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Operation Optimism: Twin Futures
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2021-07-12 11:17:18Related chapters
TUNNELS Postscript to Pronouns
For one: I saw a book, ash-colored; on the sideof its skin lived the initials A.I.riven by blanknessand a fatal crave darker than dark.It read Ako and Ikaw. My eyeshungered, wishing for anothercourt in the sky, or another throatto house another world in another time.Second:I should be in jail. I have been cripplingsyntax to its spindly few. SpellingI pummeled to misspell Astrosphinxas statuesque as May I sing with me? Words whiplashed on fire icejeepneying with Saint Lazarus—the emperor of English over grasslilt parsing poison into ice creampoetry and screaming grammar noir.The narrative of tradition, beer-fellowedby cultural madness to digressand mull over a foamof savory crab fat alongsideour pickled come-what-mays. For this,‘Ikaw’ and ‘Ako’ separately are You and Mein Filipino, that by accident tryto understand Taglish as nomadologywears thin of its spatial possessions,rhymes, or like those rent checksno prettier than your beinga residential state s
Last Updated : 2021-07-12TUNNELS Heartbeat
(Alright make it official you heard it in a speculative membrane-bus!)Watching fast cars from the edge-row seat of a bus, my mind safe-assigns a regular thought I thought was running pristinely naked, or an odor of a girl I thought was the effect of an 8AM lesson on Pierre Gourou slowly kicking in, embracing the trees from around my vision which I thought was tropical time carrying code-specific heat back to my lovely province. This back seat of a speculative membrane-bus now turning loco, calling out all aesthetes and commuters of the Manila mundi to reunite! And ringing—my mind’s chasing the hour like a whiplash too quick to move. Love this shy avocado hope on board—of all round trips I couldn’t finish: tickets there turning to peanuts, roasted peanuts scattering around a wheel to never make this poor brain tired of thinking aahh thoughtlike an Atom-U freight memoryringinglike a heart. Or: a deadbeat’s heartbeat.
Last Updated : 2021-07-12TUNNELS Democracy Jr.
1st: I was very proud I passed the test. The test was about how strong and firm I was with my faith, political or racial or hologrammatic.2nd: The gift of democracy so essentially fluid, ergo, was time. I had to witness time suture history—or the narrative of forgetting in peacetime.3rd: How was the police—yes the polease!—calculating the algorithm of hurt when protesters were themselves curators of Lego-like ideas and wild algebra?4th: Kowloon was a place of blacker and blacker appeal to our fair M/Other. . 5th: She who stood astound by the palace walls read her // self, more than bodies melting in the rain, freezing in the sun.6th: The heroine who did this should become the anti-auteur. The second heroine in our mind would be the myth and metaphor of our freedom.7th: I didn’t believe I would allow myself to listen close to my mind—how imagination gurgled so loud repeating revolution like a Bacharachmasterpiece.8th: From Manila to Hong Kong to my ci
Last Updated : 2021-07-12TUNNELS Short Story, as Borobudur
I’ve found a reason to live. Yellow skybright shores. The theory sleeps between religion’sporcelain ghosts & inner Sastra,& your seeminglyneurotic connection to the plotsabotaged by the night’s iridescent fingers.Hands of your characters’ hair area wisp in this solitude’s picaresque,keeping shiny the stupas, beautiful as sciencethough the birth of the hero can never beprehistoric Java, claiming the lost narrativeof memory. Brittle aura of bonesover the unsettling tear & this isto complicate the scenesfrom a horoscopic point of view.I’ve found the signs in a jar: heart lotuses,synecdoche. Flowers of the intricate past,I’ve brought them up to the altarwith or without a conclusive epiphany,a conflict so indistinct as a starmilked for its nirvana, for the riddlingtales it tells right from the beginning,middle & end. The setting seems very patient.So what is chronologically cotton-boundmay not be novel, physically circl
Last Updated : 2021-07-12TUNNELS The Ice Cream Man is feeling the flavour, narcolepsy
he sells not, it seems, as the week’s bestseller sleeps in like a strange touch of odd memory, shifting the day’s dream minerals into a controversial hybrid of taro and guacamole. To scoopout some more island recipe from the greying whole, the interface of muted shreds and bits, is,after boyfriends and girlfriends fail to acknowledge sublime art suspended in street after howling street, the swirling sociology of tropical malaise.The Ice Cream Manwith [his] underrated purposiveness of disembodied aesthetics, hops in, emerges, rethinks the condition of language, of signs and symbols that confront the steady disinterestedness toward matcha. What is it that forces taste to be critically sabotaged by teleology? Yet what is being promised by the Coney Island theory is parity premised on subsistence. As if aura, as if this beast of contestation: is the decision to choose ice cream sandwich over standalone waffle cones a celebratory case of favouring the sublime, the liminal, the appli
Last Updated : 2021-07-12TUNNELS A thought, or, a fatal error
has the gentleman standing in the doorway, making useof the pinkie stuck still in his nose to once and for allcancel the fourth and last postal service. What iswrong about the delivery today? A thought, or, the actof sun-gazing over the glittery green, waitingfor the aureate making of numerals, a further lucidity.Or a line he cares so much about. So muchrepetition, so much nectarine the insects writheinstead inside the mail box. A thought,never mind the bluish pain of thinkingas such is the bride of September afternoon,or, ideas driving the good news back into wreck again.Ink, or, the hand’s decision to turn the key in the ignition.Who is coming? When a thought arrives, is delivered,the art of return is returned, the mossy silvereyesthrough the shrubbery repeat the panic, the fatal vomitcreeping in, leaving him with two choices on his palm.A thought, or, a fatal error?The line placid, splitting. The Lopez porch swinghasn’t m
