Metro Manila Miasma

"I am here to propose a legend that says the city was once / a tribe of children / humming around in a circle / with embers at the center and cold hunger / for a story." - Ned Parfan

I, we, thrive within the Petri dish defined by your jagged boundaries, binding sixteen cities and a developing duck embryo, officially, squared by three suspended railroads plus the most ancient on soil, you are defined and simplified by two to three words and not much else, and undefined and unraveled by a million spectacles and cuss word puzzles. Tabloid fodder factory you are, and we line up for news about ourselves and the more suffering, or dead, victims among us. And I, we, your weary children: indifferent, passive, as our lungs fill up with your pneumatic smog, with barely a sniff, plow like the diminishing, extinct-bound carabaos (and trivia: sprawled inside Krus na Ligas, is the only functional rice field within you, which your steeled and cemented self may have forgotten.) 

Your redemption lies buried in one of your landfills, perhaps among the one hundred and fifty buried in Payatas, or underneath a garbage pile on one of your feces-strewn sidewalks. Your chalice of salvation dumped in a junkyard somewhere or sunk on a bed of your polluted rivers. In futile search of your desaparecidos, there are uncanny moments when incense mingles with the unified cry of your orphans, add to that those of the casualties of the recent Kentex conflagration (among others).

May all your churches, temples, buildings of worship, of whatever religion, serve as your thumbtacks, iron nails, staples, keeping you stuck to this earth, in place, that you wouldn't tremble too much in case of a violent tremor. We got, gathered, guts grinding from your gutters. And the (arguably) richest of your fiefdoms dreams of a tower that will be third tallest in the world (and soon fourth, fifth, sixth, and ad nauseam, as vanity of edifice complex goes). Indeed, you host these parasitic turfs that are no different from you: cabal of fools making fools of what they really are: 

fools. 

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Happy New Year, everyone! 

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This blog is sponsored by Limitado

phone nos. 09167840522/ 023588753

and S.P.R.A.W.L.-MMA

3rd floor JN Building, 657 EDSA corner Monte De Piedad Street, Barangay Immaculate Concepcion, Cubao, Quezon City

Plath and Bukowski

I have Sylvia Plath's "Collected Poems" and Charles Bukowski's "You Get So Alone..."

The former borrowed from my sister a year ago, and since I've no plan of returning it, it's mine.

(Anyway she just lives in the next building and may "borrow" it anytime.)

The latter I bought from National Bookstore a month or two ago --

with money my wife thought better (and more humanely) spent for our little daughter's milk.

(One afternoon I found them lying on top of the other on top of our plastic bedroom drawer.)

I believe reading them both is good for my, ah, "poetic education"

and mental health. 

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Happy Holidays and Happy New Year, everyone! 

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This blog is sponsored by Limitado

phone nos. 09167840522/ 023588753

and S.P.R.A.W.L.-MMA

3rd floor JN Building, 657 EDSA corner Monte De Piedad Street, Barangay Immaculate Concepcion, Cubao, Quezon City

Ham

Mother got pissed when she caught me
slicing ham with butter knife.

I said, It got it done. Just let me eat.
And quit the utensil profiling.

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This blog is sponsored by Limitado

phone nos. 09167840522/ 023588753

and S.P.R.A.W.L.-MMA

3rd floor JN Building, 657 EDSA corner Monte De Piedad Street, Barangay Immaculate Concepcion, Cubao, Quezon City

Gi Gold!

Quotation from T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock":

"I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled."

But I'm still good enough for gold. wink emoticon

(...and one bronze medal in the white-blue belt 85 kg. and absolute divisions, respectively, of the 1st Philippine Brazilian Jiu-jitsu open, held earlier today at the SM Mall of Asia.)

I'm practically a no gi grappling guy: Last time I competed wearing a gi was way back in 2005, in the first ever Pan-Asian International BJJ Competition, where I also won gold in the white belt division. And after 10 years, and with barely a total of two months of training with a gi in-between (including the very few times I trained with the UP Judo Team around 2005), I'm definitely very happy with today's results -- first time competing as a blue belt. smile emoticon

Thanks to all my teammates and athletes in SPRAWL and Kamphuis-Fabricio BJJ, also to Maestro Afonso Cego for the luta livre lessons. 

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This blog is sponsored by Limitado

phone nos. 09167840522/ 023588753

and S.P.R.A.W.L.-MMA

3rd floor JN Building, 657 EDSA corner Monte De Piedad Street, Barangay Immaculate Concepcion, Cubao, Quezon City