End of Friday

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Lightyears away from where I am,
Ceaselessly soaring through boundless heights,
In waking, in slumber, despite perpetual occupation,
My dreams deftly weave realities in atomic detail,
Eager to divorce me from my own.

Consciousness teeters at the maw of the subconsious,
Tethers nothing but a strand of hair
That ties a square micrometer of the tip of my toes
To the solid, unforgiving ground,
I struggle to stay at least until
The end of this shift.

Traveler Reminiscing

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It’s in the air, the distant morning
Of youth that has long passed;
The sweet scent of reminiscence
Of blissful unburdened past.

The roads oft trodden yesterday,
Stretch before my eyes again,
And on it walking unawares,
A child to whom I am a stranger.

Ah, youth, all those that mattered to you
So much they weighed you down,
Are of no consequence at all–
None worthy of your frown.

But why tell you that, young one?
When I know more than any,
This knowledge will be yours to gain
Come your much-dreaded tomorrow.

So, onward I shall walk again,
Knowing the distance I have so far covered,
With hope and utmost certainty that I
Would travel on even further.

Unawares

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Lights doubling on roads made mirrors by rain,
Sun comforting earth where snow had once lain,
Golden moon kissing every foam-tipped wave
Are lackluster to this fool you enslave.

You seep all beauty when I behold thee.
No awe for the world when you’re next to me.
No divinity existing compares
To you, my love, who caught me unawares.

Happy Place

Where is my happy place, dear mother?
I cannot seem to find it, father,
It is nowhere near our home.

Perhaps in friends’ company then?
Maybe in their mirth and banter,
But they’re too fleeting to be so.

Like starburst, you then smile at me,
Wordlessly, you bring me joy,
Oh you, love of my life.

And therein lies my happiness,
Sheltered by the comfort
Of your unrelenting love.

Love and happiness
And home, you are–
A constant for forever.

You are ever in my heart, beloved,
I needn’t look far now to seek
My cozy, happy place.

Inebriated Dedication

This day, my dear, I dareth drank
To self-same stupor to banish care.
For love and longing lord o’er this lad
Amidst thy absence, am brought a scare.

In flights of frenzy I feign to find
A glimpse, a giggle, a gaze, a glance.
Perchance thy presence perhaps permit
A day doth daring thou darling dance.

My morning, midnight, and my mind’s mate,
My beau, my boon, my best, my bliss,
I fervently fight despite my fright
To forget how much you I miss.

For fie, there is no forgetting
How this heart howls to hold you so,
That even when in wine-soaked state
My being yearns to yield to you.

I love, I learn, I long and last
To have you here in my heart and hands.
Despite this drunken droning, dear,
My love forever understands.

No amount of inebriation
Can match how you, my love, provide
Affection and utter satisfaction
The way our beings do collide.

Note: I really am drunk while writing this.

The Disappearing Rock Formations

I decided to make a new category to accommodate personal stories or anecdotes which I itch to share with you all. This began because I was about to post this story in the NoSleep subreddit but held back because I was uncertain of this story counting as a scary one. I hope you like it!

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My family hails from a small town in the Philippines, situated right beside the Pacific Ocean. Despite being devout Roman Catholics, my folks still firmly hold on to traces of animism such as believing in tree spirits, fairies, dwarves, and other folklore stuff, to the point that we communicate with them. Honestly, supernatural encounters have become an ordinary part of our quiet town lives and I’m not even sure if I should begin with this one. Nevertheless, this is one unforgettable story which still keeps me up at night thirteen years later.

My first encounter with these rocks was when I was six. We were vacationing from Manila at the time and were spending the day at the beach in the middle of a cape. At the farther end of the cape is a steep cliff of yellow-white rock with lush trees and vegetation on top. I see it clearly as I type this– the pallid rock with greenery on top, the blue sky and the sea of the same hue– it was enchanting.

