BALAGBAG- Bicol word for something lying perpendicular to and on the street. An irritating nuisance to passers-by. Thus, BALAG-BLOG. Welcome to the inconvenience....
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
STAINED-GLASS EYES
By: Gerry N. Peralta
First the mind’s a frame
Of black curves and dark designs
Twisting and conjoining steel
To form the image of immanent glass
Then Aztec gold is slowly laved,
Here, and Mandarin orange,
There, royal blue beside emerald green,
Deep purple conniving
With amber
Slot by slot-
Till the whole is a class act
Of light dazzling through matter
In a ménage a trois with color.
But everything is a play on the eye-
Like a slide on television
HXK-2, the chemical for ice boxes
And bathtubs, is stirred
With a dollop of hardener,
Then poured quickly on glass fibers,
That tighten instantly
Into pure plastic!
No matter-
The Sunday churchgoer
Looks up and beholds
What he believes in
Heaven, the saints and angels,
Garden of Eden, creation!
The word made glass-
Stained by his own eyes!
SANS PINCE-NEZ
By Gerry Peralta
I remove, when I write,
My reading glasses
The more to blur the edges
So words take on a shade
All their own
Darker, than the ribbon
In my typewriter
Softer, than onion skin paper
Then the dot in “icon” becomes
A halo, the “H” in Hell
Grows horns
In mantra the “a's” develop an aura
And the “o” in God
Becomes a heavenly host!
Even the haha in brouhaha goes
“hahaha”!
Then when I put my glasses back on
The words take on-
A glaring clarity
Meant more for my proof reader and/or
Editor
Go ahead, read again this poem
Sans pince-nez
See for yourself!
Monday, June 21, 2010
DALI’S ‘SLEEP’
By: Gerry N. Peralta
He winks in his dream
The nose proud even in sleep
And though absent
I see a mustachio
Waxed and curled to the tip
Like eyes on a peacock feather
I wouldn’t be surprised if he slept
With the other eye wide open
For he saw the innermost dreams
Of Narcissus waking from water
Of a man cradled in crucifixion
Of time melting into stupor
Or the eye itself encrusted with jewels
Or sticking out of a walking stick
Or glaring at the projected light of film
I guess his ego never slept
I imagine it as an eyeball
Caroming and careening
In the vast spaces of his works
I hear it as thunder
That is in fact laughter
Masquerading as a snore
But what are these thin sticks
That prop his face, his sleep?
These miniature creatures
Whose eyes one couldn’t even glimpse
Are they how he saw himself?
Sunday, June 20, 2010
TA'PIES
Ano ini, Ta'pies, tapuyas
Na sa lanob nag-dudumig?
O suka, bai baya, o sagmaw
Na initsa kan pirot na katabang?
O bangraw na nalipudan
Kan dampog asin dagang nag-sasangaw?
O bangraw daw
Na nag-kukurahaw nin kamurawayan
Na natamu'rakan kan nag-iitom
Na bulan?
O suka na nagsusuriyaw
Nin anggot na napupuot
Na sa tulak dai natutunaw?
Bul-bul na nagbubulos paitaas?
Dugi' na may dugi o
Daga' na may daga,
Bako daw?
Nudi ini gayod lanob man sana
Na saaga pipinturahan na
Nin pink asin blue
Kan MMDA,
Ay isus.
(June 21 2010)
Saturday, June 19, 2010
MIRO'
The beams floating effortlessly
in mid-air, turn into mobiles
of equation
bobbing up and down into
see-saws of equanimity
in an equality of the senses,
a sense of completeness
and clean-ness,
that only marbles of glass
and stainless steel rods
possess, yet is possessed
by a liquidness of lines,
straight lines that, when ogled
with keen interest, ripple with pleasure
sometimes the triangle visits
with curvature, grace under
curvature, that bends into micro-organisms
of sheer delight, geometric yogurt
that blend, equally, joy and math
in an equalness the universe only
knows.
(6/20/10)
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
WARMTH OF PUREST WEAVE
By: Gerry Peralta
How I slept, cried and crawled
By your leg, feet and thigh
On your newly woven mat
As the light of the moon
And the heat of the sun
Crept in and out
Of the bamboo window's
Criss-crossed frames
And the Northerly and Easterly
Blew over and under
The floor slats
As your fingers pushed the straw
With just the right tightness
And softness
I remember as warmth
Of purest weave
Now that I myself sit
On the newly woven mat
With a child beside me
Sound asleep.
