Wednesday, 29 April 2026

Five Poems by Adonis Alegre







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.

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