By Stephen Zagala
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You swore it’d never happen again, but you ran out of Black Label at the end of the week, third time this month. Where else is there to look but the bottom? A middle-aged has-been raises the question of novelty in the worst possible words, gifts of articulation peed all over the floor, barely missing the ears. LRT1 doors in the dead of night, sirens wailing, call your name from beyond before slowly coming together behind you, almost snatching your bag. Against your bones crying to run through the rocky, fragmented, spectral city sidewalks, you’re somehow convinced that this is living. Mornings spent in questions, afternoons without fanfare to answer them, evenings a far cry from epiphanic: you take a shower instead, convinced you can wash the clinging static and watch it slide down the drain. Flip lights, re-clean dishes until mirrored surfaces, sanitize. set sugar mix to slush, repeat, repeat, repeat until you aren’t sure what is getting done anymore, you or the chores left in the sink or the lingering image of some words you can almost mistake for a poem from far enough. You reconsider buying the three-liter bottle with a paycheck, the details of which you still aren’t sure of. There is a non-zero chance you now find yourself at home in transition, no, in transit, the loving embrace of the ghosts of station to station shadowing you. Dancing with train poles, attempting the world’s sorriest pull-up on the horizontal bars, riding from end to end forgetting where exactly to get out, these are what you dream of affording on the LRT2, where the empty seats are somehow even fewer and the standing room closing in on you. This has to be. Do words still come to the waiting? Homecoming, therefore, remains foreign to you, a station the LRTA has not yet completed. Lifting your eyes to scan for what passes for inspiration these days, there is nothing left you can say about a sky of powerlines or a hanging forest or the degrading, decaying concrete monuments to power some Spanish guys had built on family money. Nothing that speaks, anyways. Another comment, not a suggestion: don’t you think that this is much more suited as a monologue, not a poem? You recite every landmark on the jeepney ride home to yourself, hoping to be wrong, or to at least forget. There’s nothing else you can think of that comes close to it. Don Bosco, drive-in motel you can’t name, hospital named after the mother of Jesus: even at night, at least to you, nothing about Manila can possibly change. How about creative non-fiction: what about it? Save for the people, perhaps that’s change enough for one commuter. Wondering about the wandering warrants willful wistfulness: quick, what are you doing dulling the already-narrowing sidewalks of this Frankenstein city? Surely this must be fuller living, right? This has to be what it means to live.
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