I was rummaging my notes when I found an illustration of the French painter Millet’s painting “The Man With The Hoe”. It is a picture of a laborer standing in a field and leaning forward in a resting position on the handle of a grubbing hoe. This is actually one of my favorite paintings for it drew not just my attention but my sympathy as well I actually made a short story out of it. It was a shocking picture of a tired laborer “not much intelligent-looking and human than the beast of fields”.

I was also reminded of Gainsborough’s “The Blue Boy”, a painting from Rococo Art which is the extension of Baroque decorativeness beyond classical restraint. It was the bourgeoise art, the art of the elite. Even history tells that there is a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, that there is a manifold gradation of social ranks even before the earlier epochs. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices and serfs. All of these social classes are also manifested in literature and art.

Whenever these random associations come into mind, thoughts of myself and where I stand in my society score upon my consciousness. I was born to a family which I consider as belonging to the working class. My father is a DENR (Department of Environment and Natural Resources) employee while my mother is an elementary public school teacher. Both had to work hard and even hold sidelines in order to support me and my three other siblings. The four of us broods are all getting our education from public schools. I am already in college and as what is basically expected from me, strives to do good with my acads in order to graduate on time and acquire immediately a job. Being the eldest, I am supposed to have a job right after stepping out of school and carry out the unwritten laws of a breadwinner.

I am on my 3^rd year in the BAE Major in Creative Writing program now, and honestly, I am still figuring out where this degree will take me. What I’m trying to say is that we don’t get hold of our destiny, we might sink or swim. Who would like having those 4 years of sleepless nights and damn papers in college get wasted by slumping your butt on the couch and be an 85-pound bum someday. We are taught in school things that we can use in facing the real world, and what I mean here is the survival in the industrial and economic blunders of reality. Most of us make their exodus to other countries to seek their fortune, to find wealth. This only holds true to Marx’s assertion that we are left no other bond between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of Philistine Sentimentalism, in the icywater of egotistical calculation (Marx).

I am really hoping that this passion I have for writing would take me to certain heights and basically let me earn money from which I can support my family and do whatever I want. And I would certainly sing: It’s all about the money/ It’s all about the dum dum du du du dum / I don’t think it’s funny / To see us fade away / It’s all about the money /It’s all about the dum dum du du du dum..

TO MY ROOMMATE

(by Cecille La Verne L. Dela Cruz from Hitler’s Whore, The Poems Of)

                                     ._________________________________________.                                                                                                       A                                                                                 B

                              The two points of a line in a two-dimensional plane. 

If you fold this paper lengthwise,

and cut a hole across

to connect A and B, you make a wormhole. 

to Wonderland – her wormhole. 

If you’ll allow me, I will draw you into

a cesspool of bliss and beauty,

where my kisses and touches

will shrink Time and Mass into empty concepts.

Then you will find

yourself joining Alice in Wonderland. 

Come, then.

I’ll slide my finger into your hole.

Will you take me someplace? I know you can’t make heads or tails about this, I too feel the same way. They say the only thing one will regret in this life are the risks one didn’t dare take. Life is so short, so I want to marvel things as much as possible. Risks bring rewards.

If someone sees us, just tell them I’m your niece. You can pass as my aunt anyway. We have this uncanny resemblance, I tell you.

Have you heard about
Capri, Carthusia? They say when you close your eyes and breathe in its warm breeze, it would feel like having a dream come true. Back in 1380, monks at the monastery of Certosa gathered the most fragrant and beautiful flowers from that island —- oak, wild carnation, lily of the valley. They worked on that just to honor a visiting queen. The waters in which the flowers were kept were said to be very intoxicating.

Take me to a beach. I want to feel sand between my toes. I want to feel the sea breeze tickle my shoulders.

I want to be with you. Just want to be with you. Maybe I would feel how it’s like to be in Carthusia.

I know your bent out of shape already. You don’t have to say, all these things people say keep messing with my head too. We do not have to care.

Nana said all good things come to those who wait. But waiting is the hardest part, don’t you think? I’m not going to wait for another two years. When I turn 18, maybe I won’t want this anymore. One day I will wake up, and this will all fit together.

Last night I dreamt about you again. I was staring at you through the glass window outside that cold night outside your place. for a while I could not enter for I could not find some way to get in.

I called in my dream for you, and had no answer, and peering closer through that window I saw the both of you, your arms entwined around her hips, her tongue sticking out for your mouth. In my dream, I know that you’re in love with her and the feeling resonates like squishing broken glasses on palms.

There is something demoralizing about watching you both get more and more crazy about each other.

Then, like all dreamers, a sudden supernatural powers made me pass like a spirit through that glass before me, and the next thing is that I was carrying this butcher knife and stuck it on her dainty head and all you did was to stare and whisper I LOVE YOU. 

