Heart Lines

Went to Silungan last Friday with Vince, Elmo, Allan, BJ Patino, EJ, and Kai, who read our palms. In between teasing other people about their "simian" lines and suggestive girdles of Venus, she said the lines on my palms are fainter and more web-like than most. My lifeline, apparently, is short and shaky---which doesn't necessarily mean I won't live long, just that sometimes my drive for life wanes. And my heart line almost zigzags and is chained---representing complications in matters of the heart until (or even IF) I settle down. Hmm. Friends have also reached the same conclusions from lines in my poems.

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I think it was at Cantina, over enchiladas and San Mig Light, where a writer I respect assessed my poetry and psychoanalyzed me in the process. One of the things I remember him saying was that tone is what carries readers through my work, where I strive towards wholeness. But that the all-knowing tone prevents urgency; the poem becomes merely a retelling (after the fact) instead of a process of discovery. He said I have a strong tendency to idealize/romanticize, that my love poems may be too concerned with defining a nonexistent "we," that the "I" persona often seems amorphous and too open to possibilities. Ta-daan. 
 
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Vlad translated my "Vase of Flowers" into Filipino and read it out loud at Conspiracy two weeks ago. Wala, natutuwa lang ako that it's been given new shape and life. That poem was very dear to me at one point.

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I am glad I have a handful of friends who know me so well they can read between the lines. When I texted Egay out of the blue to say "Mababatukan mo siguro ako," he guessed why correctly, even after days of non-communication.

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Years after the fact, my old wish has finally been granted: a good beer-lubricated conversation with one of my "spectral presences". I felt safe enough the other night, knowing my romanticized idea of the person already had little power over me. I have, I think, managed to live with my what-ifs and countless could-have-beens. But as always, it was curiosity that drove me to go. I also felt I owed it to the person I once was to fish for answers to questions long asked and forgotten. And answers were given, though the questions had mutated.

We have become two of a kind, flawed in inversely proportional ways. The best thing about the conversation was the discovery that the haunting had not been one-sided all this time. Among other things, I felt vindicated.

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I am currently in love with the strong statements in Gluck's 20-part poem, "Prism." The fourteenth part goes:

The assignment was to fall in love.
The author was female.
The ego had to be called the soul.

The action took place in the body.
Stars represented everything else: dreams, the mind, etc.

The beloved was identified
with the self in a narcissistic projection.
The mind was a sub-plot. It went nattering on.

Time was experienced
less as narrative than ritual.
What was repeated had weight.

Certain endings were tragic, thus acceptable.
Everything else was failure.