GOOGLE EARTH
(For Jun Orense- Oct. 22, 2009)
By: Bob Peralta
When you passed on to the other world,
I Google Earthed- 'Albay Cemetery',
Swooping down Mayon volcano as the lens
zoomed in to a funeral procession
in my realm of mind
But I could not go as low as the streets,
The way I could in the States,
To Arlington perhaps or where Michael Jackson
Now lies; or to where the 'Imagine' circle is-
in Central Park.
All for the better.
Because when I saw Mayon straight down
without any of its cracks, making it perfect
The way it was when we were kids,
I saw you also with your young face-
Perfect in its apparition of reality
Then a segue of sepias blooming
Penaranda Park, by way of
mudflow gully, where we used to play,
Zentro, where we used to drink
The night into yet another evening
Your piano fingers tinkling the days
into bright smiling teeth
Thankful that I was far away
And that no satellite
Need bring me any closer
To the truth
That you will always be there
Where no Google Earth
Could ever snoop
Or follow....
SI MAMAY
Ni: Gerardo N. Peralta
Si Mamay kong Mayon
Nagmamamá na naman
Namumula-pula an ngudoy
Nagdudugo-dugo an liwuy
Atyan káyan makuspa ka na naman
Sa panginuron!
Ata hari bayá magparamamá
Abó na ning saimong abo
Pagtugá baya na dai ka na matuga
Pundo na ning saimong bisyo!
Nudi kun paghorop-horopon
Kun an saimong dai pagtuga
Senyas na kan saimong kagadanun
Hala sige na lugod Mamay kong Mayon
Pagmamá na lugod gilayon!
May 15 2010
THERMOMETER
By: Gerry Peralta
Still as a thermometer
That remembers your last fever
Forever at 40
The mercury is unmercurial
In its silvery sleep
I whip it and whip it again
Hoping for normal at 37,
But it remains un-wakened
From deep slumber
So I whip it,and whip it again
Shake it and shake, whip it and whip
Till its scales shatter
Into a thousand globules
Of silver...
Silent, in slo-mo, I try to grasp
One last glob in the air,
But it slips from my fingers and breaks
Into still a thousand pin-points
Of light..
Never again to be 37
Or 40.
PEPE
(SMITH’S SOLILOQUY)
I am mummified!
Dead to the world!
My esophagus, a sarcophagus
Limned with the secret recipes
Of the afterworld
My voice- a pharaoh’s pharynx
Ever rising like the phoenix
Now a larynx
Long as the Nile
Gone dry
My skin- precarious as papyrus
Or rolling paper entombed in a wallet
For over half a century
Crackling
Before being lit
They want me tame and silent
As a sphinx!
But they cannot scoop out
My heart of song,
Our song, ‘Ang Himig Natin’
My gift of living tongue
To a people who only sang
My last name’s tunes
They cannot embalm the soul
Of rock, try as they might
To squeeze it dry
Of it’s labyrinthine juices
Nor can they severe or cut
My guts- to go the distance
Of the solitary path
And deliver the mall rats
Like the sixties rat packs
Out of slavery!
CLOCKS
By our midnight
When we all become clocks
The long hand ticking in reverse
Racing the shorter other
To who knows where
We suddenly feel counterclockwise
Our springs and gears
Rusting spontaneously
The invisible space
Between battery and coil
Oxidizing a shade brown
Reversing its polarity
Our self worth becoming a pendulum
That at one high point refuses
To swing back
Or does so longingly, grudgingly,
Slow as time unwinding
Ever wider, ever slower
In the end we will all cease
To tick
Analogue or digital
No exceptions
Not even the person
Who invented the clock
Whoever he was, bless his soul
Or discovered time
From infinite non-existence
BALAG-BLOG
That's what this blog will be, virtually, a BALAG-BLOG. An irritating nuisance. Shout-out in your face blog.
Nah! maybe ten years ago, when I was 20 years younger.
Now its just going to be an arthritic piece of wood too early for treat or trickin'.