The final poem --
* * * * * *
Words escaped from our closed lips,
drifted out of the open window
(Open them, you said, because the car stinks.
I said, I didn’t notice, but alright—
Let’s. Besides, we should enjoy December.)
and got smudged into the black canvas outside
much like the green, yellow, red and blue
Christmas lights
that streak past the hazy highway
as we drove by signs and stores, and houses and trees,
and memories and drinks,
and kisses shared on doorsteps and under sheets,
and on these familiar streets.
Every letter, every phoneme,
they tried so hard to clutch at the rolled-up windows—
unwilling to be left behind,
desperate to be listened to.
Perhaps they would be much like the sticky little black fingers
of ghost-eyed children as they clutch at our t-shirts and jeans
(or my hair, if they were hungry enough),
should we bother to stop and get down
at that corner of Javellana and E. Lopez
where they stand close together like death’s little army,
several months’ worth of dirt their armor,
a biting pang in their stomachs their only weapon.
But then, I knew they would be much more like the children,
should we happen to pass them again a bit later
when they’d all be lying asleep on Marlboro boxes quilted together,
wrapped in nothing but their diluted dreams,
fingers splayed open for a kind passerby’s (or Santa’s!) gift—
weak and willing to be pried away from the car windows
by our indecision and pretend forgetfulness
and be dissolved into the cold biting air,
indifferent if they won’t find our ears.
And so all we hear
are the hum of orange streetlights
and the ring of blurred figures and vehicles that we pass.
(I’d say the streets also have notes of blue,
but blue was there in Roxas Boulevard
and not here in Iloilo.)
These sounds, they are the swish-swash of rain
pelting down a taxi’s fiberglass window,
creating rolling stripes of gray and yellow
on your face while you held my hand and looked at me
too long an afternoon ago.
Much like now, when you would take your eyes off the road
and your eyes would ask me questions
whose answers I wouldn’t, at the moment, dare unveil.
And so I turn towards the vignettes that we pass by-
my favorite madwoman in her peach blazer and yellow shopping bags,
walking perhaps to McDonald’s, ready to seize sundaes from reluctant hands;
and there, see there, a motorcycle splayed on the pavement, its rear wheel still rolling,
nearby a TV crew with their rolling cameras and microphones and extension wires,
one policeman drowning in an aftermath of a frat fight.
And all I hear
is the rumpling of your hair against your baseball cap as you adjust it in between gears, too many times in one block alone.
Did you speak just now?
I’m sorry I was too busy listening for those words flailing outside the window,
their clamor must sound like that poor high school boy’s last sighs
as he held out his hands against the glint of knives and eyes
there in Magsaysay Village,
where we, too, once parked and travelled each other in the dark.
All you hear,
I know,
is the sound of my sweat gliding down my temple to my collarbone—
It feels warm and then all at once icy.
Are you hearing what I was saying?
Or is it those words that you hear?
Those words, they now flatten themselves at the rear windows,
like wet pages of newspapers plastered on the glistening asphalt of Luna Street
several typhoons ago.
Those words,
They must now be shivering
like I had, so long ago
when your hands left my breasts
to close the windows.
-END-
12.12.09, 17:36
