Listen ear-to-speaker close and witness Eminem rock all your established notions of the rules of language and music.

Eminem is a lyrical sniper armed with a semi-automatic. He shells us with poetry and expresses in a few minutes of rap what many fail to do in a hundred pages.

History has seen a great number of brilliant poets and lyricists, word warriors who have equally amazed and inspired us. However, very few are like Eminem – able to simultaneously and musically indulge rage, sorrow, pain, shame, guilt, regret, genius, sin, sympathy and tender compassion without equivocation and ambiguity. And to do so within a tight rhyme scheme would make even the Bard tremble.

Eminem is a lyrical sniper armed with a semi-automatic. He shells us with poetry and expresses in a few minutes of rap what many fail to do in a hundred pages.

He personifies the neurotic artist who cares about each syllable and the exact beat of its delivery. With flawless cadence, he welds syllable to beat like they were joined at birth.

Listen to Eminem’s sound and fury and you will understand the mad discipline that took him out of the trailer park into celestial flight.

Apple.

No other fruit has caused greater discord and sin. No other brand provokes as much commotion and desire.

At Apple’s core, slightly off center, stands a man in a black shirt and white sneakers whose youthfulness and reticence seem better placed in an upstart. The contrast is striking. Nevertheless, Jonathan Ive holds his own against the man in Levis jeans and cashmere turtlenecks who eats spotlights for breakfast.

Ive, like his patron, resonates through his designs.

What makes Ive so amazing is his stubborn faithfulness to a philosophy of design.

His design is so organic that factories rise and fall in its wake. It is so perfectly and gracefully executed that it recedes and becomes an invisible veil into a dimension of pure experience.

Like a true Apple masterpiece, the architect stands quiet and inconspicuous behind the performance.

Muted elegance inhabits Ive’s character as much as his craft.

“Design is how it works.” 

- Steve Jobs

Through design and rhythm, Eminem and Ive attend to our senses with indulgent, almost violent intentions. Their forms reflect a consuming obsession with details meant to elevates every moment.

Eminem and Ive are furious disciples of design and delivery. Eminem with poetry and beat, Ive with symmetry and lines.

Brothers in the scholarship of cool.

Artists so consumed by the science of their art.

(a page from a unpublished, ghostwritten book, april 2009)

with pinions prone to the sky…

remember the seagull
and how apart it stood from the flock.

a solitary flight
into the yonder of sightless horizons.

to fly without losing height…

stalls and stalls. stalling over again.

yet in secret aspirations,
has claimed the wind.

Writing has always been a dreaded pursuit.

It is in my case, and i dare say, for most of us.

Most of that dread stems from the fear that what we scribe on that page can never fully capture the depth of our thoughts and emotions. The words that stare back are not quite what we wanted to say; worse, not quite reflect the person we thought we were.

We measure ourselves through ink and letters and often find ourselves insufficient.

Weightless.

So we avoid facing the unwritten. Because there, kept hidden in our minds, our myths remain safe from rejection and ridicule. Unchallenged and inert.

Every word is a cut.

Despair. Fear. Anxiety. Rage. Pain. A sense of deficiency.
All of that we bring into the blank page where they bleed, oh so slowly, through the narrow aperture of our pen.

All those emotions are there for a reason.
We tremble at the thought of fall, but more so with flight.

Stephen King once wrote that we should never come lightly to that blank page.

It is a battlefield. Come gagged with flailing arms, come with clenched jaws and white-knuckled fists, come doubtful and irreverent, come timid. come in misery, come in fear, come in tears.

Come with the best of intentions. Come with the slightest of dreams.

Come to it any way but gently. Come to it flawed and alive…

So go ahead.

Grip the blade.
And stain that page with guts.

this is me, silent.
listen…

this is me, centered
in my gravity.

this is my second, alright, nth attempt at a personal blog. if you can see my panel, you would be nauseated at all the blogs i have in comatose, recumbent and handicapped of substance.

i truly admire writers and bloggers with focus. they know their craft and they hone it with surgical precision.

mine is just all over the place and schizophrenic. i am supposed to know better, right?
wrong. because i don’t.

***

or maybe… i do…
because i tend to run away from safety.
because i tend to list when sailing calm waters.

i am sorry if i tend to disappoint. those who see me as a vessel of promise, but never fulfilled. those who impose the emptiness on me.

i carry your expectations as my anchor, but they will not define my mileage. they will not weigh me down.

instead they shall be the wind on my back and take me to sanctuaries by myself i cannot.

the off-roads, the pavements, the bends…
you may think i seem to travel with a limp, but the path is rarely straight
and i choose to walk on the edge.

