Stop writing, start living

BAYANGGUDAW NOTES. 25 DEC 2016.
Stop writing, start living.

[For my Manong Cristino Inay: I missed you in NJ and NY, but next time, we will need to sit down and talk again about your poetic life.]

I HAVE ALWAYS told this to myself.

That I have to stop writing and start living. This business of writing has found me drinking coffee more than the allowed number of cups per day. Pour more, pour more, por favor.

Has to be that caffeine kick that makes my world go 'round and 'round and 'round and 'round.

I sit to wait for ideas to come, and with the picture window revealing all that which winter can come into a point of un-concealing itself so wannabe small-time writers like moi could catch some of its promise of beauty and grace, I think of all the small-time poets who never had the chance to be like Neruda who had the bombastic chance to go bombastic and live off the sweat of his creative labors by writing full-time and not have to be worried about where to get the money for the next meal.

I have seen this difficult situation of writers in my Ilocoslavakia, and sometimes, sometimes I wonder where all those poets, unable to buy books of poetry that would somehow lead them on to other ways of 'writing' the poetic, get their inspiration and their ideational power to make us see a different world, or imagine a different one apart from that which is prescribed by the official grand narrative of the state and its institutions, like those institutions anchored on fiefdom in local governance.

I know of one poet, the esteemed Manong Cristino Inay, who has vowed to do a comeback and in that comeback, he would write about the need to go red-and-dark again, remembering forever on the page what came about during the dark days of our collective, lobotomized, propaganda-sustained, social life.

When I was a student at the UP Diliman, and then eventually as a romantic academic dreaming of a 'better Filipins', Manong Cristino was there. I had read him, and I knew, I knew that he has not betrayed the poetic cause, that cause that offers us a renewal, a re-visioning.

We should wait for him to start writing again.

In the meantime, I stop writing so I can start living. Please!

PDX/