justify the rejection. The thing I wanted to avoid was my piece might be discussed in his monthly column in Home Life. I hated criticism then and I wouldn’t have known what to do if he had picked my piece.

One day, when I was at university, I received a letter from Dr Deriada. He wanted me to see him. The next day, I met him at the Sentro ng Wikang Filipino. He looked simple yet witty. When he started to speak, I fell in love with his mind. Dr Deriada is a brilliant teacher. It was he who has made me think more cogently and realistically.

‘Roger, a poem suggests; it never states.’ He then took a piece of paper and wrote what he had just told me. ‘Have you read the poem The Golf Links?’ he asked me. ‘No, sir,’ I honestly told him. ‘It is by Sarah Cleghorn,’ he continued.  He wrote the poem on the same paper he had taken out. The poem was so short, I noticed. ‘It is so short, but it is a poem. And that is how a poem should be written,’ the old man said to me. I felt lost.  My receptiveness was very poor at that time. When I went home, I began to ruminate on it. Then all of a sudden I was afraid to write a poem because what I had written were not poems but rubbish. What I did was I catalogued the words in line fragments and arranged them like those of a poem. I loved writing abstruse ideas, something nobody can understand. All I thought that the more my reader couldn’t understand my poem, the better poet I would be.

The next week I started to write a simple poem, The Golf Links as my inspiration. The poem is titled Angels in the Street: abandoned by their gods/ these little angels/ walk and beg/ their wings are gone/ their clothes so white/ have turned black/ they will grow up/ into demons. Dr Deriada edited the poem. He pruned some long lines until the poem became very short. ‘This is how your poem should look like,’ he advised me. After two months, my poem appeared in Home Life, yet I couldn’t understand what a poem really is. I wrote and wrote, which he always advised me when I met him. I felt good, seeing my poems published in Home Life.

In 1997, I had my poems published in Panorama. I gradually weaned myself off seeing Dr Deriada on to editing my own writing. In 2000, he anthologised my poems in Mantala, a publication published by NCCA. In 2002, I was named Fellow for Poetry to the 41st UP National Writers Workshop.

So what is a poem? Now it’s 2013 and I guess for years of searching for its meaning and importance, I’m ready to tell tenderfoots what I have discovered.

A poem is The Golf Links by Sarah Cleghorn: ‘The golf links lie near the mill/That almost every day/The labouring children can look out/And see the men at play.

A poem could also be my poem Dagmayhood: Water, earth, or rays are superfluous to it./Deep down in the core, come hell/ or high water,  something pushes,/then parched curls of the corm tingles,/and that something starts to lay out,/makes space for a sprout to shift up/ through all the coats that have moulded/ bit by bit, one about the other,/for a spell long past remembering,/and set off the outer skin  dry russet,/ to tore asunder and chip off. /Inside, the core kips - up to that instant, /unidentified, cryptic, when it stirs, rouses,/calls on the root and sends /new shoots  skyward headed for the glow.

A poem could also be my other poem Mangoes: 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.

A poem is Airs Poetica by Denver Ejem Torres: A poem is that thing behind a fly./ That thing here I will explore/ because it is the desire of the groins/ of my mind. That thing excites,/ charms, invites. It is beautiful/ whether it's up in the air/ or sleeping on a brown branch./ A poem indeed it is if it is/ as big, bold and brave/ as the Philippine Serpent Eagle/ that stands on its own/ and goes beyond its black nest./ Well, if the Black Shama/ can sing a haiku, I may like it too./ A poem shall make me want to steal it/ and give me the desire to desire./ It shall be covetable,/ like a banana to a bird./ A poem must fly me/ beyond grasslands and chaparrals./ It has to have a border,/a breakable, penetrable border./ A poem, more importantly,/ must convince and can make/ a man say yes to the offer:/ If I write you this poem, /will you open your fly?    

A poem is Water (for B.) by Danton Remoto: For you, my lover, I will be like water./ I will be Lock Lomond flowing/ in loneliness from Ardlui to Arden./ I will be the Falls of Dochart hurling itself/ down the hills of Breadalbane,/ the rocks rumbling with my cascading force/ I will be the rain, slanting/ over Stirling in needles tiny as pores./ I will be snowflakes drifting/ From the Orkney to the Isle of Skye,/ falling in silent fury, as if focusing themselves/ in the cold eye of memory./ For you, my lover, I will be like water.

Thus, a poem makes claims on our lives or enacts historical, social, literary, and spiritual awareness, while remaining grounded in the multiple facets of our lives.

A poem is something that defamiliarises the well-known. It is taut and elegant in its unfolding, yet not overwrought or overtly inventive.

A poem delves into underexplored areas or risks saying the unsayable. A poem exhibits rich moments of figuration. A poem is conscious of rhythm and meaning.

For years, I’ve realised that poetry is a place of interconnection, where mind and body, self and other, innermost and exterior, may come across. And so I see poetry not as an endeavour to truthfully portray an involvement already known but as the making of a new familiarity that presses into some place not yet recognised. I write poems when I am mystified, stimulated, suffering, questioning, uncentred. The poem tries to answer that mystification, to expand the periphery of what I can know and understand; in that long-drawn-out understanding what was shimmering at the fringe can now come into the fundamental. A good poem is fairly like a volcanic islet. It produces new landscape of my depth.

