1. It's nice to be quiet like this. When I wake up, I feel a fine buzzing inside my head. I walk three blocks each morning and three more going home. I pass by many things I'd like to have. The urgency to write like a madwoman has gone from me. Maybe one of these days the bubble will burst and the very thing I know is true will reveal itself. But that's for another, more terrible day. Tonight, it's raining and I am planning on sleeping early.

2. Passing by one of the big hotels in Alabang, I saw two people kissing. I inched closer for a better look but tried to hide myself in the shadows because I am not entirely shameless. They were two women -- the other had short curly hair and the taller one had a small earring on her nose. How nice it is, I think, to experience this kind of abandon, a feeling that I can still remember but am finding hard to mimic now that I've grown older.

3. What I would like is to hear from you. But again, you have dropped off from the earth. Where are the places you vanish to? I would like to know, truly.

4. I miss my mother's chicken soup. Even if she has never made chicken soup, even if she is not really my mother but a sigh and sometimes, just a name that I keep putting in between these self-imposed distances.

5. What does it take for a person to be truly happy in the body s/he walks around in? Is it really no longer a question of happiness but of comfort, a certain acceptance? It makes me lonely, somehow, thinking that.

6. If I am a blur, you are radar. Whatever that means to us now.

7. Last Sunday was perfect. I never thought I could describe any experience in a theme park as perfect but there we were and it was not raining and my brother kept posing next to these obscure, uninteresting structures, saying Take my picture as if his life depended on it and he and Darling's cousin rode the bump cars and I recorded how fast their cars went That ride took about 2.6 minutes Oh and we rode the ferris wheel and Darling's cousin was trembling with fright because it was his first time and you know how it is, that very certain fear, when you do things for the first time ever and we ate a Family-sized pizza because it was a Family Day and what could be better then eating a Family-sized pizza on your Family Day and we watched the fireworks while eating and the colors exploded all over our faces God-cum says P who never knows when to stop being crass and Darling he loved me so much that night I knew it as much as I know the curve of your back because you've walked away from me so many times and we rode every ride we possibly could and laughed at Darling's cousin's nervousness Oh we were radiant We were a flying trapeze, a six-foot heart undone and un-miserable I could not believe that my life looked like this If you took a picture, you'd be afraid of how terrible we seemed and on our way out we saw Cinderella and her prince and I was fine with the way Prince Charming looked at me as if he was about to say something dreadfully, painfully important but he couldn't, what with all that prettiness draped on his one good arm so he walked past me, so quickly that I could've imagined it all, oh well, there goes that. Story of my life.

The Muse This Time

R. Zamora Linmark

I am, at the moment, a patron of the meat market. Profession: a poet on-call because poetry only comes when it wants to; hobbies; listening to Gershwin while looking for Freud in Woody Allen movies; history of the heart: six lovers who wanted to be immortalized.

“Funny,” said my fourth, “you can cook up a poem about bumper-to-bumper traffic, but when it’s time to write about me…” How do you explain to someone who makes you come thrice a week and gives you head and foot massage at bedtime why it is much easier to write about gridlock in the land of diesel than return to that humid night in Makati, where we had met, in a Korean-owned steam room, a misnomer since lust provided the heat.

The fifth and sixth were more demanding. “Screw the acknowledgment page,” said the fifth. “I want a biography that sings,” said the sixth. Completely unaware they were making the same request an hour apart from each other, I told them, “What do you take me for? a mail-order poet? Dial-a-poem?”

“I don’t get it,” said the third. “You can create beauty from a dead fish,” said the second.

“Destroy buildings in one line,” said the first, “but you cannot write about the good ole devil?”

Their words are stinging now as I approach twilight. Truth is: love’s hard to live with. I forget to set the alarm clock, I buy everything on credit, I start making up words, I call in sick to the world. “Are you a poet?” asked the second. “A lover?” asked the third. “Just shut up and write,” said the first.

I can’t. Nothing is entering. Except the voice of my first lover, the one who set the picture straight. “The problem with you is you think you’re Woody Allen in Manhattan.”

Gershwin’s blue clarinet, black-and-white Big Apple, an ice cream parlor. At the counter, Woody is buying Hemingway’s daughter, Mariel, a milkshake before he delivers the bad news. Tears coursing down her cheeks, she asks, “Why? Because I’m too young? Because I don’t know Rita Hayworth from Veronica Lake? Because I’m not Diane Keaton running with you in the rain?”

They split, then a minute before the credits roll, he changes his mind. “I’ll take you back,” Mariel says, “when I return from London.”

That’s the closest to my idea of love: watching the skyline, making out, making mistakes, making believe desire means it’s with somebody else, then breaking up, and, if we’re lucky, forgiveness that comes right before take-off. There, I’ve said it. What more can one want? A lover who loves me as much as the rain. Rain, and, from the opening credits to the closing heart, Gershwin.