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| ANGELO V. SUAREZ |
| Nameless Beerhouse Elegy |
| THE AUTHOR HOLDS THE COPYRIGHT TO THIS POEM. THIS IS POSTED WITH PERMISSION FROM THE TRANSLATOR. |
| THIS IS PART OF THE LITERATURA READING SERIES | CLICK HERE TO GO BACK TO LITERATURA |
| “True company is rare and must be kept
raw with drink, distance, a few fangs, and scandals.” —Ricardo M. De Ungria Why people call this place “Kittens” you will never understand, save for nights the occasional cat drops by for its ration of strokes & random caresses. Or why people sometimes call it “Batcave” when no bat at all hangs upside-down its topside of peeling paint & rotting wood to sleep or drop its share of guano. What you do know is what goes straight to your heads no longer comes out alcohol but wisdom, that what passes thru your veins is not polluted blood but verses, satanic ones, the type that finds itself not scrawled on pages but floating on a puddle of puke disgorged by a friend who has long since drifted away. And you miss him; each bottle you raise each time is a tribute to him whom you met at the nearby school a street-cross away where once in your lives you called each other brothers, allies of the pen, this pointless vocation. Volition be your guide, erudition on craft the raft that sails you thru stormy seas of imagination, rivulets of beer, puke, imagery, & metaphor— pathways that lead to that homeland you call poem. And this place serves as port of passage, & life has never been the same since you got here. What you aim for’s not for wimps, a poet wrote, & not for wimps it is. Imps, maybe; perhaps even enemies— one of whom you once shared this table with, chicharong bulaklak, isaw as convoluted as your friendships, your lives. And there isn’t any name for this sort of familiarity, the way no one has names for things that truly matter, like this beerhouse, for instance— for which all you do now is approximate nomenclatures, as always. Make do with monikers momentary as memory, fleeting as a friend’s face, passing quickly like occasional cats, imaginary bats, their crap falling at a speed you wish could also apply to forgetting. This poem is part of the collection that won Third Prize for Poetry in the 2004 Palanca Awards |