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Operation Optimism: Twin Futures
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TUNNELS Postscript to Pronouns
For one: I saw a book, ash-colored; on the sideof its skin lived the initials A.I.riven by blanknessand a fatal crave darker than dark.It read Ako and Ikaw. My eyeshungered, wishing for anothercourt in the sky, or another throatto house another world in another time.Second:I should be in jail. I have been cripplingsyntax to its spindly few. SpellingI pummeled to misspell Astrosphinxas statuesque as May I sing with me? Words whiplashed on fire icejeepneying with Saint Lazarus—the emperor of English over grasslilt parsing poison into ice creampoetry and screaming grammar noir.The narrative of tradition, beer-fellowedby cultural madness to digressand mull over a foamof savory crab fat alongsideour pickled come-what-mays. For this,‘Ikaw’ and ‘Ako’ separately are You and Mein Filipino, that by accident tryto understand Taglish as nomadologywears thin of its spatial possessions,rhymes, or like those rent checksno prettier than your beinga residential state s
TUNNELS Heartbeat
(Alright make it official you heard it in a speculative membrane-bus!)Watching fast cars from the edge-row seat of a bus, my mind safe-assigns a regular thought I thought was running pristinely naked, or an odor of a girl I thought was the effect of an 8AM lesson on Pierre Gourou slowly kicking in, embracing the trees from around my vision which I thought was tropical time carrying code-specific heat back to my lovely province. This back seat of a speculative membrane-bus now turning loco, calling out all aesthetes and commuters of the Manila mundi to reunite! And ringing—my mind’s chasing the hour like a whiplash too quick to move. Love this shy avocado hope on board—of all round trips I couldn’t finish: tickets there turning to peanuts, roasted peanuts scattering around a wheel to never make this poor brain tired of thinking aahh thoughtlike an Atom-U freight memoryringinglike a heart. Or: a deadbeat’s heartbeat.
TUNNELS Democracy Jr.
1st: I was very proud I passed the test. The test was about how strong and firm I was with my faith, political or racial or hologrammatic.2nd: The gift of democracy so essentially fluid, ergo, was time. I had to witness time suture history—or the narrative of forgetting in peacetime.3rd: How was the police—yes the polease!—calculating the algorithm of hurt when protesters were themselves curators of Lego-like ideas and wild algebra?4th: Kowloon was a place of blacker and blacker appeal to our fair M/Other. . 5th: She who stood astound by the palace walls read her // self, more than bodies melting in the rain, freezing in the sun.6th: The heroine who did this should become the anti-auteur. The second heroine in our mind would be the myth and metaphor of our freedom.7th: I didn’t believe I would allow myself to listen close to my mind—how imagination gurgled so loud repeating revolution like a Bacharachmasterpiece.8th: From Manila to Hong Kong to my ci
TUNNELS Short Story, as Borobudur
I’ve found a reason to live. Yellow skybright shores. The theory sleeps between religion’sporcelain ghosts & inner Sastra,& your seeminglyneurotic connection to the plotsabotaged by the night’s iridescent fingers.Hands of your characters’ hair area wisp in this solitude’s picaresque,keeping shiny the stupas, beautiful as sciencethough the birth of the hero can never beprehistoric Java, claiming the lost narrativeof memory. Brittle aura of bonesover the unsettling tear & this isto complicate the scenesfrom a horoscopic point of view.I’ve found the signs in a jar: heart lotuses,synecdoche. Flowers of the intricate past,I’ve brought them up to the altarwith or without a conclusive epiphany,a conflict so indistinct as a starmilked for its nirvana, for the riddlingtales it tells right from the beginning,middle & end. The setting seems very patient.So what is chronologically cotton-boundmay not be novel, physically circl
TUNNELS The Ice Cream Man is feeling the flavour, narcolepsy
he sells not, it seems, as the week’s bestseller sleeps in like a strange touch of odd memory, shifting the day’s dream minerals into a controversial hybrid of taro and guacamole. To scoopout some more island recipe from the greying whole, the interface of muted shreds and bits, is,after boyfriends and girlfriends fail to acknowledge sublime art suspended in street after howling street, the swirling sociology of tropical malaise.The Ice Cream Manwith [his] underrated purposiveness of disembodied aesthetics, hops in, emerges, rethinks the condition of language, of signs and symbols that confront the steady disinterestedness toward matcha. What is it that forces taste to be critically sabotaged by teleology? Yet what is being promised by the Coney Island theory is parity premised on subsistence. As if aura, as if this beast of contestation: is the decision to choose ice cream sandwich over standalone waffle cones a celebratory case of favouring the sublime, the liminal, the appli
TUNNELS A thought, or, a fatal error
has the gentleman standing in the doorway, making useof the pinkie stuck still in his nose to once and for allcancel the fourth and last postal service. What iswrong about the delivery today? A thought, or, the actof sun-gazing over the glittery green, waitingfor the aureate making of numerals, a further lucidity.Or a line he cares so much about. So muchrepetition, so much nectarine the insects writheinstead inside the mail box. A thought,never mind the bluish pain of thinkingas such is the bride of September afternoon,or, ideas driving the good news back into wreck again.Ink, or, the hand’s decision to turn the key in the ignition.Who is coming? When a thought arrives, is delivered,the art of return is returned, the mossy silvereyesthrough the shrubbery repeat the panic, the fatal vomitcreeping in, leaving him with two choices on his palm.A thought, or, a fatal error?The line placid, splitting. The Lopez porch swinghasn’t m
TUNNELS Self-Portrait as Open Flesh of an Undetermined Panic
Most of the panic remains virginal in the backyard, mostly quince-coloured, growinglike a flower sitting on an acre of phrases, mostly gerund, echoingthe voiced Gustav Klimt canvas that speculates on a mottled shadow.The figure of it is the sharp side of human,the freckled face of suspicionentering the green steel fences of our house, near the grassthat beds the pain, the pity, the first personwith a complex set of subjunctive mood. At about ten in the morning,before lunch is served, short of parenthetical immensitiesabout the recent case of a dog, the doomed offering beneath the orange sun,the children surround the areawhere there is a smell drawing a familiar incident.It’s a funny fruit torn from the sight’s memorial Edenrecalling a life in the hay, once mistakenlybegging for bones, sometimes barking at the neighbour’selection campaign ads-plastered tree,shaking out what’s coming in less, drily unnameable.However, in the interest of ungrammat
TUNNELS I, from the et cetera farm
Dear autochthon:We slurp in the Parental Guidance colour of television, this orbit of the lost and found circling the living room with oxygen. Full of class and chrome. I write to you to request subsidy to cover my travel fare from my country to your always royal palatine palace, the hollow spaces of which the bright future of mental othering. Call it a telepathic zone. Call it a rapid polychrome. Of what? Perhaps only time could reimburse with instances of cultural selfing letting the sun set on its inner skin.I know how well respected you are in wishful thinking, your many achievements confronting different time zones and pushing agnotology away from the mouth of trauma, are phenomenal. Or maybe not, just a soft blow. Moreover, it is imperative on my part to thank you in advance for this opportunity to type up words I pilfered from last night’s dream. I know my research project will be a reality with your approval. In case you have suggestions, you can reach me by
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