all of the people will go to sleep
i’m afraid some silence is just a war having it’s nap,
that at any time of our lives,
there will be a madman running across the street
with a burning head
and sickness on his bread,
that his mind is so free it normalizes intrusivity,
where peace becomes his nemesis
where vengeance becomes his pride,
and they would name him no name after being exiled
and would soon return with fire
as it warms his neck like a frivolous fruit,
and wine, wine all the way to his redemption
and on that same night, all of the people will go to sleep.
dear octobers
dear octobers: home
is a comfort that is dead,
that our dream house
is now a house of graveyard and betrayals,
where gold is a rustling place,
where shiny people is fading and involved,
but remember that
only memories are ghosts to me.
dear octobers: pale
is a sky that is breathing.
gentle rain of the glitter-groves
and furry-smokes on trees and farms,
these are only evergreen to me.
i am sure i am not dead when you are gone.
pain tickles the brain, prickles the heart
there were raining dead flowers to
my ceiling, to my feeling,
another hiss of a bad thing,
this freckled speck, this head.
it has never feared a nameless
thing.
how exaggerated my thinking was,
how it speaks unstoppably cruel in a
clueless crowd.
overthinking is partaking of
absences.
this bulging who forgets the
lines and silent practice,
among prices and spits, expectations
are expectations,
nothing new, nothing less.
a favor of fever, you do me no good.
a labor of lies, you do me no good.
it was terror, dissecting lunacies
and the lunatics.
pain tickles the brain, prickles the
heart.
and whenever you burn a child
weeping fire,
it will laugh like an old folk, dust
off villagers like a gold cloak.
you sing with your pain as it no
longer lingers
behind the unfortunate and ridicule
filaments.
oh, dry hinge of a
butterfly wing on your left string,
heartless fling!
to the forest and fields i run by
and passes by,
wearing a white shirt and loose
jeans,
with stitched blooms on the
side, like wild birches,
necklaces not much, bracelets enough
pearls,
i still remember—i am the
gentleness of men,
the right taste of compassion, not
the take-it-all fool
or rough rampants i swirl.
oh,
their bitterness blinded me not!
i bathed myself with wine.
the floret boy i know has long been frozen
from his fear.
he even hides his flowers over his
insecurity to the sun.
someone placed a cicada calling
at the back of his head,
he had gotten back to his dead,
found the nearest pen.
it was not branches that grew up on
his arms but roots:
you may be stranded in your mind
that wanders where.
i am a young adult now: full of
possibilities and reasons to
just sleep on the bed & be safe
from the teeth of others.
or now what, to jump to certain
things i cannot bounce
back but let us see, as i scratch my
eyes, relevance to
the little golds that glittered my
eyebrows and upper cheek,
i couldn't handle anything more as
it reached my sore.
and there is a shadow that spreads
in my arm, an eclipse to
the real world where all of my
dreams will go to sleep.
“i bathed myself with wine;
society here i come.” i cried.
i crawled. i read the beads of this
old trace to the good.
who am i in society? where do i
belong? what can i do?
i am free and nobody, or i am here
stuck in the wrath
of
my roots. the floret boy began to flourish his dead.
i
am none and everything. i am morrie and bennetti.
i
am ready for the great doom: the spread of my petals.
i
have to face reality no matter how dark it is or bright.
it was the great rain of the
century, the breakdowns of
my generation, the anxiety that
birched into burning.
my childhood ends here; my teenage
too. the end, but
not for the rejected and endless
trying. i will get hired.
moth boy
the moth boy and his august poem is the last hope
that flared into thrifty thresholds:
bereaved by utterly-kind peculiarity,
his mind was a grit trickster,
like a calloused-born master, distorting fallacy fires,
tarnished with lies—he surmised! he despised!
to defeat the old, crooked clock of it all,
he must be born out of some pockets.
he may lose his arm, his wit,
his wonder, his twin-brother,
he may never come back the way
he changed his plans, but he will return,
the good name of that high house
with a mouse in a green crown & town-aroma.
he have been in an internal mayhem.
the audacity of his new anxiety
made every thing a sharp human thing.
he have been pressed by some people
who would find his deathly buttons;
cross-legged-sharp, he clipped his wings away
from the senseless & repetitive barks of his mind.
and he remembered, he must set forth birds
like tucked-scales onto the spirit of his good wills
and fly like a paper-soldier, his good moral character,
a mind of his own undertone,
a heart of his own burning,
a re-defined skill, sailed by the captain of fear—
now bravest of them all.
“i would like to wash my dirty hands
with bottles of drunk perfumes,”
said the other moths to the moth boy,
“and i would study grammar like a mad mathematician,
eat dry cereals like chips.”
but the moth boy is just a filipino boy
who combs his mother tongue in english streaks of poetry,
whose father is an ilocano who lives far by the sea,
whose mother is a kapampangan who is a good housewife,
whose japanese eyes are his grandfather’s, &
whose heart was passed down by his late grandmother.
lastly, in the spread of his winged arms (by sunrise)
lies the death of his melancholy-friends.
the spread of that bonafide moth finds him
the lightest key to carry.
the moth boy and his august poem
has come to an end with abundance in a fireplace,
behaved by utterly grace, its temple, its face.
Adonis Alegre is a filipino poet from bacnotan, la union. he took his bachelor’s degree in ab english at don mariano marcos memorial state university, philippines. you can read his poems in panitikan ph, levitate magazine, redamancy magazine, everscribe magazine, querencia press, livina press, bakunawa press, among others.