            Jai guru deva om.... Nothing’s gonna change my world.  

            He crouched himself down quivering in a corner of his cell like a cornered animal, humming his favorite Beatles song. The sinister pulsations of the place had wrought him a sense of insufferable gloom: the walls, he senses, are decomposing like vegetable matter, the bars of hardened tool steel outstretched to choke him, the dull and single fold-up bunk diabolically immovable, and the coldness of the concrete floor swallowing him up. With only a lone iron barred window, he could helplessly stare at the fog-enshrouded outside of his cell, the oppressively dark night sky and a portion of the equally desolate gun tower. 

            Just like the others, he had only bread and water for this day and had to wait for three more days for a solid meal. Screams from someone being beaten in one of the penal bastions or the “disciplinary unit” reverberates throughout the cell block as though the sounds were coming through a megaphone. In his three-week stay here, he had already grown used to it; yet hearing them still feels like barbed wires squished on both eyes. He had seen a fellow emerging from that bastion after days, totally senseless and babbling to himself so that he had to be moved to a padded cell in the prison’s hospital ward. They were demoralizing to him. The sufferings were demoralizing to him. 

            Nothing’s gonna change my world. Nothing’s gonna change my world. 

            He had never been brought in there. It’s because even in prison, he had still brought his natural humble and submissive self, always yielding to rules and stooping for higher people. He was a connoisseur of it. His world was pretty much all the same since he started to have sense in his surroundings. He grew up in a milieu of laborers, slaves and plunderous land owners. He had toiled the same land his forefathers have toiled before, and still paid the increasing debts they have. When he was still at a very young age, probably six or seven, he was that scruffy little boy who moved around and insisted on helping his father work in the field. Since then, he had become his papa’s buddy and had a grubbing hoe as his sole property. 

            One thing that binds them together was their faith. His mother would always tell him and his other five siblings bible stories before sleep, and had them pray the rosary after dinner.  

            God has reasons, she said. 

            At least that was a lot long time ago. Since his wife, that lonely bitch, ran off with his comrade three bitter years ago and had left him and their son alone with all the town talks, the thought of taking his life away had become an obsession to him. Only thing that holds him back was his son, that dear little child. They had grown so close he had thought of him way too much. They are all they’ve got after all. God knows how much breath Jaime had drawn him whenever that boy chuckles upon receiving a box of Curly Tops or that white kite now torn and tattered in the garbage pit, or those  favorite back rides he always let him have even if his back was excruciatingly aching from a whole day’s work at the field. He thought he had nothing more to wish for except that they’ll forever be together. Jaime was the only precious thing that made him forget the bleakness of his life. 

            And when that poor child went ill with Malaria, lay bedridden for almost a week, seeing with his very own eyes the decay of his beloved son, he had but to succumb to the trance of that dull and soundless day and set off straight to that black pick-up truck with his grubbing hoe dangling on one hand and stuck it on the forehead of the Arab man who had asked him for ways. 

            He had filched the man’s wallet of course, and some jewelleries — two gold rings (one a university ring and the other probably his wedding ring), a silver Rolex, and a gold double link rolo bracelet, before hiding the body in the car’s trunk and dumping it down the bushes below one of the overlooks off LockCliff Drive a good kilometers away.  

He had done what a desperate man would do, what a desperate loving father would do. He had already made up his mind the night before the killing that he would do whatever it takes just to save his son. He had consumed a pack of cigarettes that night outside their grisly shanty. He won’t let his son see him smoking. He was never a smoker but circumstances had made him so. That night, he also burned those religious readings his mother had given him. 

After the killing, he had gone home with his mind in vertigo with the prescribed medicines and a brand new toy, a brick game, only to be greeted by the lifeless form of the child in his deathbed, the poor 12-year old boy’s once sweet face raked off by the mask of a cadaver, his hair left with no signs of luster, his eyes and mouth still open, and on one hand is a crumpled picture of the boy and his parents at church taken when he was still two years old. 

Now, who told him that his world can change through prayers? He had long since forgotten Him. Maybe he would still believe in providence. Yes, he was already doomed to suffer. Nothing’s gonna change my world. Nothing’s gonna change my world. 

With the broken glasses he had lifted from one of the inmates, he sliced his jugular and died still crouched on that corner of his cold cell. He had sought death himself triumphantly. After all, death was the place he had been calling home.

Death is a place called home. This would always linger in his head whenever his alone.

He  dreams of taking his life but he just can’t do it. He had one precious thing waiting for him at home, the single reason he must continue living, yet the same memory that racks up his mind. He thinks of his 12 yr. old son way too much, back there in their grisly shanty, the poor child’s sweet face thinner, his hair beginning to lose its luster, bedridden because of the progression of his disease. It was mild malaria, the town’s doctor told him 6 days ago.

