A Poem For You On Our 25th

Our dreams, our passions

have always been intertwined,

we simply cannot let go;
The novelty of encounters
is always there,
as well as a bit
of guilt that you are
the stranger in my fantasies;
It was only yesterday
was it not?
When we hungered,
we yearned
to be one
daily, we scrounged
for both time and place
and every bit
of opportunity,
every ruse, every excuse
to claim our dreams,
to wallow in sweet, salty sweat,
to endure,
to revel in
rapacious desires;
On our humid nights
that entice, we plead
for light not to come,
we beg to indulge unstoppable
in our gluttonies, as we will always
be each other's stranger.

To My Dad On Fathers Day

Dear Dad,

Thank you for teaching me how to ride a bicycle, and swim, and tie my shoe laces. I needed all that.

Thank you for being kind and upright, for being patient, for always being there at the doorway during each first day of school, for being a good provider, a good father and husband.

Thank you for all those Friday evening trips to Quiapo Church, the Sunday afternoons at the Luneta Park after Mass, the weekend picnics at Mount Makiling, the summers in Baguio, and the annual "visitas iglesias". I needed those.

Above all, thank you for your love and your time. If I can be even only half of what you were to me as a father, then I will be a good father to my own children and a good husband to my wife.

I love you.

From your son.

A Brief Life

Excuse me

I'm just passing through

and I wish to see

everything beautiful and ugly, too.

I want to see and be

where a mountain meets the sea

or where a swift river

empties into an ocean

or where a vast golden meadow

melts into the bluest of sky

or on a summit's solace atop cumuli.

Inasmuch as I want to see happy faces

with crow's feet and wrinkles that coax

skins into pleasant smiles

I need as well to glimpse tears

that well up and fall

into the depths of sadness and despair

grimaces, too, and the empty gazes of hopelessness.

I may need to immerse myself

in gluttony and vile

and turpitude by all names

to be indifferent

to wrinkled, begging palms

to pleading, dirty faces of street urchins

if only to be human, to be frail

to be out of grace, to be damned

to glimpse both beautiful and ugly

taste and smell delicious and revolting

experience happy and sad.

As of now I take

painfully slow steps,

at times, unsure,

towards the light of my longings,

my dreams, my pinings.