***

for those i have lost because of my absence, know that i was never gone.
i was just out paving some sidewalks with castles of golden sand.

for many months now i have been carrying with me a book on haikus, rengas, haibuns, and other types of japanese poetry. i held on to this slim volume like a respirator. i breathed through its pages as i was caught in the undertow of my own blustery thoughts.

fencing them within poetry was the only way for my restlessness to stand still. like some magnetic pole, the pieces would align and find direction and keep north.

i find that japanese poetry purifies and pacifies me. pressing my thoughts through the fine sieve of rhythm and measure, i am able to navigate through the effluence and dead weight of life and find my density, my truth.

a harvest of poetry.

here i cultivate the seed.
here i hope for blooms.

you were the only one who survived from a litter of five. your mother, a cat we have never seen, could not have chosen a more dangerous place to give birth. we had a beloved and aging dog who was terribly suspicious of strangers, more so of trespassers. she mercilessly tore at your brood, but left you unscathed.

the violence of nature is never without design.

we took you in and tootsie passed on quietly in the night a few days after that. you, on the other hand, were anything but quiet. oh how you cried. anyone who heard you could not have doubted that you were meant to be here.

i nursed you. at first you can only manage to suckle my shirt, but then you found the perfect spot on my hands: from pinky to the index, stopping short of my thumb. that’s how i measured you growing up. as an adult, the habit never left you. up until our last days, you would tenderly nurse on my fingers, your way of taking my hand. we spent many nights falling asleep this way. you on the crook of my arm, lulling me to sleep with a purr that promised dreams of warm snow.

you found the lump that i was too young to have. when i first came out of the hospital, you waited on our bed with a quiet understanding that some things have been lost.

you were gentle and kind. every stray kitten you would take as your own. magically, you would express milk even when all laws of nature said you should not. in your desire to care for a stranger, you willed yourself to give what you did not have. only kindness can conjure such miracles.

you were a contradiction to your kind. you were regal and graceful but you possessed none of the predatory instincts that so defines your species. you never chased rats. oh how you would watch them, take on that stalking pose that you have mastered so well, tremble your limbs, raise your derriere ready for the pounce, and then stop to lick yourself. you paused short of delivering the death blow.

you were a defiance to your nature.
you ate fish but choked on the fish bones. you climbed on high places but needed to be carried down.

the lump you found on me, i found in you. you seemed fine after the operation. but i knew… i noticed your tremors even as you hid them from me. on that day, the seizures were sapping your strength. i stayed by your side. but you held on until all of us were home to say goodbye. you did not want me to be alone when you go. with every labored breath you were breathing for me.

looking back it all makes sense… you had to go because you knew it was time for me to leave.

i miss you, especially on rainy days which we so loved.

and i return to you and to all of me that you have kept safe.

the northern star of my singular horizon.

***

there is something about the comeback kid defying the odds and the naysayers that is triumphant all in itself. there is something about shattering expectations that is always hopeful and exhilirating. something about defiance defies defeat.

never mind if the rise is not as spectacular as the fall.
never mind if the climb happens to be just a few feet off the ground.

a few feet up is enough for a change of view.
a few feet up is still higher ground.
                up is a few feet closer to the sky.
          feet
   few
a

midway through the steep, we can see how far up we’ve come and how far up we can still go.

so i am taking my time, climbing this mountain of mine.
          up, standing
falling                     down.
taking piggyback rides at all my second winds.

===

this post was supposed to be made just prior to the oscars.
let’s just say i am giving it another wing.

the first was a few years back while i was applying for my license to teach. the gatekeepers of the PRC stopped me because i was wearing slippers. they said it was “unprofessional”.

they will, however, allow you to get inside if you wear socks with your tsinelas.
good thing they were easy to find: socks at 10 pesos a pair for sale along the many stalls that lined the sidewalks of morayta. i chose the most colorful pair that i could find.

i felt certain that i looked a bit more, um, “professional” without the loud socks on. but i would rather not debate the fashion. i have made my point. the guard stared at my garish feet in a moment of hesitation, then sheepishly let me in.

second time was a week ago at the DFA. i thought i was just going to be among the slippered and sandaled masses waiting in line at the back for their passports. turns out, my business required me to enter the front gate, along with the well-heeled bureaucrats.

i was wearing slippers of course and the guards were requiring (gasp!) closed shoes. i cannot sock my way in this time. but after traveling three hours under sun and smog to get here, i was not about to be scorned having come so far.

i feared i might not make it on time. only two hours remained before the offices closed. fortunately there was an an ukay-ukay (vintage) store just around the corner. i took time to carefully scan through their shoe rack. desperation is not an excuse to be undiscerning. i found a pair of moccasins i liked and wore them without socks or pretense. i hurried to the DFA where the guard smiled and gladly let me through.

i felt triumphant crossing those lines.
often i may wear the wrong kind of footwear, but i do have what it takes to earn my pass.

i guess what i saying is that we cannot always flipflop our way through life.

some times we have to muffle our steps and tiptoe around in socks.
other times we have to announce our tracks with heels and pumps.

either way we cannot make halfway prints in the sand.
we may hop or skip,  but always press our feet as we land.

barefoot or otherwise, we have to make this trip with brio and panache.
so swagger and stand. walk like you own the ground.

   silverstein went to wash the shadows
                     and i have to iron the days.

   them’s been full of wrinkles and bristles,
   that sunshiny colors seem so misplaced.

   so if you’ve been looking for me
   and keep unfinding me there,     

   i must have been stuck in one of ‘em puddles.

   i’ve been looking for an iron
            to smoothen the days

   so finally happyness
                                  can see its own face.