My mother was the first to point it out. “Look! It’s like a lady asleep!”, I remember her say in our native tongue.

The rest of us clamored at where and how it looked like a lady asleep. She pointed out that half the face was buried in sand and all we saw were her closed eyes, brow ridge, forehead, and hair of trees and shrubs. Surely enough, the lower portion of the cliff at the edge of the cape formed a pair of bulges that resembled a pair of eyes peacefully closed, with the vegetation right below playing the role of eyelashes. My aunt took a picture of the said rock formation and we spent the rest of the day uneventfully.

The picture my aunt took was developed (as we did not have digital cameras back then) and displayed in the shelf of her dental clinic back in Manila. It proved to be an interesting conversation piece. Acquaintances from our town who’d visit my aunt’s clinic were told of the rock formation. We returned to that beach a lot more times and we’d acknowledge her petrified slumber before going about our business. She was like an expected companion to our beach excursions until 2004.

I was eight when I was stung by jellyfish in the same beach and that was the last time I saw her. When we returned a few months later, the closed eyes on the cliff were gone. We have known the place for ages and there was no way that we were in the wrong beach. We were in the same spot by the same cape, but the rock formation was not there. In its place was just a boring cliff with no peculiar formations to offer. I reasoned that maybe it was eroded, or that there might have been a landslide but the people living nearby could not recall landslides at that cliff. People just noticed that it was gone one day.

I was able to convince myself that it was nothing supernatural and that the people just didn’t notice the erosion or landslide. I was content enough with this explanation until we returned to Manila to find that its picture at my aunt’s dental clinic has gone missing. Perhaps, it must have been a coincidence, but what an eerie one that is!

My family preserved the story of the sleeping lady as a conversation piece long afterwards. The rock has long been gone along with the picture, but the story was repeated to an acquaintance from our hometown. This acquaintance claimed to know of a rock formation just as interesting. It was situated in an islet not far from the cape and took the form of lovers locked in an embrace. He said it was detailed enough to make out the limbs, hair and torsos of a male figure and a female figure kneeling while hugging each other, their faces buried in each other’s shoulders.

My aunt decided to go see it with that family acquaintance. The said acquaintance has been to the spot several times and had no trouble finding it. However, the petrified lovers were also gone. A handful of people also remembered this formation, but they did not notice it turn into a shapeless boulder over time.

So far, those were the only disappearing rock formations we know about in my family, but they were enough to confound us for years to come. I cannot ascertain if both formations were of the same rock type though. I have not returned to our hometown for years mainly because the busy pace of city life has seized me. And like in the rest of the Philippines, people have left our hometown for greener pastures. However, that town is still home to my earliest memories, and in those memories remain things beyond explanation.

Ask.fm

Hi! I know it has been entire months since I wrote anything here. It’s just that I’ve never really produced anything worthy of putting here.

For now, I’m opening something more relatively personal–an ask.fm account! Yay! If you’re not familiar with it, you just ask me a question and I’ll answer it. Of course, I have discretion over which questions to answer. Check it out below and ask me something

http://ask.fm/faurphen

Writing is NOT so painful!

World of Horror

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My “personal personal” blog!

Hi everyone! I was inactive because I was occupied lately and cannot find the time to write poetry. I just thought that if I put anything else aside from poems in here, it would disrupt the flow of “Waves Without Sounds” (get it? “the flow of waves? haha)

Anyway, I made a separate blog for my other more personal nonsense. Please check it out and follow here!

My Other WordPress Blog

I made another WordPress blog for the stuff I write in Filipino.

Check it out at https://alimuos.wordpress.com/

Reach

 

Where the air is crisp and pure and mild,
And the skies are ever clear;
Where the trees reach high and the grass is green,
And the nights are filled with peace;
Where the untainted soil is nurturing,
And the children want for nothing;
Where the beasts sing of things to come
And the spirits keep watch and hear
Each prayer and each step we make,
And grant what we deserve;
Where everything does not have a price
And all is family;
The simple life is not too far,
And so is peace and freedom,
It is just us who have the hardest time
To stretch out with open hands,
To reach out, take hold and seize the peace
That we keep on wishing for.

