POET, PLAYBOY, PERVERT, SON
by Miguel Syjuco
In hills,
Haunted hollow with blurs of
bullets,
Burs of kris and bloodshot eyes,
As talks trip-falter on two feet
too big,
And ransoms roar
For human life:
Poet playboy pervert, one
Single man hurt
In bomb blast
Half past the 11th hour before
peacetime,
Echoes flown, thrown on walls,
blown, rhyme
With ouch, kapow, kaboom,
Why is death standing in a mother’s
living room,
Boy, the bebop jazzmataz fast
on the bullets ass
Named nothing, that slug, thug,
PSG bug,
Without within things like thoughts
or profound snots,
Flung thither and non on pavement’s
dawn
Rough like red, rough like yellow,
Fellow fiends, friends, kaibigan,
kaputol
Ng diablo, well blow me downtown
and shiver me
Timber, rape riot red, tight
like homesteads
On the soothills of the south,
Bastards with sewn shut mouths,
Lackies luckless lost amongst
Soldiers, their pockets filled
with holocaust,
And rebels with ideals as raw
As hunger in their bellies,
Claws, and AK47s slung, sleepily,
on shoulders hung
With rust of race and allah’s
word,
Fleeing upwards like an ebony
bird,
Buzzard breath on toasted bread,
And Joyce Jimenez in that young
boys head,
As he rubs gun hilt shiny gold,
Like hold on hope, like brown
periscope,
Like barter trade of eye to eye,
And xyz,
I don’t know why
The abcs and 1,2,3s of graves
Dug there beneath the trees
Where monkeys scream and scraw
And barefeet walk,
And bananas stalk
The upwards sky, shone shiny
Gone with heat of dawn tossed
gently
‘cross the steaming sky
Of shells, shrieks, shudders,
shouts,
Splits heads, holes hearts, tears
off mouths,
To end, abruptly, silence corruptly
Unreal, undone, the war’s unwon,
In the south of this place
Where the setting sun, sets strong,
sets strong,
Sets blood and wrong,
On the poet, playboy, pervert,
son of a gun,
Son of mother, son of sun,
Son of allah, son of god,
Son of greed gone green
On heaps of gold and cold hard
cash
Of the folk on Polk street, thievery’s
stash,
Temple tempered on celluloid
dreams,
Pipe schemes, and ream of Captain
badiding’s
Limp wristed blistered follies,
Fallen from power, fallen from
grace,
Shamed the shame
Of our people’s race.
And poet, playboy, pervert,
Mother’s son, engraved in earth,
Battle done, and allah’s gone,
and god is done,
And death’s door shut with leaves
of grass,
Blown trembling in the south’s
red sun.
Mandaluyong,
February 19, 2001
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