One time, it just came as lightning and it lit it up in my mind. I then began to think that a poem is meant to be shared, discussed, misunderstood or understood, but always contemplated. Not by the educated or uneducated, or the high or the low, but by the reader existing as a contemplative, thoughtful being.

As a poet, I believe that poems deimpossibilise human liberty by allowing the alchemical fire of unheard-of imageries melt the walls of reified realisation, in so doing at one hit obliterating the captivity of the mind and raising the dangers in the struggle to resolve the ambiguity between ordinary life and the marvellous.

So what is a poem? I hope you’ve got the answer. I know it is not easy, but try reading a lot of poems and writing one, and trying means not once – it could be one hundred times.

Some New Words for July 2013

an essay by Roger B Rueda

Words are like a living creature, capable of developing, moving, spreading, and influencing the world in many ways, directly and indirectly through others. They have power, energy, and influences. They create peace and inspiration in our lives. They can encourage or discourage, slander or uplift, so we need to use them wisely. We need to keep them as pets in the home of our mind. We need to love them and know the every detail of their gist and nuance.

As I think about the power of the word to enflame and divide, to calm and connect, or to make and effect change, I’m ever more careful about what I say and how I listen to the words around me.

As a writer, I see the impact of words I choose on the world around me and my own favouritisms, predispositions, and discriminating consideration of the words I hear.

Lately, I have found the word ‘accubation.’ It is the practice of eating or drinking while lying down. I love eating bread while lying especially in the morning after waking up, so I think I can express myself with the word. I don’t know  why  I’m getting lazy these days. I love eating while lying down. Possibly, because of my chikungunya. Do I have? Hahaha

When I’m not satisfied with my new haircut I cut my hair after I get home. Because of this, I can be considered as an autotonsorialist, a person who cuts his own hair. Such a pretty word, right? Being a wordie, I think it is. I’ve heard some haircutters are autotonsorialists.

In Manila when I was all of six, our neighbour gave us frog. I wanted to eat it, but my grandmother stopped me. Now I wonder how frog tastes. I’ve learned that our neighbour is an Ilocano, and most Ilocanos are batrachophagous.  They really love eating frog.

A person has cagamosis if she has an unhappy marriage. So if she divorces him and gets married to another person, that marriage is called digamy. If her spouse dies, and she gets married again, such marriage is also called digamy.

If teachers hit their students, they can be sued these days. Hitting students is called dippoldism. Psychologically, it isn’t good for children. Traditional teaching methods sometimes only succeeded in putting students off learning. It can traumatise children. Teachers who did it must have gone insane.

One who fakes a smile, as on television is called eccedentesiast. Most Kapuso stars are good at this. Dennis Trillo has a very good skill in it. Carla Abellana, too. I think soaps need more eccedentesiasts for the sake of the audience, who are getting more fastidious about good acting. Our friends or colleagues who tend to be reluctant when it comes to displaying genuine emotion are also called eccedentesiasts.

We call the state of being stuffed with food (overeating) as farctate. I hate it because I don’t feel good when I’m too full, especially when I'm stuffed to the gills. It is an unhealthy habit I need to avoid. Fiestas, parties, holidays are the perfect season for farctate dinners and whatnot.

An act of being likely to make a mistake is called hamartithia. This is common when we are new to something. It is sometimes inevitable, but we need it to learn, to be the best. Last May, most of our elected senators are political neophytes and they will likely to make a  hamartithia.

One who sticks obstinately and wrongly to his old ways is called mumpsimus. But I think mumpsimuses are no longer common these days. Most friends I have are stylish. I got it from Henry VIII: 'I see and hear daily that you of the Clergy preach one against another, teach one contrary to another, inveigh one against another without charity or discretion. Some be too stiff in their old mumpsimus, others be too busy and curious in their new sumpsimus. Thus all men almost be in variety and discord.'

A nelipot is someone who walks without shoes. When I was young, I tried to be a nelipot. It was not easy. I needed feet that had hardened to endure stones on the road. In the Bible, most people were a nelipot, especially Jesus. Walking barefoot strengthens and stretches the muscles, tendons, and ligaments in your feet, ankles and calves.

Who do you see first after leaving your house? That person you see first is a qualtagh. Of course, my mum is the first person I see when I leave home. She is there to remind me to pray.  She is my qualtagh for my spiritual life. It is pronounced, by the way, as [kwol-tog]. It is from a form of Gaelic known as Manx.  It is spoken on the Isle of Man, and though it has nearly vanished in spoken usage, it is a well-documented word and there is an effort to revive its usage.  Literally the word ‘qualtagh’ means ‘first foot,’  as in the first person to set foot in the house on New Year’s Day, or the first person one met when they set foot outside on New Year’s Day.  It may also be used to refer to the first person a woman encounters after being confined to her house following the birth of a child.

Have you tried xerophagy? It is a diet of bread and water. Last night I tried it. I bought some pandesal from Pan de Manila. I love their pandesal because it is so soft and a bit sweet. I got so hungry the whole night I needed to wake up early to eat my breakfast though I usually don’t eat breakfast. In the early Christian Church, xerophagy meant eating food cooked in water and salt during Lent. Xerophagy has also been practised in prison and in the military as a form of punishment.

I hope you’ve liked the words I’ve picked for you.