He grew up in a milieu of laborers, slaves and plunderous land owners. He toils the same land his forefathers have toiled before. When he was still at a very young age, probably six or seven, he was that scruffy little boy who moves around and insists on helping his father work in the field. Since then, he had become his papa’s buddy and had a grubbing hoe as his sole property.

He had long since forgotten his wife, that lonely bitch, she who ran off with his comrade three bitter years ago, and left him and their son alone with all the town talks.  What he needs now is money, and he has to have it so badly. Aside from his ill son, he still needs to pay his debt to his master by tomorrow, or else he will be dismissed in working their in that field again.

A black pick-up truck is moving slowly and a man bobs up his head at his car window while calling him, a lone stranger asking for ways. This is what his waiting for. It will just take a single strike of his hoe on the head and he’ll filch the man’s wallet or anything worthy, hide the body in the car’s trunk and dump it down the bushes below one of the overlooks off LockCliff Drive a few kilometers away, and then flee like nothing happened.

He had made up his mind. God is but a name.

glowworm, wormwood, woodland, landglow, grassland, bedlam, grassbed, wormgrass, grassglow, glowlight, lightface, lightpad, lilypad

I wandered off to the woodland with glowworms scuttling ’round my lightface looking for a lilypad to be my lightpad and fly me to a grassbed away from bedlam.

cloWn

colorful              blue                ash           flame-like color

doing tricks        juggles          cries         cradles

carnival              garden           vineyard        graveyard

child                   young girl      old man        I

The grotesquely masked clown, dressed in a wind-blown frock the color of burning flames, cradles me in his arms. I am small, frail and fragile, so I cling myself to him helplessly. I knew he didn’t care with the way he cradles me in this ill-considered haste,yet the weirdest thing is that I can’t feel any danger of being thrown away.

Everything around is wonderful. Dreamlike. I am in a candy colored graveyard, the very eye of this labyrinth father told me to never enter. Orange grass, pink trees, a myriad of fruits that seem to grow on the trees’ trunks (a tree here can have as much as 5 different fruits waiting to be plucked), candy cane tombs, vanilla sky, the labyrinth itself which stood endlessly was made of thick rose bushes and were bedecked with purple blossoms.

Stars seem like they are just a stretch of a hand away. They twinkle before my rocked body. They are nearer here than back home where I still have to draw my head upward to be devoured by their magnificence. But here, I see them descend and I devour them. Here, they are black.

The smell of incence burning permeates me. I can feel its scent enter my nose, slither up my memory. It lulls me even more to sleep, but no, everything here deserves every bit of attention.

The sound of mirth resonates slowly —- playful giggles, innocent chuckles, soft hushed conversations. Maidens came like mists into view, all camped by the glowing grass, sitted, bare-footed and donned in white.

They were my audience.

And then there she* was, the most striking of them all, sitted on her scarlet mount, clothed in purple and scarlet color decked with precious stones and pearls, she that raises a golden cup with her right hand while a smirk creeps upon her plum-tinted lips.

She was happy. Even more jovial, and I know exactly why she felt that way. She had gained triumph again.

* The Whore of Babylon (Revelation 17. 3-4)

OBLIVION came rushing to this bedroom

With his frayed flowing robes barely touching the damp floor

Turning everything to ashes as he passed, and finally cloaking himself to her.

The lawn is green, every blade of grass decked with liquid pearls from last night’s downpour. There grow four old and sturdy oaks, the wide front porch of the country house stretched as their backdrop. The oaks have always been there since we were still children, serving as shades for us whenever we want to spend the entire day playing outside. But today is special. They are now adorned with a plethora of powdery blue ribbons tied upon their branches.

Tables and chairs stand grouped across the lawn, and clutched on them are white balloons, motionless and waiting to be popped. Along the perimeter of the place is a white picket fence, about 3 feet high, which touches a row of sweetbriar bushes boastful of their bloom.

With the air quiet and still, it was actually a sight to behold, as if Persephone had again escaped the underworld. Yet its splendour was of no use now as I scurried myself through the flagstone walk leading up to the slightly open white door, clasping the sides of my chiffon dress as I fought for balance.

I spotted her off to one side, slumped on the floor, her white wedding gown splaying on the white Grecian tiles, leaving a turmoil of creases on its train, her father helding her. He was stroking her hair which was sleekly tied in a bun —- long slow strokes, careful not to shove the lone white oleander pinned on its place along the back of her head, and whispering “My Angel” to her. He had tears welling up his eyes, fighting them like how soldiers would when seeing a picture of their loved ones a minute before going to battle.  

The moment went on seeping like poison to my consciousness. I saw her shoulders trembling, her face covered with her hand, while i am standing there beside that white door — worthless, choking up as i saw a crumpled letter on her other hand.