Last Updated : 2021-07-12TUNNELS Self-Portrait as Open Flesh of an Undetermined Panic
Most of the panic remains virginal in the backyard, mostly quince-coloured, growinglike a flower sitting on an acre of phrases, mostly gerund, echoingthe voiced Gustav Klimt canvas that speculates on a mottled shadow.The figure of it is the sharp side of human,the freckled face of suspicionentering the green steel fences of our house, near the grassthat beds the pain, the pity, the first personwith a complex set of subjunctive mood. At about ten in the morning,before lunch is served, short of parenthetical immensitiesabout the recent case of a dog, the doomed offering beneath the orange sun,the children surround the areawhere there is a smell drawing a familiar incident.It’s a funny fruit torn from the sight’s memorial Edenrecalling a life in the hay, once mistakenlybegging for bones, sometimes barking at the neighbour’selection campaign ads-plastered tree,shaking out what’s coming in less, drily unnameable.However, in the interest of ungrammat
Last Updated : 2021-07-12TUNNELS I, from the et cetera farm
Dear autochthon:We slurp in the Parental Guidance colour of television, this orbit of the lost and found circling the living room with oxygen. Full of class and chrome. I write to you to request subsidy to cover my travel fare from my country to your always royal palatine palace, the hollow spaces of which the bright future of mental othering. Call it a telepathic zone. Call it a rapid polychrome. Of what? Perhaps only time could reimburse with instances of cultural selfing letting the sun set on its inner skin.I know how well respected you are in wishful thinking, your many achievements confronting different time zones and pushing agnotology away from the mouth of trauma, are phenomenal. Or maybe not, just a soft blow. Moreover, it is imperative on my part to thank you in advance for this opportunity to type up words I pilfered from last night’s dream. I know my research project will be a reality with your approval. In case you have suggestions, you can reach me by
Last Updated : 2021-07-12
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TUNNELS Footnotes
1A tourist destination in the province of Pampanga where air bases were built during the Americla colonial rule in the Philippines 2It is a volcano located on the island of Flores in Indonesia. 3Wild ducks in the native lexis of the people in Candaba, Pampanga in the Philippines. 4 A common place or town terminal where Philippine tricycles (or trikes) are used as service vehicles 5 A creature in Philippine mythology said to come out at night to suck the blood of victims from their shadows 6 A trite Filipino expression meaning “Are you sick of things?” 7 A Taglish or Tagalog English expression for “Let’s go!” 8An always crowded station on the Metro Rail Transit (MRT) in Manila, Philippines 9 All three towns of the province of Pampanga in Central Luzon in the Philippines
TUNNELS Intro to end
You see this humdrum townBacolor or Apalit or Macabebe9seeking colors & flood tide arias on the impulseof a rainy Saturday afternoonbeforethe machinery of undergarment civility because a harness will only be made for onefar away from the closetripraps & minuetsageing windows sigh in the airI have no plans & precedents—when in this charming confirmationyour handsome decision loungeson the very idea I suppose was your ideaof the blue histories of weather reportin a coma,wishfully contactingRogelio de la Rosa (makananu tana?),his name typed up slowly, fur is flying—lightness!—but you got everything nowround your mythic little fingerslife at the alterations shopoh what a terrible mess I’ve madeof this ending,ending of a poem.&
TUNNELS a story about a bruise in light of Lacan’s le sinthome; or, because love rolls in the fifth eye of our homelessness
I feel terribly whole tonight because of the nightrain& the proud No Fireworks sign out there on the street.I feel terribly dangerous I could let my right hand arm-wrestle the left hand of the clock before midnightsmokes up an illusion of the forgotten ledbetters &faux romantics. I could smash bricks w/ my silence& then screw & shout ‘till my bones crow to ask:do you remember your neighbor’s rabbit that fellin love w/ the rooster because it’s the Year of the Rabbit?what about rain trees, purple prose, the scattered zines& rhizomes? don’t they all speak of the symbolic symptom?feel free to say it out loud. panda-eyed, freezing cold,I know. I know the feeling, the stroke of the bokusekibrush, the memory on the wall like graffitied genitaliafrom the ceiling to the floor. I speak my mind free.i speak it free like when you spill secrets in a publicphone box, insisting that writers send ideas to priso
TUNNELS The Poet Who Wrote Adam Snow
for John AshberyThe literary life is never easy, you saw it firstin the convex mirror, its spreading tensionthe surface of claw-prints in silver. I then triedto learn how to read humour and surprisedisguised as a shadow pretending to havenever seen alchemy winnow through thistlesdown the dark alleys of your city parks. I,the wanderer learning how to drift pastshoe factories and never pay attentionto the still-chiming ways of lookingat a lamppost, would like to say, You arethe art of consciousness, the consciousnessof art! Uniform of the swirling things,you are: desk, papers, dried leaves, moneybills, memos, pills, tears, the image. Allsurround me like a magma of memoriesshutting down the last sex of wine from ash.