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For our Anthropology class, we went to a community of indigenous people living at the mountains of Pampanga. It’s amazing how life seems so peaceful there. The community is like one big family where they trust one another. Money doesn’t seem as important to them as it is to us since they have crops and they can just hunt for food. It was a good break from urban living. I slept better there than here in the city where I’m always anxious about things. Above is a picture I took during our trip.

Blast from the past: The Balangiga Massacre

This literally hits home as Balangiga is in the same region as my hometown.

LA INDEPENDENCIA DE FILIPINAS

Today marks the 114th anniversary of the infamous Balangiga Massacre, which exemplifies the brutal treatment and racist attitude of the Americans towards the Filipino people in their quest to “pacify” the Philippines and integrate our islands as an  American possession—as in the words of President McKinley, to “benevolently assimilate” the Philippines. Despite the US government’s effort to cover up their atrocities in the Philippines, the Balangiga Massacre remains one of if not the best documented example of  American war crimes against the Filipino people.

• The Action of 28 September 1901

Originally, the “Balangiga Massacre” was referred to the battle that happened in the town of Balangiga, Samar on 28 September 1901 where the troops of Company C, 9th US Infantry Regiment were garrisoned in order to close down the town’s port and prevent supplies from reaching the guerilla troops of General Vicente Lukban.

The townspeople decided to attack the Americans…

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The Best Things in Life

Taft Avenue, Manila | Photograph by Malory Columbretis

I often get anxious or stressed out and then drive myself into thinking that no good can be had in this life. In between these bouts of sorrow, though, I have surges of happiness that I take from even the most mundane circumstances of my life.

This morning, I was rifling through old notebooks in search of a certain story I wrote down some time ago. I found the story, but I found a more interesting entry in one of those notebooks. The entry was dated 30th of May, 2014, and I was so thankful towards my past self for listing down the things in life that are worth living for. The title of the list is ‘THE BEST THINGS IN LIFE’ written in capital letters, and I thought it is something worth sharing, so here it is!

THE BEST THINGS IN LIFE: (according to Malory Columbretis)

• That time of day from 3pm-5:30pm
• Long rides alone, especially during the night
• Trips that pass the way from Quiapo to SM North EDSA*
• Rainy weekday afternoons
• Windy Sunday afternoons
• Walking in the park or the mall alone
• Starry midnight skies as seen from the rooftop
• Being alone in the classroom
• Climbing mountains in a ride
• Feeling the ocean breeze and hearing the waves during the afternoon
• Constant tinkling of wind chimes for more than 5 minutes
• When you can smell the rain and different bodies of unpolluted water without seeing them
• Befriending strangers without certainty of meeting them again
• Exploring unfamiliar places alone
• Walking against the wind
• Birds on trees
• Daydreams. Undisturbed daydreams.
• Companionable or comfortable silences

*This is extremely personal, and it is also my favorite. I grew up constantly frolicking in these two places and the route from one to the other is my own memory lane because I pass by my high school and my childhood home.

I remember writing that list to cheer myself up with when I’m drowning in gloom, but I am easily distracted and as such, I forget many things that I am not supposed to forget. Now, I will remember what to do when I am blue–I will just look at that list and smile at how such simple things are the ‘best’ things for me.

In sharing this, I hope those who read this list will remember their own ‘best things in life’ no matter how simple those things are. I believe it is best to have sources of happiness that are easy to have instead of constantly worrying and pushing oneself towards something big which is difficult to obtain. We all walk our own paths towards great things that we deeply desire, but when your feet are sore and you need something to ease the pain, you just have to look around and see the little things that make you happy.

Banaue Rice Terraces | Photograph by Malory Columbretis