Category: Poetry

I am content when wakened birds,
Before they fly, test the reality
Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings;
But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields
Return no more, where, then, is paradise?
-Sunday Morning, Wallace Stevens

This is what it means to be broke in a time where your friends own smartphones
and post pictures of latte and waffles on Instagram: daytime light
no longer spears through the windows but barely makes them glow.

The knocking on the clear Plexiglas pane is another poor soul dressed
in olive skin and tattered clothes with his little five-year-old palm

stretched out to you, the other holding a somewhat rusty tin cup.

The guy cleaning tables at Jollibee sees the little beggar and draws the blinds

so that you wouldn’t feel bad. Where were their mothers? Some social workers
just so happened to be hungry and were eating burgers at a table opposite you.

They wore frowns, their eyes fixed on their food and drinks. The sound
of metal hitting a glass pane makes you turn towards the window.
“That same kid had run away from six foster homes,” you hear one of them say.

The window’s warm glow fades with the day as the shadows grow longer.
A boy helps a man wearing sunglasses walk past you, holding a cane.

—
John Oliver Ladaga is taking BA English (Creative Writing) at UP Mindanao.

Your soul’s time has run out
and your near-empty husk now breathes its last:
a shimmering white light exits its mouth
and in the following second the light in its eyes

dies

and i mourn your (un)timely departure

while gripping the hand of the husk that you left.

My own soul grieves,

my eyes cry waterfalls,
my mind goes numb,
my vision blurry,
my hands shaky,

but even then I have to face the reality
that even I know that you will never come back

because you cannot come back

because they have cut up your empty husk
and dipped it in formalin
(which is totally lethal, by the way)

because they have locked it up in a wooden box
and dressed it up for a gaudy display
while they mourn and take one last look at you
and “pay their last respects”

while they stuff their mouths with the cakes at the wake
and down the stuff with coffee
(but I presume they are eating away the pain)

and because they have only just crammed the wooden box
inside a concrete box
one that holds barely enough oxygen
to keep a man alive
(okay, maybe for ninety minutes, but still)
and they have forgotten to take into account
that you are claustrophobic

and that cement boxes over wooden boxes
do not have even basic facilities

and so I am worried that you will drown in your shit.

So you do not come back to your husk

because you cannot come back to your husk,
because going back again would be just torture,
because they killed you by asphyxiation,

and so your husk just goes back to dust

which is a pity for such a beautiful husk

and sometimes I wonder if it is still worth it
to break both boxes and pick up all the pieces

ten years later when just the bones remain.