TUNNELS tɹaɪsɪkəl
Short distance routes for the love of the people’s plaza. In the land of guavas and legato-linked pabasas. Far gone since you left this town and its parish kisses traded for maple leaves.The green tufted Garcia garden behind the churchyard - not even the interstate 3AM tapsi can match. Seattle. Toronto. Burkina Faso. Look, we don’t have the places solet’s not talk about getting lost. Let’s talk about our national tɹaɪsɪkəl racing in our blood’s activity. It’s normal, you know. Like the Friday tiangge stalls floweringlike freckles in June, someone’s bleeding for what weare (not). Drop. So we have the future in the barangay basketball league. The way we spell “future” makes it easy for us to spell traysikel. Not tricycle. It’s traysikel, Bayani. For they’ve grown digital too, ask Uncle Pepe.
TUNNELS The Rapid Room
(after Requiem for a Dream)Feel the pain, the spiked effect of the year fastens like fantasy to the rapid room of human skin. Watch the junior tomato sun swiftly spinning forward the neon kitchen countertops, making big the dream to dance with cauliflowers while the text message remains unread, un-sniffing the curry powder from the freshest Woodstock of our lungs. See neon-painted plastic cups drift across the misshapen reality already inspiring the right chopper to celebrate the saturnalia of sharp objects, the happy flying Greek alphabets of such a beginning. It’s obvious to us two people, we never learn. Neither of us could understand, yet, the cost of all this may welcome another pain, another grotesque feeling, and then beyond the door into the abyss, we see us. In this rapid room we live. Our skin desires, dissolves. You believe in my troubled arithmetic. So we wrap our arms around each other, feeling the new pain every day, with calm paper boats sailing around this roo
TUNNELS Call Center Angels
Ting. The train left Guadalupe Station8 collecting more of Garoy’s ilk, work-tired and sleepy, the Garonoids. Then back to the strange lady stare-kissing the sun, back to Garoy’s scratching his gluteus maximus. Tang.The Garonoids behind them seemed like an on-off light bulb in their stressed shell-light. As the train stopped, they were switched on as if awareness were to penetrate their system. And when motion pedalled, their inner sky of sleep once again shut. Garoy yawned repeatedly, and the lady with the now amber-lit eyes averted her gaze, now toward the approaching station. “We’re heading to Boni Station and you’re still scratching your—“He quizzed, “What?”“Your gladiatorial tang tings.”“Ting Tangs?”And there’s a risk of Neil Gailman and Amanda Palmer confusing the morning’s blood pressure.
TUNNELS Little things
A couple of weeks back everyonewas chanting ¡Habemus Papam! in the garden,on chimney tops, on the floor of the plaza smittenby bird beaks, but not in the libraries of philanderingcodeheads and newly circumcised trapeze swingers.On that special day no one wanted to hear somethinglike a “freelance boner.” I’m sure you too didn’t throwan ear for words like papal shit or quantum Christology.You know, I’d like to brush your hair when things gougly, as in when a tsunami hits the seawall and there’sno one to fix your hair out of fear. I will celebrateyour eyes’ uncalculated blink as it might changethe season from tinder-parched mornings to being 84and still writing you poems. You know, I’d liketo see you cry, laugh at people off to work, becauseyou’re edged to clear the skies of jinx and throat-cloggedpretensions. The paddling mallards, oh, I want to countthem out for you and give you my monthly salarylest I fail to do the maths. I want to carry you
TUNNELS #taglish
never an expletive(in mint condition): nagsasawa ka na ba?6from the mouth of decadence, the idea of fish balls& tall tales in the streets. from research-groomed Rizalian dream, a #LunetaPark for your religionof sweet air. from media to selfirrealis& #Imeldific, a bruise in history-making. from the R-establishmentonce called a “(r)ehab,” the “first bonga light,” “systems spidering,” at the edge (a slant rhyme for ‘age’)of thirty-three a dirty ice cream is an oasisof #Dutertism; you & IWednesday #conyos of Ma
